Difficult Realities: Poetic Countertraditions in Premodern Japan, 960–1479

Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Comparative Literature

First Advisor

Campe, Rüdiger

Abstract

This dissertation traces how, across five centuries of poetic practice, a group of poets used the language of court poetry to unconventional ends while writing under conditions of ongoing precarity. I call these occasions for poem-making “difficult realities,” by which I mean experiential hardships whose articulation in poetic language generates a tensional relation between these experiences and conventional ways of apprehending and shaping the world afforded by the mainstream tradition of court poetry. Concerned with the ways in which these poem-making practices are entangled in a complex counterpoint with the verbal and cognitive resources of court poetry, I describe these as “countertraditional” modes of poetry. These countertraditions are “traditions” insofar as they are constituted by acts of poem- and meaning-making linked by chains of reading, imitating, and borrowing carried on across five centuries. My four major examples are all hyakushu, a highly artificial hundred-poem format that, somewhat paradoxically, became a site for experimenting with how waka poetry could give form to the complexities and contradictions of first-person experience. These poets are also linked by a shared writing scene that recurs over time: a writer, positioned outside waka’s usual ritual occasions of performance, sitting at the writing desk, composing a new hyakushu with manuscripts of predecessor poets within arm’s reach. The historical arc of the study corresponds roughly to the period in which waka was a living tradition at the Japanese court, from its consolidation in the tenth century to its eventual transformation into an antiquarian practice after the Ōnin Wars in the late fifteenth century. The introduction begins by considering the poetry of Shigeyuki’s Daughter, a late-tenth-century poet who poses the question of how waka, a language-game fine-tuned for the performance of generic modes of subjectivity, could convey the particularities of individual experience. Her poetry condenses many of the problems traced in the dissertation: she articulates the idea that the difficulty of language is also the difficulty of reality. The second part of the introduction introduces a number of conceptual figures for understanding the idea of a countertradition: “counterpoint,” “counterintention,” the “periperformative,” and “counterpublics.” The dissertation then proceeds chronologically with four interlinked case studies that examine key moments in this hyakushu tradition. Chapter One, “Exercises in Voice: Yoshitada and the Origins of the Hyakushu Form,” looks at the origins of the hyakushu form in a set of epistolary exchanges between Sone no Yoshitada and Minamoto no Shitag?. I make the novel argument that the hyakushu form arises out of sophisticated imitation of the writing practices found in the mid-Tang exchange poetry of Bai Juyi, Yuan Zhen, and Liu Yuxi. I then trace how Yoshitada repurposes language drawn from the tradition, and from a specific set of courtly manuscripts, to bring other voices and experiences into waka’s fold. Chapter Two, “The Weather in Sagami,” examines a hundred-poem sequence offered in 1024 as a votive offering to the Hashiriyu Shrine by a woman known as Sagami, so called after the eastern province where her husband served as governor. Extending Yoshitada’s experiments with by?bu and utaawase poetry, Sagami makes the hyakushu into a form capable of measuring and making visible her turbulent interiority. With this intimate portrait of particular suffering, she inaugurates a long tradition of votive hyakushu presented to shrines. Chapter Three, “Topographies of Self: Shunzei’s Gosha hyakushu,” explores autobiographical and devotional strategies in a set of votive hyakushu composed by Fujiwara no Shunzei in the wake of the Genpei Wars. I focus in particular on the sequence that Shunzei offered to the Kasuga Shrine, home to the tutelary deity of the Fujiwara family. I trace how Shunzei looks back on his own career in poetry and looks forward to the uncertain future of the poetic tradition. Chapter Four, “The Lives of Echo: Asukai no Masachka and the Ruins of Tradition,” moves forward three centuries to examine a body of poetry composed in the wake of the decade-long turbulence of the ?nin War (1467–1477). I show how Masachika uses the diachronic figure of echo to suggest that the waka tradition, despite its many material losses, still survives in Masachika’s poem-making practice. I also show how Masachika shapes his sequence as an echo of those undertaken by Shunzei and his heirs. As a project in comparative literature, this dissertation offers a novel approach to reading Western and non-European poetries together, rooted in a long comparative tradition that examines how the linguistic predicaments of human existence are reflected upon and worked through in poetry. As a study in poetics, the dissertation offers detailed accounts of the working procedures of four significant Japanese poets. Within the field of Japanese literature, I offer a novel historical and theoretical account of the internal heterogeneity of waka poetics within and beyond the mainstream tradition.

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