A Poetics of Courtly Male Friendship in Heian Japan.pdf

A Poetics of Courtly Male Friendship in Heian Japan

PAUL GORDON SCHALOW

Western scholars have tended to read Heian literature through the prism of female experience, stressing the imbalance of power in courtship and looking for evidence that women hoped to move beyond the constraints of mar-riage politics. Paul Schalows original and challenging work inherits these concerns about the transcendence of love and carries them into a new realm of inquirythe suffering of noblemen and the literary record of their hopes for transcendence through friendship. He traces this recurring theme, which he labels courtly male friendship, in five important literary works ranging from the tenth-century Tale of Ise to the early eleventh-century Tale of Genji.

Whether authored by men or women, the depictions of male friendship ad-dressed in this work convey the differ-ing perspectives of male and female authors profoundly shaped by their gender roles in the court aristocracy. Schalows approach to the poetic ele-ment in the texts focuses on identifying motifs and rhetorical structures that recur in poems about male friendship. In addressing the prose narratives, he concentrates on describing pairs of male characters created by the authors. The noblemans desires for erotic adventure with women and for friendship with

(Continued on back flap)

(Continued from front flap)

men are not contradictory or mutually exclusive in these texts, but are integrat-ed and play off each other in interest-ing ways. In fact, to be both a lover of women and a friend of men comes to define the very notion of what consti-tutes a hero in the Heian period. Such a hero embodied the courtiers hopes of overcoming the numerous obstacles to intimacy that existed in their admittedly privileged lives. Schalows analysis clarifies in particular how Heian litera-ture articulates the noblemans wish to be known and appreciated fully by another man.

The historical contexts that produced the desire for male friendship in the Heian court and the specific manifesta-tions of that desire in Heian literature are radically different from those in our own time, a thousand years removed. Nevertheless, the poems and narratives addressed here manage to speak to us movingly about the Heian noblemans very human desire for the intimacy of a friend.

Paul Gordon Schalow teaches Japanese literature in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Rutgers University.

SCHA

LOW

A Poetics of C

ourtly Male Friendship in H

eian Japan

JaPaneSe literature

Exploring the issue of male friendship, this book takes aninnovative and fresh approach to well-known

classical texts.

Haruo Shirane, Columbia university

In its lucid and far-ranging exploration of literary articulationsof male-male friendship and their relation to court alliances

and rivalries, Paul Schalow shifts and beautifully complicatesa question that feminist analysis has made crucial to ourunderstanding of Heian literature, that of how literary

expression enacts, performs, or materializes courtly power.

Thomas Lamarre, mCGill university

Jacket art:Suetsumuhana: The Safflower.

Attributed to Tosa Mitsuoki (16171691).By permission of Mary Griggs Burke.

Photo 2000 John Bigelow Taylor, NYC.

Jacket design by Santos Barbasa Jr.

University of Hawaii PressHonolulu, Hawaii 96822-1888

www.uhpress.hawaii.edu

A Poetics ofCourtly Male Friendship

in Heian Japan

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Bo Ya Plays the Qin as Zhong Ziqi Listens. Attributed to Kano Motonobu (ca.14761559). The Mary Griggs Burke Collection of Japanese Art. The Metropol-itan Museum of Art. Photograph 2000.

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Paul Gordon Schalow

University of Hawaii Press Honolulu

A Poetics ofCourtly Male Friendship

in Heian Japan

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2007 University of Hawaii PressAll rights reservedPrinted in the United States of America12 11 10 09 08 07 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schalow, Paul Gordon.A poetics of courtly male friendship in Heian Japan /

Paul Gordon Schalow.p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-0-8248-3020-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)1. Japanese literatureHeian period, 7941185History and

criticism. 2. Male friendship in literature. I. Title. PL726.2.S34 2007895.6'114dc22

2006020766

University of Hawaii Press books are printed onacid-free paper and meet the guidelines forpermanence and durability of the Councilon Library Resources.

Designed by the University of Hawaii Press production staff

Printed by The Maple -Vail Book Manufacturing Group

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For Kiri, Eric, and Emlyn

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Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Chapter 1. Poems to Sing and the Hope for Transcendence 6

Chapter 2. Paradigms of Friendship in the Tale of Ise 37

Chapter 3. Poetic Sequences in the Kager Diary 77

Chapter 4. The Tale of Genji: Two Cranes Flying Wing to Wing 116

Chapter 5. The Uji Chapters: Maidens of the Bridge 163

Afterword 188

Notes 193

Works Cited 207

Index 213

Contents

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The research and writing of this study was made possible over aperiod of years by a grant from the National Endowment for theHumanities, two semesters of sabbatical leave from Rutgers Univer-sity, and a twelve-month fellowship in the School of Historical Studies atthe Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. I wish to expressmy deepest gratitude to each of these institutions for their generous sup-port of the project.

I am also greatly indebted to mentors and colleagues in the field fortheir endorsement of the project at various stages along the way, especiallyAileen Gatten, Howard Hibbett, the late Earl Miner, J. Thomas Rimer, andHaruo Shirane. Colleagues at Rutgers University who also deserve my deep-est appreciation for their ongoing support of my work are Donald Roden,Ryoko Toyama, Ching-I Tu, and Janet Walker.

At the University of Hawaii Press, I wish to thank the members of theEditorial Board and particularly acquiring editor Pamela Kelley for herstrong interest in the manuscript and for helping me see it through to pub-lication. I am grateful to two anonymous readers who took time to give themanuscript a careful reading. The insightful comments of one reader in par-ticular spurred me to clarify certain key aspects of the study and arereflected in the finished book.

An earlier version of chapter 2 appeared in the Harvard Journal of Asi-atic Studies, volume 60, number 2 (December 2000) under the title Five Por-traits of Male Friendship in the Ise monogatari.

I wish to thank Eyal Ben-Ari at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit at the German Institute for Japanese Studies(DIJ) in Tokyo, Noriko Mizuta and Sumito Miki at Jsai International Uni-

ix

Acknowledgments

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versity, Junko Saeki at Dshisha University, and Rieko Wagoner at TrinityCollege for invitations to lecture on my work at their respective institutions.I am grateful for the thoughtful feedback of audiences there and at George-town University, the Institute for Advanced Study, and Rutgers University.

I am deeply grateful to Mrs. Mary Griggs Burke for allowing me to usetwo images from her collection of Japanese art: Bo Ya Plays the Qin as ZhongZiqi Listens depicts the Chinese legend of the Broken Strings in a paintingattributed to Kano Motonobu (ca. 14761559), and Suetsumuhana: The Saf-flower depicts a pivotal scene in chapter 6 of The Tale of Genji from an albumattributed to Tosa Mitsuoki (16171691). I wish to thank Stephanie Wada atthe Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation, Deanna Cross and Masako Wata-nabe at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Miyeko Murase of ColumbiaUniversity for their assistance.

x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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This is a study of bonds of friendship depicted between noblemen inthe literature of the Japanese imperial court during the Heian period(7941185). It is not a description of real-life friendships betweenhistorical persons but rather an attempt to describe how what I will be call-ing courtly male friendship is depicted in a number of texts circulating inthe late tenth and early eleventh centuries. The recurring patterns of this lit-erary depiction constitute the poetics in the books title. The texts underdiscussion are generically diverse and include a poetry collection (theWakan rei sh, or Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing); two poem-tales (theIse monogatari, or Tale of Ise; and the Heich monogatari, or Tale of Heich); apoetic memoir (the Kager nikki, or Kager Diary); and an extended work ofimaginative fiction (the Genji monogatari, or Tale of Genji). Apart from Poemsto Sing, all of the texts combine poetry and prose to varying degrees. Myapproach to the poetic element in the texts has been to focus on identifyingmotifs and rhetorical structures that recur in Chinese and Japanese poemsabout male friendship. In addressing the prose stories, I have focused ondescribing pairs of male characters created by the authors in their narrativesof friendship. As we shall see, the noblemans desires for erotic adventurewith women and for friendship with men are not contradictory or mutuallyexclusive in these texts but are integrated and play off each other in interest-ing ways. In fact, to be both a lover of women and a friend of men comes todefine the very notion of what constitutes a hero in the period. Such a heroseems to have provided Heian courtiers with hope for transcending theconstrictions and disappointments of their admittedly privileged lives. Inparticular, this study is concerned with clarifying how Heian literature artic-ulates the noblemans wish to be known and appreciated fully by anothermanor what may be termed the hope of transcendence through malefriendship.

1

Introduction

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The ranked aristocracy of the mid-Heian court is estimated to havenumbered no more than five thousand people whose ostensible purpose forexistence was their service to the imperial household.1 This small groupcompletely dominated cultured life in the capital, called Heian ky, the Cityof Peace and Tranquility, from which derives the period name. Althoughcourtly literature has come to symbolize Heian culture as a whole, the noble-men and noblewomen who produced it were but a tiny fraction of the pop-ulation, a leisured elite. The court aristocracy rarely had to concern itselfwith earning a living, with child rearing, or with domestic chores. This isnot to say that courtiers had easy lives, however. Political disgrace, rumor ofpersonal misconduct, decline in family prestige, and even exile lay in waitfor them; indeed, courtly literature was a forum where the collective fearsinspired by the instability of their hierarchical world of finely tuned rankscould be explored, and it was also an island of elegance and well-being thatthey created to shelter themselves against those fears.

