The study of literary Sinitic (aka Sino-Japanese) literature of the Edo period (1603–1868) has waxed and (often) waned in the post–World War II era, but in this third decade of the twenty-first century, signs of renewed vitality have emerged. The four works discussed below amply demonstrate the potential for this field to contribute not only to remapping the considerable proportion of premodern Japanese literature that lies outside of the canon of wabun (writing in Japanese) but also to situating this corpus within the multilingual, culturally, and sociopolitically diverse Sinographosphere that encompasses most of East Asia. For reasons to be discussed below, these recent studies deserve the attention of this journal's readers, especially those interested in the body of classical poetry and prose that, through interaction with and absorption of various indigenous cultural and literary influences, deviates from many of the norms or conventions that held sway within China. And while the studies under review may have been written primarily with an audience of Japan specialists in mind, they hold the promise of stimulating cross-border and comparative research. As Wiebke Denecke has pointed out, “Like a historical experimental laboratory, Japanese literary culture allows us to look at Chinese literature in an oblique, productively defamiliarizing and refamiliarizing light that can help reassess well-established myths of Chinese literary history.”1In recent decades, the study of early modern kanbun and kanshi has been greatly enriched by the work of scholars such as Nakano Mitsutoshi 中野三敏, Tokuda Takeshi 徳田武, Nakamura Shin'ichirō 中村真一郎, Ibi Takashi 揖斐高, Nīna Noriko 新稲法子, and in English by Jonathan Chaves, Wiebke Denecke, Peter Kornicki, and John Timothy Wixted, among others. Contributions by Robert Tuck and Matthew Fraleigh have extended this into the early to mid-Meiji era, when Sinitic literacy and literary practice arguably reached the apogee of its range and influence. By focusing on the century and a half prior to that era, from ca. 1700–1850, Yamamoto, Ibi, Sugishita, and Chaves/Fraleigh, respectively, provide numerous insights into the historical processes through which literary Sinitic gained virtually unprecedented prestige by the beginning of the modern era.As indicated by its title, Yamamoto Yoshitaka's award-winning Shibun to keisei: Bakufu jushin no jūhasseiki surveys roughly a century of Sinitic literature composed by a Confucian-educated elite who, regardless of whether or not they enjoyed official status, were situated within or on the margins of the governing institutions of the baku-han 幕藩 state. Through their writings, Yamamoto traces the trajectory of Sinitic literary modes or styles (Kanshibun no seisaku yōshiki 漢詩文の制作様式) during the rise and decline of the Kobunjiha 古文辞派 (Ancient Style) School over the longue durée of the eighteenth century but without the hitherto prevailing tendency of scholarship to focus on said school's leading proponents, Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠 (1666–1728) and his followers. Sorai's preponderant influence is even evident in the tendency of modern scholars to downplay the sociopolitical contexts within which these developments occurred, echoing Sorai's own view that literary culture could be fully detached from governance (keisei 経世). By contrast, Yamamoto addresses literary stylistics through the sociopolitical affiliations of these authors, in order to “grasp the circumstances, case by case, within which such works were both written and read” (25). This entails the understanding of the practical functions to which literary Sinitic came to be applied, and to “explain the sensibilities of that era not by way of present-day concepts,” but “on their own terms” (ari no mama ありのまま) (21).The central, indeed pivotal figure in Shibun to keisei is Muro Kyūsō 室鳩巣 (1658–1734), a Confucian scholar and poet whose career divides more or less neatly between lengthy periods of service to the Maeda clan in Kanazawa (1672–1711) and to the Tokugawa bakufu in Edo (1711–1734), respectively. During his service to the Kaga domain (Kanazawa), his vocation as a clan physician (han'i 藩医) but without the rank of retainer (hanshi 藩士) precluded him from offering his opinions on matters of governance to the authorities, and his writings simmer with frustration over being unrecognized (fugū 不遇) and excluded from a meaningful role in civil administration. He self-identified as a “clerk in reclusion” (inri 