At the House of Gathered Leaves: Shorter Biographical and Autobiographical Narratives from Japanese Court Literature (review)

Memoir is in. Calling it self-writing or autobiography, the North American academy studies the form, while writers produce it in conspicuous quantity. Biography floods bestseller lists. It is an age of (auto)biography, with blogs exposing the audience even more. But what does the average reader know of the biographical and autobiographical writings of Japan, whose long tradition is so rich? Westerners might cite Makura no sōshi, which they suppose was kept in the drawers of a literal pillow (an admired "fact" about the work, whose title is the subject of scholarly dispute). The diaries of court women are accused of being fragmentary, as though what has been transmitted to us are scattered parts of the complete, true records that some must have made. It seems absurd that anyone today could imagine Murasaki Shikibu and her contemporaries simply writing down day-by-day happenings, given the evidence of their immersion in complex rhetorical strategies and questions of fiction. But their records, with the exception of the earliest, Tosa nikki, written by a man with a complicated agenda and a dissembling female pose, have traditionally been touted—in essays accessible to the consumer of translations—as outpourings of an essential femininity. With the publication of At the House of Gathered Leaves, we draw closer to a critical mass of studies that could steer readers in a more fascinating (and correct) direction. Joshua Mostow illuminates the political context of these works, assuming that they took shape for reasons other than the unburdening of feminine sensibilities. Specialists have encountered this argument in articles by Mostow dating back to 1990, but to find half of the Fujiwara "Regents' House" (sekkan-ke) prose-poetry texts translated in one volume, with meticulous annotations and comprehensive discussion of the category, is bracing.

Anyone who buys the existing tales about Japanese women's writing, or is unfamiliar with the tradition, has a lot to learn, and Mostow promptly facilitates the process. At the House of Gathered Leaves is an evocative title, taken from one of the narratives, you might think. A lesson in evocation awaits in the frontmatter, which offers two poems preceded by a headnote. Brackets inform us (if we read carefully) that the subject does not appear on the surface in the original Japanese of the note. The headnote mentions an emperor and a well-known poet, Ise, a woman with an ambiguous relationship to her collection of poems. Her daughter Nakatsukasa, who submitted the collection in response to an order, is not named. The first poem portrays this daughter as raker of her mother's poetic leaves at the old house; the second is emperor Murakami's confirmation that the child has inherited those words. The transmission is figuratively natural but has a range of political players and unexpected roles. Did Ise shed her verses like a tree, leaving another to organize "her" diary? What of privacy or personal emotion? How important is the presence of the emperor to this scene?

In the crisp first paragraph of the introduction, Mostow limns his triple objective. It is the purpose of the translations—not merely the introduction—to explain the development of the genre at hand; that genre is "what is called 'diary literature' (emphasis mine)," which has "putative origins" in two works; there will be a focus on political conditions that enabled such writing to function; he will explode the assumption that they are "solely 'confessional' and apolitical" (p. 1). The first point mentions Tosa nikki and Kagerō nikki, bookends of "diary literature" at 935 and 974, the second "women's autobiographical writing," and the third introduces the notion that these works were commissioned by men. He proceeds to build a lineage grounded in political intent while dismantling the tired category joryū nikki bungaku.

Mostow's thesis, drawn from the newer Japanese scholarship...