Any man born into one of the aristocratic families that served at courtwas among the most privileged on earth. He could expect to receive an elitecontinental-style education in Chinese poetry and the Chinese classics thatwould subsequently lead to his steady advancement in the elaborate courthierarchy. According to his abilities and the quality of his alliances, hemight attain service to the imperial household or, even more desirable,become adviser to the emperor himself. But the competition for power andinfluence among the leading clans was fierce. By the time of the mid-Heianperiod one branch of the Fujiwara familythe hokke, or Northern Househad achieved overwhelming political dominance at court. This was accom-plished through a system of marriage politics whereby the reigning Fuji-wara chieftain of the Northern House was able to control the throne asregent (sessh) by naming a daughter consort to the emperor and later install-ing his own grandson on the throne.

The almost complete domination of the court by the Northern Housethrough the regency system (sekkan sei) meant that much of the court aris-tocracy was effectively disenfranchised. Members of the less successfulbranches of the Fujiwara and other clans were routinely sent out to the prov-inces for lengthy terms as provincial governors. Such a posting was presti-gious enough, but it obligated the courtier to be absent from the capital foryears at a time, and for that reason provincial governorships were generallynot welcomed by high-ranking courtiers harboring political ambitions.Interestingly, it is from the class of provincial governors, on the peripheryof court power, that many of the greatest Heian writers emerged, a resultperhaps of the tendency for people on the margins to develop a critical per-

2 INTRODUCTION

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spective and analytical consciousness toward centers of power. Thus, whilea noblemans aristocratic birth provided little solace in the face of his lack ofpolitical clout, at least his literary attainments in the Chinese classics andJapanese poetry (or Yamato song, waka) could provide the basis for hisparticipation in a cultural and aesthetic regime of power that emerged inrelation to the political power of the Fujiwara Regency. Verses and narra-tives depicting a disenfranchised hero who vied for the love of women andthe friendship of men show that literature provided the Heian court with acultural arena of the imagination, where power lost in the public realmmight be recouped through the art of writing and reading.

Western scholars have heretofore tended to introduce questions ofpower and politics into their readings of Heian texts from the angle of fem-inism, placing special emphasis on the imbalance of power between menand women in the context of courtship.2 The strategy has been to describethe ways in which Heian literature idealizes romantic love, or longing,and then show it to be embedded within the marriage politics of the regencysystem. In general, feminist analysis has stressed the suffering of noble-women and has looked for ways in which the literature nonetheless giveswomen hope of rising above or getting beyond the constraints of marriagepolitics through their experience of love or through some other means.3 Thepresent study inherits these concerns about the transcendence of love andthe suffering of women from feminist scholarship and carries it into a newrealm of inquiryof the suffering of noblemen and the literary record oftheir hopes for transcendence through friendship. If feminist analysis ofcourtship and love has taken as its goal the politicization of feminine expe-rience in canonical works of Heian literature, then this study of male friend-ship seeks to shift and deepen that analysis to include masculine experienceas a subject of critical inquiry.4

Several of the narratives addressed in this studynamely, the Tale ofHeich, the Kager Diary, and the Tale of Genjidepict female characters play-ing a central role as mediators in friendships between noblemen. The cen-tral role of female characters can best be explained in terms of the ways thatgendered perspectives inform Heian writing. In some scenes an authorsdepiction of male friendship is an expression of male interiority and high-lights friendship as part of a mans inner life, whereas in other scenes sucha depiction is an expression of female observation of men and frequentlyhighlights the role of women in enabling the friendship. Heian depictionsof male friendship inevitably embody the differing perspectives of maleand female authors whose viewpoints on the subject were profoundlyshaped by their gender roles in the court aristocracy.

INTRODUCTION 3

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The Chinese paradigm for male friendship is the story of Bo Ya andZhong Ziqi, otherwise known as the legend of the Broken Strings (Chinese:jue xian Japanese: zetsugen). It appears for the first time in Han dynasty textsand was familiar to the Heian court as a theme of Tang dynasty painting andfrom the text of the Lie-zi.5 According to the legend, Bo Ya was a skilledplayer of the zither, and Zhong Ziqi was his friend. Alone among all his lis-teners, Ziqi possessed a remarkable ability to appreciate the nuances of BoYas playing. When Bo Ya played a passage that evoked mountains, Ziqiwould grasp his intent immediately and say, lofty like Mt. Tai; when hisplaying evoked the sound of rushing water, Ziqi would say, flowing like theYangzi River and the Yellow River. When Ziqi died, Bo Ya cut the strings ofhis zither and never played again, because there was no one else in theworld that knew his sounds.6 The legend of the Broken Strings came toexemplify the ideal of a noblemans profound response to another man. Itsechoes can be heard throughout Heian literature in stories that depict thenoblemans desire to be known and appreciated by a kindred spirit.

As the legend of the Broken Strings suggests, the Heian literature ofcourtly male friendship grew out of a bilingual and bicultural context involv-ing aspects of both Chinese and Japanese literary languages. For members ofthe early Japanese (Yamato) elite, the ability to read and write was entirelya product of contact with continental culture, and originally Chinese liter-acy was the only type of literacy that existed for them. The reception of con-tinental culture in the sixth century by the emerging Yamato state was con-troversial and followed an uncertain trajectory, characterized by militarycoups, political assassinations, and heated clashes among elite clans, butthe forces favoring accommodation with Chinese cultural forces, and inparticular with Buddhist teaching, ultimately prevailed. By the seventh cen-tury, powerful families within the Yamato court enjoyed the social andpolitical advantages that Chinese literacy afforded them. At the same time,a desire to express themselves in the indigenous language led to creativeexperiments in literary production of Yamato texts, starting with renditionsof Japanese poems called Yamato songs (waka). Initially, these experi-ments were conducted by literarily gifted members of the Yamato court andinvolved inventing ways to alternately use Chinese graphs for their sound(as phonetic graphs) and for their meaning (as logographs) so that anapproximation of the indigenous language could be produced as text. Later,the phonetic use of Chinese graphs was systematized into a syllabic script(kana) that allowed relatively facile transcription of Yamato language astext. Phonetic graphs were at first used exclusively to transcribe names andwaka within the context of Chinese prose, but with the later emergence

4 INTRODUCTION

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of syllabic script it became possible to create extended narratives in theYamato language.

The newfound ability of the educated elite at the Yamato court towrite poems and prose in the indigenous language never displaced thecourts interest in Chinese texts, however, and Chinese writing maintainedtremendous prestige as an object of literary study and enjoyment. As Mar-ian Ury once noted, to the Heian Japanese, Chinese culture and its prod-ucts existed apart from national boundaries as requisite tools of civilizationand, to a very high degree, as the marks of civilization itself.7 Furthermore,written Chinese continued to be used for all official communications withinthe Yamato court and between the Yamato court and the outside world,namely the Tang empire and the Korean kingdoms of Silla and Paekche. TheHeian courtiers treatment of Chinese texts underwent a gradual change,however, whereby classical Chinese came to be read following Yamato-likediction and syntax. By the tenth century, Chinese texts were no longersomething separate and foreign but were fully integrated into a system ofliteracy involving Japanese and Chinese frames of reference, what ThomasLaMarre has termed the Yamato-Han or wa-kan assemblage.8 Thisassemblage allowed courtiers to integrate multiple forms of literary expres-sion into a coherent, if slightly precarious, Yamato-Han literary culture.Although plagued by occasional glitches and inaccuracies, the hybrid liter-ary apparatus nevertheless allowed most noblemen and a few elite noble-women to read and compose texts at a sophisticated level within a dual lit-erary environment.9

Because the literary depictions of male friendship addressed in thisstudy are a product of a cultures history, they are inevitably bound to a spe-cific time and place. We cannot assume that friendships manifestation inHeian literature should automatically be intelligible to people living in thepresent day, one thousand years removed, for its epistemological underpin-nings are not necessarily our own. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake tocompletely deny the comprehensibility of these narratives of friendship topeople of today, for they manage to speak to us movingly about the Heiannoblemans desire to be known and appreciated by a kindred spirit. It is adesire that resonates convincingly across the temporal and cultural dividebetween the texts creators and ourselves. The historical contexts that pro-duce the wish for friendship and the depiction of that wish in literature willinevitably differ across cultures and time, yet it seems only human to wishfor the intimacy of a friend, however elusive, who might understand us.