隠吏) who wrote critically about many local issues, but refrained from addressing his works to the wider public or his superiors. It was possible for him to remain under the radar of the latter, according to Yamamoto, because literary Sinitic had not yet been incorporated into the curricula taught to samurai (buke 武家) officialdom, making his Sinitic poetry and prose inaccessible to those who, had they known, might have rebuked him for intruding into matters beyond his purview. Following his transfer to a position in the bakufu administration in Edo, where he rose to a high rank, he shed this reticence, spending the last years of his life writing prolifically on governmental affairs in both Sinitic and Japanese (sōrōbun 候文). These writings exerted an outsized influence through the remainder of the eighteenth century and beyond.In terms of literary stylistics, Kyūsō carried forth his teacher Kinoshita Jun'an's 木下順庵 (1621–1699) emphasis on modeling their writing on Chinese canonical texts such as Selections of Refined Literature (Wenxuan 文選) rather than on the native Japanese sources favored by the dominant Edo-based Confucians, the Hayashi (Rinke) School. The latter compiled an influential anthology, Comprehensive Mirror of Our Nation (Honchō tsūkan 本朝通鑑), whose authors affected the styles and even the voices of Heian (794–1185) aristocrats, exalting the rarefied court culture of that period as the “utopia” they aspired to (71). Decades after Kyūsō’s death, during the Kansei era (1789–1801), the bakufu began to implement a rudimentary system of examinations (gakumon ginmi 学問吟味), the groundwork for which was prepared by Kyūsō’s essays (written mostly in sōrōbun or a hybrid Sino-Japanese idiom, Kanbun kundoku chō 漢文訓読調) he had produced to educate the samurai on Confucian texts and doctrines. As Yamamoto elucidates, the examinations were first implemented by the chief councilor to the Tokugawa shogunate, Matsudaira Sadanobu 松平定信 (1759–1829), not so much to inculcate doctrinal fidelity as to foster reading and writing skills in Kanbun that could be instrumental in civil administration (235). As educational curricula subsequently came to emphasize such skills, the weight of state authority shifted from the metsuke 目付 (the military inspectorate) to the Confucian scholar-officials (jushin 儒臣) trained in literary skills.Yamamoto provides a plethora of examples illustrating how Kyūsō and his peers deployed their erudition in Chinese literature and history to articulate political ideals in the manner of Chinese scholar-officials, particularly through the penning of admonitory remarks (kangen 諫言) to rulers. Zhu Xi's 朱熹 (1130–1200) private memorials (fengshi 封事) were inspirational in this regard, but so too were the poetry and prose of Su Dongpo 蘇東坡 (1037–1101), Tao Yuanming 陶淵明 (ca. 365–427), Qu Yuan 屈原 (342–278 BCE), and other canonical writers. Contradicting the magisterial scholar Hino Tatsuo's 日野龍夫 (1940–2003) view that Kyūsō, Arai Hakuseki 新井白石 (1657–1725), and other prominent intellectuals were largely resigned to the strict limits placed on their influence over government policies and therefore had “cut themselves off from the present reality,” Yamamoto convincingly demonstrates that this mining of Chinese sources in fact represented a “new understanding of the present” that enabled them to chart a way toward achieving political relevance, one that bore fruit in subsequent generations (153).In addition to Kyūsō and other members of the so-called Mokumon 木門 (disciples of Kinoshita Jun'an), the book devotes chapters to other figures whose writings contributed to the fluorescence of literary Sinitic, including the renowned poet and painter Gion Nankai 祇園南海 (1675–1751), the literatus Nakamura Ranrin 中村蘭林 (1697–1761), and the influential scholar-official Shibano Ritsuzan 柴野栗山 (1736–1807), as well as later generations of writers like Kashida Hokugan 樫田北岸 (1757–1794), Yamamoto Hokuzan 山本北山 (1752–1812) and Hayashi Kakuryō 林鶴梁 (1806–1872). These latter facilitated the dissemination among commoners (chōnin 町人) of literati avocations such as flower arrangement, tea, and poetry inspired by or in imitation of the Gongan School, especially Yuan Hongdao 袁宏道 (1568–1610). Moreover, men like Hokugan, Hokuzan, and their contemporaries further articulated the rejection and transcendence of the Kobunji School, both by criticizing the errors and excesses of Sorai's followers but also through affirming the centrality of keisei to the literati vocation.One of the consistent themes