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TOURISTS AND ONLOOKERS 465 Additionally, I also saw verses by the celebrated Ryūkyo: First snow Falling and obscuring The holly’s pricks And, Plovers cry “Is it the capital’s equivalent of Miho This Kamo bank?” Mount Hiei is referred to as “Fuji of the Capital” and it must be in relation to this that the poet claims the Kamo banks (from which Hiei is viewed) are the Capital’s equivalent of Miho (whence Fuji is viewed). r 3PBETJEFQSPTUJUVUFTEPOUDBMMPVU CVUNBLFNPVTFMJLFTRVFBLT r 5IFOFXMZCVJMUSPBETGSPN,Z˷UP5PCBBSFPOMZGPSVTFCZPYDBSUT other traffic travels on raised streets on both sides; this is the reason why the newly built road proper is full of ox turds and is absolutely filthy. r "MUIPVHIJUTOPUTPJO,VSBNB JO0IBSBUIFIJMMZQBUITBSFOBSSPX when walking along the road there, if you run into a woman pulling a horse on her way to Kyō to carry out her trade, because all are singletrack paths, the going is frustrating; there are many steep hairpin bends; there are also scores of horses being led along, so the traffic becomes jammed for a while. r 5IFZTUSPOHMZEJTMJLFCMVFTPDLTIPFTBOEPOMZVTFUIFNGPSEBODJOH r 'PSiyakutai mo nai” they say “yakutai tobakari.” “Yakutai mo nai,” or “useless,” is shortened into “yakutai,” or “use.” r 'PSiJODSFEJCMZHPPEuUIFZTBZiBMBSNJOHMZHPPEu translated by Timon Screech  % ; $?; ICHIKAWA KANSAI Illustrated by Isoda Koryūsai Z Songs of the Northern Quarter (Hokurika, 1786) is the title of a series of thirty seven-character quatrains describing pleasures of Yoshiwara. The author, Ichikawa Kansai (1749–1820), was an important scholar of Chinese and one of the pre-eminent 466 TOURISTS AND ONLOOKERS poets of the later Edo period. Trained in the Hayashi school of Confucian Studies, he was appointed supervisor of the Hayashi’s Shōheikō School, which was later to become the chief institution sponsored by the shogun’s government. In four years, however, shortly after the publication of Songs of the Northern Quarter, Kansai was relieved from the post and opened the famous Kōkoshisha Poetry Society, where a talented younger generation of kanshipoetsgathered,includingthewidelyacclaimedKashiwagiJotei(1763– 1819), Kikuchi Gozan (1769–1849), and Ōkubo Shibutsu (1767–1837). Although in his preface Kansai distances himself from the work, claiming the poems to be little more than a trivial diversion, Songs of the Northern Quarter nonetheless represents a deliberate attempt to realize the theories of “native sensibility” poetry that had been advocated by the renowned critic and kanshi poet Yamamoto Hokuzan (1752–1812). Ōkubo Shibutsu discusses the importance of Songs of the Northern Quarter in his poetry talks as follows: “In the final years of the Meiwa period (c. 1770), the poetics of the Ken’en School had not yet gone entirely out of fashion. To some degree, poets were still primarily concerned with style. In writing Songs of the Northern Quarter, Kansai showed that there is no subject matter that cannot be articulated in ‘native sensibility’ poetry.” As Shibutsu makes explicit, Songs of the Northern Quarter was written with the intention of countering the lingering archaism of the Ken’en School of poetry, led by Ogyū Sorai (1666– 1728). Whereas Sorai and his followers had advocated the imitation of Chinese precedents, Kansai encouraged his disciples to concentrate on the “scene before one’s eyes,” and in so doing they worked to adapt the themes and language of kanshi poetry to native Japanese subject matter. The poetry of Songs of the Northern Quarter belongs to the genre of “Bamboo Branch Songs,” which typically deal with romantic themes and portray the customs particular to a certain locality. Following the success of Songs of the Northern Quarter and the similar series penned by Kansai’s disciples, Bamboo Branch poetry became a common subgenre of later Edo kanshi. Evolving from a poetic form that portrayed the erotic interludes and unique conventions of the pleasure quarters into a poetry in which the customs and scenery of regional cities and port towns and, in some cases, foreign countries are depicted, Bamboo Branch poems continued to be written into the Meiji period. Songs of the Northern Quarter provides an accurate, if romanticized, portrait of life in Yoshiwara. Arranged in spatial and chronological order, the poems begin at Yoshiwara’s main gate to proceed to the teahouses and into the inner chambers of courtesans, depicting seasonal observances...

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