INTRODUCTION 5

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The Wakan rei sh (Japanese and Chinese poems to sing) contains asequence of seven poems on friendship that vividly illustrates thebilingual and bicultural wa-kan apparatus at work in the productionand appreciation of Chinese and Japanese verse at the Heian court.1 Poemsto Sing was compiled by the courtier and literatus Fujiwara no Kint (9661041) in about the year 1013. Kints mother was the daughter of an Imper-ial Prince (the third son of Emperor Daigo) and his father was Fujiwara noYoritada, who served the Emperors Kazan and Eny as Chancellor (kam-paku) from 977 to 986. On the basis of Kints illustrious lineage, he mighthave expected a stellar and unimpeded political career at court but for thefact that he was an exact contemporary of Fujiwara no Michinaga (9661027), a man who eclipsed all of his kinsmen and became the defining polit-ical figure in the mid-Heian court. An examination of Kints career showsthat his abilities in the composition of waka were recognized at an early age,and that as a young man he kept up a lively poetic correspondence withFujiwara no Sanekata (?998), Minamoto no Kanezumi (955??), and Fuji-wara no Michinobu (?994). In time, Kint achieved in the poetic realm thesame stature that Michinaga would achieve in the political realm and waswidely regarded by his fellow courtiers as the preeminent arbiter of Japa-nese poetic taste in his day. He was principal compiler of the third imperialanthology, the Shi sh (ca. 1005; Collection of gleanings), and between theyears 1004 and 1012 he wrote several well-regarded poetic treatises, includ-ing the Shinsen zuin (Essentials of poetry, new selection), the Waka kuhon(Nine styles of Japanese poetry), and the Kingyoku sh (Collection of goldand jewels), which served as study guides for courtiers in their poetic com-position. None of these texts was to prove as important as Poems to Sing,which served for many centuries not only as a source of beauty itself butalso as a handbook of the arts, supplying poets and dramatists with lofty

6

Chapter 1

Poems to Sing and the Hope for Transcendence

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language, artists with subject matter, musicians with lyrics, and calligra-phers with revered texts to copy.2

Poems to Sing was compiled probably as a celebratory gift on the occa-sion of the marriage in 1013 of Kints daughter to Fujiwara no Norimichi,Michinagas third son, who himself reached the position of Chancellor in1068.3 The union was probably orchestrated in part to assuage Kints frus-trated political ambitions. Michinaga, whose position at the time was Impe-rial Examiner (nairan), was a master of using the literary and decorative artsas political capital, and the fine poetry Kint collected and preserved inPoems to Sing undoubtedly enhanced the prestige of all parties to the mar-riage. The collection contains 803 entries consisting of Japanese and Chi-nese poems that were performed in a popular form of musical recitation,called rei (thus the title Poems to Sing).4 The majority of the entries areChinese couplets on various themes composed by Heian and Tang courtpoets; these are matched with a smaller number of Japanese waka on relatedthemes. Kint organized the collection into two volumes of approximatelyequal length. The first volume contains 396 poems and poetic passagesaddressing the four seasons, beginning with spring. Each season is furthersubdivided into a total of sixty-five topics: twenty-one topics for spring,twelve for summer, twenty-three for autumn, and nine for winter. The sec-ond volume contains 407 poems and poetic passages divided among forty-eight miscellaneous topics. One of these miscellaneous topics is Friends(C: jiaoyou J: ky). The seven poems in the section allow us to glimpse inmicrocosm Kints literary formulation of male friendship within the com-plex linguistic environment of the Yamato-Han (wa-kan) nexus.

Poems to Sing consists of three general types of versesshi, kanshi, andwakathat are grouped in a hierarchy according to type within each topicalcategory. First in the hierarchy are couplets taken from shi, poems written inclassical Chinese by Tang poets. Next come kanshi, couplets composed inclassical Chinese as complete poems in two lines by Heian Japanese poets.Last in the typological hierarchy come waka, thirty-one-syllable Yamatosongs, many of them gleaned from the first imperial anthology, the Kokinsh(or Kokin waka sh, 905; Collection of Japanese poems old and new).5 Thetypological organization of poems suggests that Kint made a consciousdistinction between couplets composed in classical Chinese by Tang poets(shi) and those composed by Heian poets (kanshi), and that he treated thoseby Tang poets as primary, since they were the authentic source of poetic lit-eracy. Kints juxtaposition of Heian kanshi following Tang shi couplets sug-gested a seamless connection between the Heian courtier and his Tangpredecessors. Finally, the incorporation of waka into the hierarchy of poetic

POEMS TO SING AND THE HOPE FOR TRANSCENDENCE 7

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8 CHAPTER 1

forms reveals Kints sense that Japanese poems resonated meaningfullywith the themes of Chinese verse, despite the obvious formal differences ofdiction and imagery. This allowed him to treat waka as an integral elementwithin a continuum of poetic expression alongside the shi couplets and kan-shi that constituted the bulk of the collection.

Regarding Kints purposes in compiling Poems to Sing, J. ThomasRimer has said, It appears that Kint was setting out to reinforce Japanesepoetic values that had been established some or more [sic] hundred yearspreviously. Rather than striking off in a new direction, he seemed to aim atestablishing permanent standards on the basis of which the poets of his andsuccessive generations should proceed.6 In looking to the past for robustexamples of shi couplets and kanshi, and matching them with waka on simi-lar themes, Kint acknowledged and made fine use of the integrative powerof the Yamato-Han apparatus. His work of integration had one risk, how-ever. It threatened to erase the very differences inherent in the separate lan-guages that give the sequences their extraordinary poetic texture. As weshall see, this risk is especially well negotiated in the poetic entries includedunder the topic of Friends.

There are approximately 240 shi couplets in the collection, attributed(some of them erroneously) to forty-three different Tang poets or Chineseliterary sources. Most of these shi couplets are fragments of longer poems;in a few instances, they are derived from passages of classical Chinese prose.According to Rimer and Chaves, translators of Poems to Sing, the apprecia-tion of Chinese shi couplets as a full-fledged poetic form represented auniquely Heian approach to Chinese poetry and reached its apogee in thetext of Poems to Sing. The collection favors one Tang poet, Bo Ju-yi (Po Ch-i,772846), who is credited with 140 entries (counting a few erroneous ordoubtful attributions). Two of Bo Ju-yis contemporaries and intimates arealso well represented: Yuan Zhen (779831), with 11 entries; and Xu Hun(791854?), with 10 entries. Bo Ju-yis overwhelming numerical superioritycan be explained by Kints use of Senzai kaku (ca. 950, Splendid verses of athousand years) as his source for many of the entries in Poems to Sing. Senzaikaku was compiled in about 950 by e no Koretoki (888963) and contains1,083 shi couplets in classical Chinese. These are in the form of two-linecouplets of seven graphs per line. The collection comprises works by 153Tang poets, including four Korean poets from the kingdoms of Silla andKoryo.

Scholars believe that Senzai kaku was conceived of as a pair withNikkan sh (ca. 945, Collection of Japanese views), a lost collection of kanshiby Heian poets. It is thought that Emperor Murakami (r. 946967), when he

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was yet Crown Prince, commissioned the collection from his tutor, Kore-toki, to serve in his study of Han composition. Nikkan sh contained theChinese verses composed by ten major Heian courtier-poets who flour-ished in the ninety-year period between 834 and 923. The earliest Hanverses in the collection are by Ono no Takamura (801852) and his contem-porary Korenaga no Harumichi (dates unknown). Their work reflects theimmediate impact of the Hakushi monj (Collected works of Bo Ju-yi), whichreached Japan during Bo Ju-yis lifetime in about the year 838, on the style ofChinese verse that came to be preferred by the Heian court.

According to the scholar Kimbara Tadashi, the very early admirationfor Bo Ju-yi shown in the Chinese verses of Ono no Takamura and Kore-yoshi no Harumichi went far beyond matters of literary style and into mat-ters of lifestyle. They often composed in pairs and carried on an activeexchange of verses that followed closely the literary example of Bo Ju-yisown poetic friendships with Yuan Zhen and Liu Yu-xi (772842).7 The ideaof poetic friendships between male poets thereby became entrenchedamong Heian courtiers in the ninth century, and the practice of such friend-ships continued well into mid-Heian. Other Heian courtiers whose worksKoretoki included in Nikkan sh were likewise paired with each other: Suga-wara no Koreyoshi (812880) with e no Otondo (811877); Tachibana noHiromi (837890), who studied classical Chinese under Sugawara no Kore-yoshi, with the legendary Miyako no Yoshika (834879); Sugawara no Michi-zane (845903), Koreyoshis son, with Miyoshi no Kiyoyuki (847918); andKi no Haseo (845912) with e no Chifuru (d. 924), who was Koretokisfather. To the future Emperor Murakami, the text of Nikkan sh served as afine introduction to much of the superior Chinese verse produced at theHeian court in the preceding four generations. When, a few years later,Koretoki turned to the task of compiling Senzai kaku, he similarly wanted tocreate a representative collection of superior Chinese verse produced in theTang, Silla, and Koryo courts in the same generations. What distinguishedthe two anthologies was that the Senzai kaku focused on Tang, Silla, andKoryo poets, while Nikkan sh focused on Heian poets. Both volumes con-firmed the Heian vogue for Bo Ju-yis poems, and Kint was greatly influ-enced by this vogue when he set out to compile Poems to Sing almost seventyyears later.

In addition to the 240 shi couplets by Bo Ju-yi and other Tang poets,Poems to Sing contains approximately 350 kanshi by a total of fifty-two Heianmale courtiers. The large number of poemsthe largest of the three genresrepresented in the collectionis divided among a relatively small numberof poets. Thirty-seven kanshi are by Sugawara no Michizane, 39 by his grand-


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son Fumitoki (or Funtoki, 899981), 30 by Minamoto no Shitag (911983),30 by e no Asatsuna (887957), 22 by Ki no Haseo, 19 by Yoshishige noYasutane (?1002), 14 by Miyako no Yoshika, and 12 by Ono no Takamura.Of the Heian masters of Chinese verse, only Minamoto no Shitag and eno Asatsuna are represented with Japanese poems in the collection. Theynumber among the few courtiers who had proved themselves capable ofproducing both kanshi and waka of excellent quality. As such, they repre-sented the Heian ideal: men who were expert at manipulating both Yamatoand Han frames of reference in the wa-kan apparatus. It was an elusiveideal, and in practice it seems that poetically competent men at court spe-cialized in kanshi or waka but were rarely masters of both.