across Shibun to keisei is the attentiveness by a wide range of literati to the fostering of literary competence and creativity as tools to be applied to practical endeavors. While most of the subjects under study regarded literary facility as an essential dimension of literati education, from Kyūsō in the early eighteenth through Kakuryō in the mid-nineteenth centuries, they insisted that it was secondary to scholarly knowledge and performance of public duties (shokumu 職務), and should serve to support governance and reinforce the preeminent value of fealty to feudal authority rather than ends in and of themselves.The broad sweep of eighteenth-century literary Sinitic surveyed in Shibun to keisei provides much relevant background for readers of The Same Moon Shines on All: The Lives and Selected Poems of Yanagawa Seigan and Kōran, Jonathan Chaves and Matthew Fraleigh's biography and selected poetry of Yanagawa Seigan 梁川星巌 (1789–1858) and Chō (Yanagawa) Kōran 張紅蘭 (1804–1879). With the possible exception of the Song poet Li Qingzhao 李清照 (1084–1155) and her husband Zhao Mingcheng 趙明誠 (1081–1129), this couple has virtually no counterpart in Sinitic literature before modern times. Chaves's translations and Fraleigh's biography both complement and extend Yamamoto's account of Sinitic poetry into the nineteenth century, such as the fact that Yanagawa trained under the aforementioned Yamamoto Hokuzan, a critic of the Kobunjiha and proponent of Gongan-inspired xingling aesthetics, at his private academy, Keigidō 経義堂. At the same time, Chaves and Fraleigh calibrate their explanations to Anglophone audiences unfamiliar with the traditions and prosodic techniques of Sinitic poetry, partly by drawing analogies with works and writers from Western literature.One example of the latter comes in a poem about a storm on the Inland Sea (Yanagawa's “On the Sea of Fugen, Encountering a Great Wind,” no. 25). Chaves notes that its metaphorical description of an unfolding umbrella to capture the rise of a sudden squall on the horizon is virtually unprecedented in Chinese poetry, possessing a vividness that recalls Joseph Conrad's descriptions of sea storms in his novels and short stories. This comparison is particularly apropos, Chaves says, because Conrad, like both Yanagawa and Kōran, was writing in a language markedly different from his native (Polish) tongue. As with Conrad, Japanese writers of literary Sinitic had to master multiple linguistic and prosodic features that could not have come easily to them (or to Koreans, Vietnamese, or Loochooans). Chaves makes a similar point about a poem by Kōran (no. 138) in which she likens her downcast mood to butterflies that “frozen, keep wings closed.” This, too, is an image unique to her and virtually without precedent in Chinese poetry, demonstrating the creativity of both of these poets in expanding their linguistic and metaphorical repertoire beyond the received tradition of poetry from the mainland.On the other hand, as Yamamoto shows in numerous examples in Shibun to keisei, the eighteenth-century trend toward observing greater fidelity to the Chinese literary tradition, and lower tolerance for the Japanese-inflected diction and syntax that had become common among the nobility (kuge 公家) and later by medieval Zen monks, brought Sinitic poetry into closer alignment with continental models, whether High Tang, Song, or Ming poetry. This can be illustrated in another Yanagawa poem, “Silkworm” (no. 98). The silkworm had been almost completely absent in Japanese poetry before this period, despite being a relatively common topic in the Chinese poetry of objects (yongwu 詠物) beginning in the Tang dynasty. Yanagawa was perhaps following a trend among poets to write about silkworms among his contemporaries, stimulated by the rapid increase of sericulture across Japan beginning in the early nineteenth century. The poem concludes with a phrase “hamabito” 濱人 (literally “people of the shores,” which Chaves translates as “each person of our land”) that originates from an indigenous Japanese source, the venerable 905 imperially sponsored collection, Collection of Ancient and Modern Japanese Songs (Kokin wakashū 古今和歌集), demonstrating a hybridity of sources and language that harmonized such native lexica with those originating in China.Fraleigh's account of the lives and art of these two poets, along with Chaves's masterful translations with helpful annotations, is insightful and informative. And this is a highly accessible resource