Kints most lasting contribution to Heian poetics occurred when hewent against Koretokis model found in Senzai kaku and Nikkan sh and inte-grated Chinese couplets by non-Heian and Heian poets as he did. The rea-son for Kints ability to reconceptualize the relationship between shi andkanshi owes much to changes in the Yamato-Han apparatus during thecourse of the tenth century, particularly regarding methods of reading Chi-nese verse. Kanshi are identical to shi graphically (both employ classicalChinese graphs) and formally (both are couplets consisting of two lines,and each line contains a specified number of graphs, usually seven). Kim-bara Tadashi describes the fundamental difference between Tang shi andHeian kanshi in these terms: Heian kanshi were produced in the realm ofinterpretive reading (kundoku), and they therefore were fundamentallydifferent from shi produced in China, because they lacked a natural sense ofthe rhythm of Chinese.8 In the early years of the Japanese court, the edu-cated elite probably read shi linearly as native Chinese would read them,following classical Chinese syntax, in an approximation of the originalpronunciation (which varied depending on the dynasty when contact withthe Japanese court occurred). This method of reading is termed ondoku,phono-reading, but it appears to have fallen increasingly into disuse asthe court became less and less familiar with the sounds of spoken Chinesein the course of the Heian period. In contrast to ondoku, the method of read-ing shi in Yamato language is termed kundoku (or yomi kudashi), interpre-tive reading, and it was apparently the norm by mid-Heian. It is a nonlin-ear method of reading Chinese text, following Japanese syntax, whereinChinese sounds are dispensed with and Yamato pronunciation is usedinstead. Reading shi and kanshi with the words and syntax of the Yamatolanguage required a process of skipping graphs momentarily, then dou-bling back to retrieve skipped graphs until the sense of the poem was com-plete. Verb endings had to be addedin contrast to the Chinese language,

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Japanese verbs are agglutinativeand a system of appropriate verb end-ings was developed that helped make Yamato-like syntactic sense of theclassical Chinese lines. That Chinese verses were being read using Japanesewords and syntax through a process of interpretive reading suggests thatsome of the incompatibility between shi composed by Tang poets and kan-shi composed by Japanese poets that would have been apparent to Koretokiwhen he compiled Senzai kaku and Nikkan sh as two separate texts had, inKints day, become blurred.

A vestige of the distinction between shi and kanshi remains in theform of Kints hierarchy that places shi first under each topical heading inPoems to Sing, but any essential difference is gone because of the homogeniz-ing effect of interpretive reading. After all, the aim of the Yamato-Hanapparatus was to make Chinese intelligible to the Japanese court, not to pre-serve difference for its own sake, and thus the apparatus had built into it abias toward the elimination or flattening out of difference. Kint gives littleevidence that the shi by Tang poets in any way represent a foreign poeticform in the Heian literary world or that waka represent native sentiment incontrast to them. Instead, the elements of shi, kanshi, and waka are inte-grated into a naturalized wa-kan text that de-emphasizes the logic of Hanand Yamato as representing opposing cultural and ethnic entities. The onlydifference that remains in Kints compilation is in the historicity of theverses and songs. The Chinese nature of shi and kanshi in relation to Japa-nese poems is erased or domesticated, and their ancientness and theirimportance as a poetic origin remain; in fact, the value of ancientnessandall the virtues that it entails (precedent, authority)is one of the importantby-products of Kints effort in compiling Poems to Sing.

Joining the 240 shi and 350 kanshi in Poems to Sing are 210 Yamatosongs by seventy-three different poets, drawn mainly from the Kokinsh. Incomparison with the number of Chinese verses (shi and kanshi), a smallernumber of waka are shared among a larger number of poets. The existenceof such variety among waka poets indicates that there was a large group ofcompetent poets of Japanese at court, including many elite women. By con-trast, it was a smaller and almost exclusively male group of poets that couldcompose competently in Chinese verse. The individual poet with the mostwaka appearing in the collection is the Kokinsh compiler, Ki no Tsurayuki(872?945), with 19 entries. Tsurayuki was known as a champion of Japa-nese poetry and prose at a time when the court was dominated by compo-sition in Chinese verse. It should come as no surprise that Tsurayuki hasno kanshi to his credit in the collection. There are 11 waka by shikchi noMitsune (fl. 898922), 8 by Taira no Kanemori (?ca. 900), and 6 each by the


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female poets Ise (877?940?) and Nakatsuka (920?980). Waka is the onlygenre in the collection represented by female poets, reflecting the divisionalong sex/gender lines that, with some important exceptions, discouragedwomen from composing in Chinese during the Heian period.

Scholars have sometimes argued that poetry in Japanese and Chinesefollowed a division between public and private spheres at court. Accordingto this view, waka were composed primarily to express private or personalfeelings, whereas kanshi were composed primarily in formal and ceremo-nial contexts and thereby acquired a public and political dimension thatwaka lacked. As evidence, scholars point to the widespread use of waka inthe conduct of courtship and love affairs, which required ready exchange ofJapanese poems between noblemen and women. In contrast, kanshi werealigned with the practice of recording all official and ceremonial activities atcourt in classical Chinese and were taught as part of a university curriculumin the Chinese classics that was sponsored by the court for the exclusiveeducation of sons of the aristocracy. While this description contains muchtruth, it must be modified to include two important facts: first, that in thecourse of the Heian period waka came to play an increasingly prominentpublic role in the imperially commissioned anthologies and in court-spon-sored poetry contests; and, more significant for the purposes of this study,that Chinese verse was clearly an important realm of private expression inthe emotional lives of Heian noblemen, albeit outside courtship and loveaffairs, as is evident in the Friends sequence from Poems to Sing.

Friendships Repertoire of Words and Rhetorical Devices

The seven poems on Friends (nos. 733739, shown on page 13) in Poemsto Sing tell us a great deal about how male friendship was conceptualizedand articulated at the Heian court early in the eleventh century. The title ofthe section is written with two graphs (C: jiaoyou J: ky), meaning friends.The overarching theme is friendship among men as defined through malepoetic experience. For that reason, the friend who stands at the center ofeach verse is always a male figure, and each verse explores a specific dimen-sion of male friendship, using a fairly limited set of poetic words and rhetor-ical devices. In several cases, friendship is signaled by the overt use of word-graphs for friend (C: jiao J: k or C: you J: tomo). In other cases, friendshipis indicated strictly through a two-pole rhetorical framework consistingof the pronouns you (C: jun J: kimi) and I (C: wo J: ware). Even in theabsence of any word specifically denoting a friend, the graphs for you andI are capable of establishing a poetic context of male friendship.

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The graph jun/kimi originally meant prince or lord, and appearsfamously in early Taoist and Confucian texts to indicate a man of breeding,in the graphs often translated as gentleman (C: junzi J: kunshi). From theseorigins, it came to be used in the Tang as an honorific pronominal. TheYamato reading of the graph as kimi dates to the early stages of continentalcontact, when the preliterate Yamato world collided with the literate conti-nental world. In preliterate Yamato, kimi was a respectful name for wealthy,powerful village chiefs. As proto-Yamato society became more highly struc-tured under continental influence, kimi became the term for the ruler of apolitical entity, first of a village or a group of villages and then, with time, oflarger regions or states. The ancient use of kimi in the poetry of the eighth-


Seven Poems on Friendship in Poems to Sing

Lute, poetry, winemy friends all have deserted me;snow, moon, flowersthese seasons, I most often think of you.Bo Ju-yi, poem 733

These songs of Yang-force in the spring: so noble, hard to echo!Feelings of friendship like limpid waters only in old age Ive come to know.Bo Ju-yi, poem 734

In former years you looked at me directlypupils dark;now, I meet you, and I find your hair has turned to white!Xu Hun, poem 735

Kuai-chi Magistrate Hsiao, on passing the ancient shrine, forged a friendship across eras;

Vice Director Chang, in valuing fresh talent, promoted it and formed a friendship transcending age.

Oe no Asatsuna, poem 736

Descendant of Pei of the Bureau of DocumentsI have heard of you for years!Orphan of the attendant gentleman of the Ministry of Ritesyou see me today for

the first time.Sugawara no Atsushige, poem 737

You and IWhat promises must we have madeIn a former life?How I would like to know!Unknown poet, poem 738

Who may I call my comrade now? For even the aged pines at TakasagoCannot replace the friends of yore.Fujiwara no Okikaze, poem 739

Source: Rimer and Chaves, Poems to Sing, 219221.

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century Many sh (Collection of ten thousand ages) to indicate or addressthe sovereign (later, the emperor) dates to this early time. By mid-Heian,however, kimi was being used as a second-person pronoun (you) towardsocial equals and as a respectful third-person pronoun (he, she, they)to indicate social superiors. It was also sometimes appended to the name ofhigh-ranking male or female courtiers as an informal title. Ware (or are) hadtwo uses, as the first-person pronoun I, referring to oneself, or as the sec-ond-person pronoun you, used toward social inferiors. In the poetry ofmale friendship, however, kimi and ware are used in a highly specializedmanner, to establish a two-poled structure in which a male subject Iaddresses his male friend you. Every poem in the section on Friends inPoems to Sing employs either a word for friend, the two-poled rhetoricalstructure you and I, or both, in order to construct a poetic context ofmale friendship.

The first three poems in the sequence are shi couplets by Tang poetsBo Ju-yi and Xu Hun. Kint places the poems in a sequence based on threeconventional Chinese contexts in which friendship may be experienced:longing for a friend in his absence, corresponding by letter with a friend,and meeting with a friend face-to-face. In doing so, Kint follows the lead ofe no Koretoki in Senzai kaku, which similarly categorized friendship bytype. Poem 733 appears in Senzai kaku under the heading Longing for aFriend (tomo wo omou), poem 734 under the heading A Letter (or Pen)Friend (fumi no tomo), and poem 735 under Meeting a Friend (tomo ni au).In each case, the heading of the poem identifies the context that inspired thecomposition.

Lute, poetry, winemy friends all have deserted me;snow, moon, flowersthese seasons, I most often think of you.Bo Ju-yi, poem 733

In this couplet, the poet Bo Ju-yi expresses his longing for an absentfriend. The poem consists of two lines containing only seven graphs per line,but despite its brevity it is ranked as one of the most powerful and greatlyadmired expressions of male friendship in classical Chinese literature. Aprose heading indicates that it was Sent to Chief Musician Yin.9 Accord-ing to the standard interpretation of the poem, the poets (my) friendswho formerly made music with him, composed poetry with him, and drankwine with him have now moved on to other places and other pursuits, butwhen the seasons come around and bring with them snowfall, autumnmoonlight, and blossoming trees, they remind the poet of past times and

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particularly of Chief Musician Yin (you), the friend who once shared thethree pleasures of playing the lute (C: qin J: kin; actually a zither), compos-ing poetry, and drinking wine with the poet. My (the poets) fond recollec-tion of you (Chief Musician Yin) thus serves to comfort the poet even as itintensifies his longing and loneliness. Bo Ju-yi creates a parallel between theactivities (lute, poetry, and wine) and the seasons when they are enjoyed(snow, moon, and blossoms) in order to establish and convey the poemsmain point: that the seasons return unfailingly, and yet the times spent withthis friend, and indeed the friend himself, are gone without hope of return.Simultaneously, Bo Ju-yi makes of the poem an affirmation of friendship,reassuring his friend, Chief Musician Yin, that he is remembered andmissed. A poem on the theme of friendship becomes itself an enactment offriendship in the master poets hands.

In another interpretation widely held at the Heian court, the lute,poetry, and wine are themselves the poets friends, and the poems con-ceit is that these friends have now abandoned the poet, along with thehuman companions who once shared in these pleasures with him. There isgood reason to believe that this alternate reading of the poem is a product ofthe mid-Heian courtiers method of reading Chinese verse. The openingline of poem 733 would have been read, using Japanese syntax in the styleof interpretive reading, as kin shi shu no tomo wa mina ware wo nageutsu.The phrase kin shi shu (lute, poetry, wine) is linked to the word tomo (friend)with the Japanese genitive particle no, which defines the relation of friendto the phrase lute, poetry, wine ambiguously. Friend may be inter-preted in relation to the three items as a whole (lute, poetry, and wine,which are my friends) or, as Bo Ju-yi intended, distributively in relation toeach item individually (my lute-friends, poetry-friends, and wine-friends).By interpreting friend in relation to the three items as a whole, Heianreaders of the poem took the items themselves to be the poets friends and,for that reason, came to refer to lute, poetry, and wine as Bo Ju-yis threefriends (C: san you J: sany) in later literature. The process of interpretivereading using Yamato syntax in this case contributed to a novel interpreta-tion of Bo Ju-yis poetic text. Kawaguchi Hisao calls this a slippage in mean-ing.10 The mid-Heian wa-kan assemblage allowed the Heian courtier toread Chinese text as Yamato-language literature, but the process led tounintended apprehensions of meaning, as illustrated in this case. Such slip-pages proliferated within the wa-kan assemblage because the practice ofinterpretive reading created room for them. Individual courtiers educatedin the Chinese classics may well have been capable of recognizing whensuch slippages occurred, but for the vast majority of mid-Heian readers of


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Chinese texts the problem of semantic slippage was largely invisible. Theexample of Bo Ju-yis three friends reveals one of the risks inherent inKints conception of Poems to Sing as a text that could be read seamlessly inJapanese by relying on interpretive reading: the Chinese text was glossedin Japanese and was thus no longer foreign at some level, but the familiarityand readability of the text was achieved at the cost of the poems originalmeaning, which became a victim of the reading strategy employed at themid-Heian court. If meaning was sacrificed, then Yamato and Chinese lin-guistic boundaries were not as permeable as the wa-kan assemblage pre-tended, and linguistic difference had a way of asserting itself against thehomogenizing efforts of that assemblage, whether individual courtier read-ers were aware of it or not.

Kints decision to place Bo Ju-yis poem 733 first in the sequence ofseven poems accomplishes two tasks: it confirms the importance of the two-poled rhetorical structure of you and me in the Heian poetry of malefriendship; and it acknowledges a particular aesthetic stance toward thefriend, namely, that the deepest experience of friendship resides in thefriends absence, not in his presence. In a poem about friends who areabsent, the reader is forced to imagine a moment when the pleasure ofshared camaraderie is pastwhether in the contexts of music, poetry, orwine or in the seasons of snow, moonlight, or flowering treesand onlythen is he prepared to comprehend what Bo Ju-yi would have called thetruth of friendship. We shall see in poem 735 by Xu Hun an opposite aes-thetic choice that locates the experience of friendship in a friends presence.By giving poem 733 pride of place in the sequence, Kint suggests that theTang poet and his Heian admirers shared a common aesthetic of longing forthe absent friend. This fundamental aesthetic agreement allowed the Heiancourtier to overcome trivial semantic slippages that may have occurred as aresult of the interpretive mode of reading within the wa-kan assemblage andto achieve a profound comprehension of the poems sense.

These songs of Yang-force in the spring: so noble, hard to echo!Feelings of friendship like limpid waters only in old age Ive come to know. Bo Ju-yi, poem 734

Bo Ju-yis expression of fondness for his friend in this couplet is trig-gered by an exchange of poems. It thus describes a literary friendship, ratherthan a friendship based on longing for an absent friend as in the previouscouplet. Poem 734 is formally identical to the preceding couplet, consistingagain of two lines with seven graphs per line. The prose headnote to the

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couplet reads, Supernumerary Chang [Zhang] the Eighteenth has sent metwenty-five of his new poems; in the Yamen tower beneath the moon, Ichanted and enjoyed them all night long, and then inscribed this at theend.11 The poet praises Zhangs poems, comparing them to songs ofYang-force in the spring. This reference is to chapter 10 of the ancient Chi-nese text Wen xuan (Literary classics). But what most moves the poet is hisrealization of the special quality of Zhangs friendship; it is bland (dan)and, like water, pure and unadulterated. Only after a lifetime of friendshipdoes the poet, now an old man, recognize this precious quality in his friend.The twenty-five poems function as an extension of Zhang himself andembody Zhangs friendship for the poet. By chanting them and enjoyingthem through the night, the poet comes to perceive the rare friendship thatmotivated Zhangs letter. Zhang is present through proxy in the form of hisnew poems, and they serve as a satisfying substitute for the poet. The result-ing poem of gratitude and praise is Bo Ju-yis response.

The phrase feelings of friendship like limpid waters refers to theMountain Tree chapter of Zhuang-zi:

The friendship of a gentleman, they say, is insipid [dan] as water; that of apetty man, sweet as rich wine. But the insipidity of the gentleman leads toaffection, while the sweetness of the petty man leads to revulsion. Thosewith no particular reason for joining together will for no particular reasonpart.12

This discourse comes in the context of Confucius questions to Master Sang-hu: Why was Confucius driven out of various states where he attempted tobe of service? And why had his kinfolk, associates, friends, and followersabandoned him? Sang-hu answers the question with the example of LinHui, who threw away a disc of jade worth a thousand measures of gold butkept his little baby when fleeing the state of Jia. When asked why he didthis, Lin Hui is said to have replied: The jade disc and I were joined byprofit, but the child and I were brought together by Heaven. Things joinedby profit, when pressed by misfortune and danger, will cast each otheraside; but things brought together by Heaven, when pressed by misfortuneand danger, will cling to one another.13

The implication in Bo Ju-yis poem is that friends are joined by some-thing larger than themselves (Heaven) and not by petty self-interest(profit). If misfortune and danger lead two friends to part, then they werein fact not friends but were merely joined to each other temporarily by thebenefits derived from the relationship. The insipidness of the gentle-


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mans friendship is a reflection of the selflessness of his association with hisfriend, and the sweetness of a petty mans friendship reflects his self-serving motives. The narrative suggests that selfless friendship that isinsipid or limpid like fresh water can be trusted, whereas selfish friend-ship that has the alluring sweetness of wine quickly succumbs to self-inter-est, and the only way to distinguish the two is in the long term.

The diction and rhetorical structures employed in both of Bo Ju-yiscouplets are remarkably similar. Friendship is indicated overtly in poem734 through the graphs translated as feelings of friendship (C: jiaoqingJ: kj). This parallels the appearance of the graph for friend (C: youJ: tomo) in the preceding couplet, number 733. Moreover, if we look beyondthe couplet excerpted here in Poems to Sing to the complete verse as Bo Ju-yiwrote it, we find that the immediately preceding lines establish the contextof the poets friendship with Zhang through the pronouns I and you.