for exploring the work of this poetic couple, who were some of the most prolific Sinitic poets of their era and among the most accomplished in the entire corpus of Japanese literary Sinitic. Two other aspects of the collection may also be of particular interest to scholars of China. First, Chaves includes several poems by both Seigan and Kōran devoted to ghosts and demons (yōkai 妖怪), a popular theme of late Edo theater, literature, and art, and he includes beautifully reproduced illustrations of paintings that inspired at least one of them (79–80), inviting comparison with the pictorial and literary intersections on supernatural themes in the works of Jin Nong 金農 (1687–1763) and Luo Pin 羅聘 (1733–1799), among others. Second, several of the selected poems document the couple's extensive political activism, in which they allied with other intellectuals in protesting the bakufu's feeble response to Western threats. Their knowledge of British intrusions in East Asia, which preoccupied both during the last decade of Yanagawa's life (as well as Kōran's remaining years), was informed by the available recent works from or about China such as Saitō Chikudō’s Account of Opium (Ahen shimatsu 阿片始末, 1843) and Wei Yuan's 魏源 (1794–1857) Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Nations (Haiguo tuzhi 海國圖志, 1843).Hikaku bungaku to shite no Edo Kanshi provides a wide-ranging overview of Edo Kanshi, extending into the Meiji era, with an emphasis on some of the same figures covered by Shibun to keisei such as Muro Kyūsō and Kinoshita Jun'an. Sugishita does so through an in-depth survey of several historical themes that were taken up by a number of Sinitic writers, beginning with the commemoration of Kusunoki Masanori 楠木正儀 (1333–1390), a leading general of the renegade Southern Court (1336–1392). He traces the prose and poetry about Kusunoki written by figures such as Kyūsō, demonstrating how the evaluation of this historical figure was disputed and substantially reconfigured through their allusions to Chinese figures like Han Xin 韓信 (?–196 BCE), Zhuge Liang 諸葛亮 (181–234), and Wen Tianxiang 文天祥 (1236–1283). The comparative perspective highlighted in the title of this volume derives from Sugishita's focus on the deployment of Chinese historical and literary sources as well as the influence of native poetry (haikai specifically) on Sinitic poetry. He also documents how the prevailing image of Kusunoki (Nankō zō 楠公像) was ultimately refashioned through an extensive exchange of letters between the Ming loyalist-refugee Zhu Shunshui 朱舜水 (1600–1682) and Muro Kyūsō, in tandem with the efforts of the Mito daimyo Tokugawa Mitsukuni 徳川光圀 (1628–1701), and the Kaga daimyo Maeda Tsunanori 前田綱紀 (1643–1724).The of native literary and historical with Chinese as in the poems by Yanagawa is also evident in poetry written during a lengthy in Sugishita notes that wrote this not with its but as his own of political and to that of during the in in the this same corpus of of the of the local traces of no to in as well as local such as of and the latter a common theme of poetry, and of the of Ibi Edo Kanshi no to a collection of and essays by a scholar of literary Sinitic, in which he the cultural and literary within which Sinitic poetry and themes in common with and other native from the to the Meiji into four chapters such as the over the of the to poets, for and for the and in both and this volume is toward a general for knowledge of literary Sinitic can no be taken for It does so through poems in these to the and across the of literary the more Sinitic with examples from the canon of Edo and particularly example comes in a of poetry about This with several Sinitic by the on the that a in the such as his who into the to a Ibi to by like and the among for the image of a is with for This in to a about Edo poetry by the poet Ibi concludes that of Edo the of and the of the modern poet through the that is up by the image of a into the the four surveyed to the of premodern and early modern of literary Sinitic, and the of interest in its of both with and from that of its to the and While of these four is to different from specialists and to more general and they can be with by readers of this interested in the and range of literary Sinitic in the early modern than the for the and of as yet remain not only for Japan but also and writers and It is the of this that scholars on the by these four
Stephen Roddy (Sat,) studied this question.
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