Separated from me [C: wo J: ware] by 3,600 miles;[I] receive from you [C: jun J: kimi] twenty-five poems.14

The two-poled formula of me and you establishes a rhetorical structurefor male friendship in the complete poem, even though it is not evident inthe excerpted couplet. Finally, Bo Ju-yis stance as the poetic subject inpoem 734 parallels his stance in the preceding poem, number 733. Bothpoems address absent friends and become enactments of the very friend-ship Bo Ju-yi is writing about. Whether recalling the seasons and ChiefMusician Yin or admiring the poems of Supernumerary Zhang the Eigh-teenth, Bo Ju-yis poems stand as proof of the power of poetry to unite dis-tant friends, so that friendship becomes simultaneously the topic of thepoems and what is enacted in them. The poems stand as powerful expres-sions of the hope that friendship can transcend the gulf of time and spacethat divides the men.

In former years you looked at me directlypupils dark;now, I meet you, and I find your hair has turned to white! Xu Hun, poem 735

The signs of aging we observe in a longtime friend can bring on starkemotions of pity and affection. This is the sentiment expressed beautifullyin poem 735 by Xu Hun. As with Bo Ju-yis preceding two verses, the coupletis taken from a longer shi and presents another perspective on friendship.The poem differs from them, however, in that it contains no explicit word

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designating the person of the friend, neither C: you J: tomo found in poem733 nor C: jiao J: k found in poem 734. Instead, friendship is establishedsolely with the pronoun pair me and you. What makes Xu Huns use ofthe two-poled rhetorical structure stand out is the way he links the pair ofpronouns to two other sets of pairs contrasting time (past versus present)and color (dark versus white).

Time is divided in the poem between former years and now. Thepoet remembers fondly that the two men have been friends since the friendseyes were dark, an image signifying the passionate gaze of youth. The poethimself was the object of this long, dark gaze. Now the poet points out withsurprise and perhaps amusement that his friends hair has turned whitewith age. The use of contrasting colors in reference to the eyes and the hairis linked to the poems chronological structure: dark eyes represent youthand the past, while white hair represents old age and the present. Anotherimplied contrast is that time may have transformed the youthful friendsinto old men, but their friendship defies the ravages of time. Bo Ju-yis pre-ceding two couplets located the realization of friendship in the returningseasons (no. 733) and in the reading of a friends poems (no. 734), but in XuHuns couplet the realization of friendship is triggered visually by theencounter with the face of the friend. The three couplets trace a trajectory ofperception from the abstract to the concrete: from bodily absence (no. 733)to presence in surrogate form (through letters and poems, no. 734), to bod-ily presence (no. 735).

In each of the couplets by Bo Ju-yi and Xu Hun, the durability andongoingness of friendship are its implicit subject: despite separation, friend-ship survives (no. 733); through a lifelong exchange of letters and poems,friendship thrives (no. 734); in the face of old age, the memory of youthfulfriendship revives and sustains itself (no. 735). This ability of friendship tooffer hope of transcending the obstacles of time and distance is the focus ofthe next two poems in the sequence, both of which are kanshi, Chinese cou-plets composed by Heian noblemen.

Kuai-chi Magistrate Hsiao, on passing the ancient shrine, forged a friendship [C: jiao J: k] across eras;

Vice Director Chang, in valuing fresh talent, promoted it and formed a friendship [C: you J: tomo] transcending age.

Oe no Asatsuna, poem 736

Can friendships be forged between men of vastly different ages andtimes? This seems to be the question implicit in this couplet, which argues

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that male friendships can indeed transcend time. Citing examples fromChinese histories, the poet presents an example of a friendship formedbetween an older man and a younger one, and between a man and a histor-ical figure he admired. The couplet is by the Heian courtier e no Asatsuna(887957) and is atypical in form, in that it contains thirteen graphs per lineinstead of the usual seven. The poem is especially interesting in the contextof the section on Friends because it is purely descriptive and not anavowal of fondness between two friends, as seen in the couplets by Bo Ju-yiand Xu Hun. For that reason, it is arguably the first poem to treat friendshipas an abstraction. The poem describes two classical examples taken fromthe Chen shu (History of Chen) that illustrate the ability of friendship totranscend barriers that time imposes between men. A testament to Asatsu-nas erudition, the poem befits his reputation as an expert in the Chineseclassics.

The first verse of the couplet refers to an incident in the biography ofXiao Yun, who offered a sacrifice at the grave of Ji Zha, a famous sage-states-man from the Spring and Autumn Period, and whom he admired greatly.According to the poems conceit, this act forged a connection between themen and thereby proved that friendship is indeed possible between men ofsimilar convictions even if they lived in different historical eras. The secondstanza refers to another incident from the History of Chen recorded in thebiography of Jiang Zong. A Tang official named Zhang Zuan recognizedJiang Zongs talent and supported his advancement at court. AlthoughZhang was considerably his senior, the two men became friends. The poempresents their cross-generational friendship as further evidence of theremarkable ability of friendship to link two men across barriers of age andstatus. The poet, e no Asatsuna, implies that the ability of men of differentgenerations to experience friendship is a positive attribute, but when theincident in the History of Chen is looked at in context, it may well be thatJiang Zongs biographer meant the statement as a criticism. Certainly, cross-generational friendships could have violated a sense of decorum and repre-sented a breakdown of the strict hierarchies of status that prevailed at court.Nevertheless, the Japanese poet has clearly chosen not to view the friend-ship between Jiang Zong and Zhang Zuan in a negative light, but insteadregards it as a positive example of the ability of friendship to transcend thelimitations on masculine intimacy imposed by hierarchical constraints andgenerational divisions.

The vocabulary of friendship in poem 736 is distinctive. First, the cou-plet lacks the formulaic rhetorical structure of male friendship built around

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the pronouns you and I, as observed in the couplets by Bo Ju-yi and XuHun. Instead, this poem employs the two words for friend in a strict par-allel structure: C: jiao J: k at the end of the first line, and C: you J: tomo at theend of the second line. Through the device of parallel graphic cognates forfriend, the poet more than compensates for the lack of any pronominaltwo-poled structure in the poem. Asatsunas poem is clearly an eloquent anderudite description of friendship. Is it meant simply as a poem in generalpraise of friendship? Or is it grounded in Asatsunas personal experienceand meant to justify or explain the poets own experience of friendship?Lacking any contextual information regarding the poems composition inthe form of a headnote, none of these questions can be answered conclu-sively. What the poem suggests, however, is that male friendship was under-stood by the Heian courtier as possessing historical precedent and a histori-cal context that could be deduced from Chinese histories, and that Japanesepoets of kanshi such as Asatsuna looked to textual formulations of friend-ship in those histories as relevant to their experience of friendship in Heiancourt culture. By extension, whatever obstacles to friendship that existedbetween noblemen of different generations might be mediatedand poten-tially overcomeby their reading of friendship in Chinese histories. Thepoem suggests that Asatsuna and perhaps others manipulated the author-ity imputed in Chinese texts by the wa-kan assemblage for their own pur-poses, even to the extent of redrawing the boundaries of what sorts offriendships were considered acceptable at the Heian court. This manipula-tion of Chinese historical precedent to critique contemporary Heian courtculture was a potent by-product of the wa-kan system of bilingual and bicul-tural literacy, and it probably served in this case to liberate the Heian noble-man in his pursuit and appreciation of friendship with like-minded men ofhis class.

Descendant of Pei of the Bureau of DocumentsI have heard of you for years!

Orphan of the attendant gentleman of the Ministry of Ritesyou see me for the first time.

Sugawara no Atsushige, poem 737

Male friendship in poem 737 arises in an intercultural, interlingualsetting. Two aristocrats from different courts, one Heian and the other inthe kingdom of Bo-hai (between China and Korea), meet in their officialcapacities during an embassy to Heian, and the poet asserts that they are

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friends. The poem was written by Sugawara no Atsushige (d. 926) to wel-come to the Heian capital the son of his fathers friend, a diplomat namedPei. The couplet consists of two lines of seven graphs each, identical inform to the couplets by Bo Ju-yi and Xu Hun seen earlier. Atsushiges father,Sugawara no Michizane,15 had met the elder Pei when he arrived on anearlier embassy to Heian in 883, and now the sons meet in similar circum-stances during another Bo-hai embassy to Heian in 908.16 When the poetaddresses the envoy as descendant of Pei and refers to himself as orphanof the Minister of Rites, he is affirming that friendship is so transcendentand durable that it can be passed down from fathers to sons. That is why thepoet can claim that even though they see each other for the first time, theyhave known each other for years. Friendship is again transcendent, in thiscase because it is capable of being passed down from one generation tothe next.

The appearance of the pronouns you and I indicates that Atsu-shige has chosen to rely on the crucial two-poled structure for denotingfriendship in the poem. The poem revolves around a contradiction: the twomen have in a sense known each other all their lives (I have heard of youfor years), even though they have never met (you see me for the firsttime). Their knowledge of each other is derivative or secondhand, a resultof their fathers friendship. The friendship of their fathers, officers of theHeian and Bo-hai courts, originally crossed the boundaries of their respec-tive homelands, and now it crosses the generations to link the sons.

kimi to ware ikanaru koto wo chigirikemu mukashi no yo koso shiramahoshikere

You and IWhat promises must we have madeIn a former life?How I would like to know! 17

Unknown poet, poem 738

This anonymous poem is the first waka in the Friends sequence, andthe first time that the two-poled rhetorical structure appears in the Yamatolanguage to denote male friendship, in the dramatic opening line, kimi toware (you and I). The rhetorical structure mediates the linguistic shiftfrom the preceding five poems in Chinese verse to Japanese song, therebyrevealing rhetorical consistency in the face of linguistic difference. Thepoem draws on the Buddhist concepts of karma and past lives when it asks,What promises must we have made in a former life? Friendship in this lifeis conceptualized as a product of vows exchanged in former lives, and the

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karmic bond explains the intensity of the present friendship in this life. Inthe poetic vocabulary of waka, exchanging vows usually refers to vows ofsexual love between a man and a woman. Frequently, the idea that bonds oflove date from a previous life is drawn upon to help make sense of a rela-tionship that is fraught with unusual peril or emotional suffering, for exam-ple, if it involves a man and a woman of very different social status. In fact,the poem appears in Shin senzai sh (1359, New collection of Japanese poemsof a thousand years) as a poem on Love (koi), and it may have been com-posed originally as part of a poetry contest at court under the assigned topicof Frustrated Love (awanu koi).18 Certainly, the poem would not be out ofplace in a collection of love poems, judging from its conventional focus onthe exchange of vows (chigirikemu) and its reference to bonds from a formerlife (mukashi no yo).

The decisive factor in Kints appropriation of the poem into thesequence of poems on male friendship in Poems to Sing must have been theopening phrase, kimi to ware (you and I). For Kint, who had been workingthus far in the sequence exclusively within the masculine domain of Chineseverse, his encounter with the native words kimi to ware in this Japanese poemwould have rhetorically signified friendship between men. Japanese poetrymerges seamlessly with the preceding Chinese verses. That Chinese verses(both shi and kanshi) were being read in interpretive reading fashion at theHeian court probably explains why the Chinese graphs for you and Irang in Kints ear as an evocation of male friendship. The aura of masculin-ity inherent in the two-poled rhetorical structure in the poems on Friendsserved to disrupt Kints ability to read poem 738 as a love poem between aman and a woman. Transformed in its new context, the Japanese poemunmistakably and intriguingly becomes a poem about male friendship.Kints appropriation of the poem is nothing less than brilliant.

Some scholars argue that Kints use of poem 738 in the context offriendship was a mistake or was forced on him by a dearth of waka on thetheme of male friendship. Certainly, the erotic intensity of the poetic dic-tion and the reference to previous lives point powerfully to erotic love bytraditional standards, and on that basis some commentators question itsdesignation by Kint as a poem on male friendship. Kaneko and Emi, forexample, note that although [this poem] is placed in the section onFriends, it is clearly a statement about feelings of love between a man anda woman.19 Donald Keene even suggests that Kint had little choice but toappropriate the poem because there were few candidates on the topic offriendship in the waka repertoire: Friendship, a frequent theme of Chinese


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poetry, is so rarely described in waka poetry that one of two waka on thetheme (following five kanshi) is actually a love poem appropriated for thepurpose, faute de mieux.20 sone and Horiuchi, cited by Keene, simplysay that the poems sentiments are recast in the context of poems on friend-shipnot inappropriatelyas an expression of feelings of friendship (kyno j).21 Likewise, Kawaguchi Hisao states, It is originally a poem abouterotic love between a man and woman (danjo renai), but here it is taken asbeing about feelings of friendship (ky no j).22 Both opinions appear toaccept one implication of Kints use of the poem in Poems to Sing, namely,that the poems meaning could legitimately be reconceptualized through itsnew context in the poetic sequence of poems on friendship.

There are numerous examples suggesting that the poetic vocabularyin waka for expressing feelings of love and friendship was identical. Book 8of the Kokinsh consists of Songs of Parting (ribetsu no uta). Some are bymale courtiers and addressed to their friends, and at the level of dictionthey are indistinguishable from love poems. Kokinsh poem 378, for exam-ple, uses the phrase kayou kokoro (loving heart) to describe the intimateconnection between the poet and his friend:

kumoi ni mo kayou kokoro no okureneba wakaru to hito ni miyu bakari narino matter how great / a distance you may travel, / my loving heart will / never

lag behind though it / may seem to have been parted 23

Even poetic place-names typically linked with erotic love, such as saka(Meeting Hill), are employed in expressions of friendship between menin the Songs of Parting. Kokinsh poem 390, was composed by Ki no Tsu-rayuki, the headnote states, while crossing saka when seeing off Fuji-wara no Koreoka, who was taking up the post of Vice-Governor ofMusashi.

katsu koete wakare mo yuku ka saka wa hitodanome naru na ni koso arikere

while still he crosses / over and journeys onward / leaving me behind, / yourtitle saka / Meeting Hillis just a name 24

Another poem of friendship that is indistinguishable from a love poem isKokinsh poem 399, by shikchi no Mitsune. It expresses feelings of long-ing for a Prince he has just met. The headnote reads, Composed on partingfrom Prince Kanemi after first conversing with him.

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wakaruredo ureshiku mo aru ka koyoi yori ai minu yori nani o koimashialthough we part / I am filled with happiness / for now I wonder / whom I

might have thought I loved / before we two met tonight 25

Similarly, poems expressing feelings of friendship appear in the sections onTravel (book 9) and Grief (book 16) in the Kokinsh.

The phrase kimi to ware (you and I) was not exclusive to men in thediction of waka, either. There are several examples from both imperialanthologies and private collections that show it being used to denote amale/female pair. Gosen sh (ca. 951, Collection of later selections of Japa-nese poems) contains the first example of the phrase kimi to ware in a poemin an imperially commissioned anthology.

kimi to ware imose no yama mo aki kureba iro kawarinuru mono ni zo arikeru

You and Iwhen autumn comes to Mt. Imose [husband and wife], even therecan we observe that the colors have changed.26

In the text of this poem, you and I refers to a husband and wife, althoughit is not obvious who is addressing whom. Typically, it is the role of thefemale figure in a waka to make accusations that a mans feelings havechanged (changing colors), but whether the poem follows type is difficultto say. Moreover, it was not uncommon for male poets to compose accusa-tory poems, taking on the female perspective and voice, in uta-awase (poemmatching) contests held at court, which meant that the sex of the poet didnot necessarily coincide with the gendered viewpoint expressed in a poem.

A variant text of the imperial anthology Gyokuy sh (13121313, Col-lection of jeweled leaves) contains a kimi to ware poem attributed to thefamed poetess of love, Ono no Komachi (fl. ca. 833857).

yo no naka wa asukagawa ni mo naraba nare kimi to ware to ga naka shi taezu wa

Should the world [of love] be the River Asuka, so be it; the bond between youand me shall never end.27

The River Asuka was a poetic place-name designating fickleness on thebasis of the streams unpredictable flow. The poem appears to be an asser-tion of the steadfastness of love between you and me, presumably in thevoice of a female poet addressed to her male lover. These two examples are


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the only to appear in the imperial anthologies with the phrases kimi to ware(five syllables) or kimi to ware to ga (seven syllables).

However, the words kimi and ware appear in separate lines in numer-ous waka, beginning with the first imperial anthology, the Kokinsh, therebyproviding evidence that the two-poled structure of you and I was a com-mon rhetorical device in waka about male and female lovers. A famousexample in the Kokinsh is poem 645, which also appears in the Ise mono-gatari (Tale of Ise), episode 69. The poet is designated as unknown in theKokinsh, but a headnote to the poem contradicts the anonymous designa-tion and identifies the writer as Ise no Saig, the unmarried Princessappointed to serve at the Ise Shrine and usually identified as Princess Ten-shi (Yasuko, d. 913), who held that office from 859 to 876 during the reign ofEmperor Seiwa. The identification is historically unreliable, and HelenMcCullough is probably correct in calling it a romantic myth.28 The Kokin-sh entry reads:

Once, when Narihira was in Ise Province, he had a secret tryst with the Vir-gin of the Shrine. The next morning, as he was worrying about having noone to carry a message to her, this poem arrived from her.

kimi ya koshi ware ya yukiken omezu yume ka utsutsu ka nete ka samete ka

did you come to me / or did I go to youI / cannot now recall / was it dream or reality / was I sleeping or awake 29

The structure of you and I as discrete entities that form a male-female pair is evoked powerfully here. The female poets imagination (didyou come to me or did I go to you?) that makes the two lovers equally mobilepartners probably reflects the poets yearning for a mobility that she did notin fact possess. In the ninth century when the poem was composed, a high-born woman such as Ise no Saig could rarely have traveled on her own toNarihiras bed for a night of lovemaking. Certainly by mid-Heian the idea ofcoming and going freely to her lover would have been in the realm of fan-tasy for a woman of exalted rank. The poems power derives from the poetsexpression of her wish that, rather than waiting passively for her lovers vis-its as dictated by the Heian social order, she could in fact have visited himfreely at a time of her own choosing, in the manner of a male friend.

tare wo kamo shiru hito ni semu Takasago no matsu mo mukashi no tomo naranaku ni

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Who may I call my comrade now? For even the aged pines at TakasagoCannot replace the friends of yore. Fujiwara no Okikaze, poem 739

The final poem in the section on Friends tells us that death is the oneobstacle friendship cannot overcome. It is a poem of grief by Fujiwara noOkikaze (early tenth century) from book 17 (Miscellaneous Songs) of theKokinsh. In some ways, it can be understood to contradict the preceding sixpoems in the section, all of which define friendship in terms of its ability totranscend the obstacles of time, distance, and history. The poem suggeststhat mortality is the one obstacle that cannot be surmounted and that evenfriendship is helpless against it. Put differently, the poem addresses theproblem faced by the surviving friend, whose feelings of friendship mayendure when the friend who was the object of those feelings has passed on.The poem acknowledges an ultimate human truth: that death takes ourfriends and leaves us bereft. The poems imagery derives from a poetic leg-end of twin pine trees standing for a thousand years at Takasago along thecoast of Japans Inland Sea. The longevity of the pair of pines is contrasted tothe mortality of the poet and his friend, parted in death. The Takasago pinessurvive together seemingly unscathed by the passage of years, but theirimage of constancy brings no comfort to the poet; instead, their existenceonly accentuates the poets grief, for they force him to recognize that he isnow alone and that nothing can replace the lost friend.

The poem defines what is a friend in terms of knowing (shiru). Afriend is, above all, someone I know and who in turn knows me. The lineWho may I call my comrade now? in English translation captures nicelythe ambiguity in the original, for the phrase shiru hito in Japanese impliesboth directions of knowing; it is the person [I] know and also the personwho knows [me]. This emphasis on knowingor being knownis rem-iniscent of the legendary friends of the Broken Strings, Bo Ya and ZhongZiqi. Recall that Bo Ya broke the strings of his zither when his friend diedbecause there was no one else in the world who knew his sounds. Whena man loses his male soul mate, he calls out in grief, Who may I call mycomrade now? This cry involves two dimensions of loss: the loss of the per-son whose soul the surviving friend comprehended most deeply, and theloss of the person who comprehended the surviving friend most deeply. Thetwin dimensions of knowing and being known are central to the poemsconception of male friendship and permeate the spirit of the poem.

Poem 739 can be thought of as transitional in nature. Coming at the


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end of the section on Friends, it anticipates the next section, whichaddresses the topic of Nostalgia for Men of the Past (kaiky). In total, thereare ten poems in the section on Nostalgia for Men of the Past, and the con-nection to male friendship gets increasingly tenuous as the sequence pro-gresses. What is important to realize is that Kint compiled the poems onfriendship in Poems to Sing with exquisite attention to subtleties of senti-ment. In making two separate categories for poems of Friendship andpoems of Nostalgia for Men of the Past, Kint makes an explicit distinc-tion between the emotional experience of friendship and nostalgia thatis highly instructive for understanding the parameters of male friendship inthe work. The central figure in the sequence of poems on friendship is thefriend (C: jiao J: k or C: you J: tomo). In the poems on nostalgia for menof the past, the central figure changes to the man of the past (C: gurenJ: kojin), who may be living or dead. Men of the past are people who aretransformed by separation, exile, death, or simply the passage of time intothose whom the poetic subject remembers with nostalgia in his verses.Among them are numbered all manner of men with whom the poet mayhave consorted in former days, including friends, neighbors, colleagues atwork, and cohorts in other endeavors. The man of the past is thus a figurecreated from the poets recollection of the people he had contact with in for-mer times. To the extent that the friend is also a figure of remembrance,there is a great deal of resonance between the idea of the friend and theman of the past. If we look closely at the poems by Bo Ju-yi in other sectionsin Poems to Sing, we discover that he uses the word men of the past in hispoetic vocabulary to refer to past acquaintances posthumously. This is par-ticularly evident in Bo Ju-yis poems of mourning for deceased acquain-tances, which frequently retain the rhetorical structure of friendship in thepronoun pair you and I.

Beneath the yellow earth, how could you know of me?With head of white hair, alone I think of you.All I can do is let my aged tearssprinkle these writings of yours, my friend. [C: guren J: kojin]Bo Ju-yi, poem 740

Poem 740 resonates in interesting ways with poem 739 immediatelypreceding it, even though they appear under different topics. Poem 739 isthe last poem in the section on Friends, and it begins with the phrase tarewo kamo shiru hito ni semu (Who may I call my comrade now? or, more lit-erally, Who can I say I know [or knows me] now?). As noted earlier, it is a

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cry of grief for a friend who has died. The first poem in Nostalgia for Menof the Past, number 740, similarly begins with a cry of grief, using the samewords who and know to express the poets sense of loss: shei zhi wo(Who knows me?). The three graphs would be read in Japanese using themethod of interpretive reading as tare ka ware wo shiramu (Who mightknow me?). The interpenetration of Chinese verse in number 740 and Japa-nese poem in number 739 is almost complete, both shi couplet and wakasharing identical diction and sentiment. As in poem 739, the object of thepoets grief in poem 740 is a specific individual who understood the surviv-ing friend intimately. The poet recalls him here when he is looking at hiswritingsprobably poems and letters addressed to the poet. Furthermore,poem 740 echoes the structure of poems in the section on Friends with itsuse of the pronoun pair you and I. When considered in this light, thesection on Nostalgia for Men of the Past clearly seems to be an extensionof the section on Friends, particularly in its depiction of grief that accom-panies the death of a friend. The theme is continued in another couplet byBo Ju-yi in the next verse, number 741.

Into the long night, you gentlemen have gone first;remaining yearshow many left to me?Autumn wind, tears covering my shirt:beneath the Springs, so many of my friends! [C: guren J: kojin]Bo Ju-yi, poem 741

While translated as friends, the word Bo Ju-yi uses here is againmen of the past (C: guren J: kojin), just as in poem 740. In spirit, however,the poems sentiment is quite different from that in poems 739 and 740,which addressed specific individuals. Here, the grief is plural, amounting tomany losses and compounded heartache because the poet has so manydead companions to mourn. Nevertheless, the poets grief for men of thepast is expressed once again within the idiom of friendship, employing thepronouns you and I for the second time in this section. The pronounpair makes the poem an intimate, personal address from the poet to thememory of his deceased friends.

To understand the importance of this two-poled pronoun structure forour ability to interpret the word men of the past as designating deceasedfriends, it is interesting to consider an example of a poem that uses men ofthe past but without the two pronouns. In the section on Living in Retire-ment (kankyo) in Poems to Sing, the word appears in its general sense ofmen of the past in the second line of the following couplet by Bo Ju-yi:


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When I open the cranes cage, I see the sovereign;as I unfold my book scrolls, I encounter old friends. [C: guren J: kojin]Bo Ju-yi, poem 616

Japanese commentators suggest that this poem expresses Bo Ju-yissentiments about his retirement, and in particular represents an attempt todescribe what brings him comfort in the loneliness he experiences in hisreclusion. The beauty and dignity of the crane make him feel he is in thepresence of a gentleman (C: junzi J: kunshi, here translated sovereign) whopossesses great refinement and elegance. Through his reading of scrollsbooks of poetry he feels the vivid presence of their authors, serving in hisretirement as companions from the past.30 The English translation glossesC: guren J: kojin as old friends, suggesting the possibility that the poetderives comfort in his retirement from reading the poetry of men who wereonce his actual intimates. More likely, however, old friends refers in gen-eral terms to authors from the past, whether known to the poet personallyor not, whose well-loved writings bring comfort to the poet in his old age.This more general reading of C: guren J: kojin as men of the [distant] pastrather than specific old friends may be preferable because the poem lacksthe necessary intimacy of address that is conveyed in the poetry of friend-ship by the pronoun pair you and I.

Friends in Context

It is worth turning to broader questions of how Kint organized topicswithin Poems to Sing as a whole, in order to see the larger context in whichthe seven poems on Friends appeared. As noted earlier, Poems to Sing isdivided into two volumes. Volume 1 consists of seasonal poems, while vol-ume 2 consists of poems on forty-eight miscellaneous topics. The poemsand prose segments in volume 2 are divided under topic headings in the fol-lowing list. I have indicated the number of poems under each topic, and thedistribution of Chinese shi couplets, kanshi, and wakafor example, 1-1-1 ifa topic contains three poems, one of each type.

1. Wind (397402; 6 poems: 1-3-2)2. Clouds (403409; 7 poems: 3-3-1)3. Clear Skies (410415; 6 poems: 1-4-1)4. Dawn (416420; 5 poems: 4-0-1)5. Pine Trees (421429; 9 poems: 2-4-3)6. Bamboo (430434; 5 poems: 2-2-1)

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7. Wild Grasses (435442; 8 poems: 2-3-3)8. Cranes (443453; 11 poems: 5-3-3)9. Gibbons (454461; 8 poems: 3-5-0)

10. Pipes and Strings (462469; 8 poems: 4-3-1)11. Letters (with Bequeathed Letters appended) (470478; 9 poems:

4-4-1)12. Wine (479490; 12 poems: 6-5-1)13. Mountains (491498; 8 poems: 2-3-3)14. Mountains and Waters (499509; 11 poems: 5-5-1)15. Bodies of Water (with Fishermen appended) (510520; 11 poems:

5-4-2)16. The Forbidden City (521527; 7 poems: 3-2-2)17. The Old Capital (528529; 2 poems: 0-1-1)18. Old Palaces (with Deserted Mansions appended) (530539;

10 poems: 2-5-3)19. Immortals (with Taoists and Hermits appended) (540553;

14 poems: 3-10-1)20. Mountain Residences (554564; 11 poems: 3-6-2)21. Farmers (565571; 7 poems: 1-3-3)22. Neighbors (572577; 6 poems: 2-3-1)23. Mountain Temples (578586; 9 poems: 2-5-2)24. Buddhist Matters (587603; 17 poems: 3-10-4)25. Monks (604612; 9 poems: 2-4-3)26. Living i

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