#makura kotoba

Today is one of those happy occasions where I actually have a photo of the place mentioned in the poem(s) I am going to translate/discuss… and even with a somewhat appropriate natural phenomenon (fog trailing across the peak) - although no river in sight. Regardless, this is in the Yoshino Mountains in early April 2007, when I took a day trip down to see the famous cherries. Those cherries are not quite as famous yet in the period of MYS, so there’s nothing about them in these poems, which really only feature Yoshino due to it being the site of the cremation of the maiden for whom these elegies were composed. Nevertheless the cherry blossoms trees scattered throughout the mountain are what make Yoshino still a part of the cultural imaginary in Japan, and that was the inspiration for my trip (well that and Heian literature), but next time I’ll have to remember to think of the poor drowned Izumo no otome while I’m there (hopefully later this year!).

溺死出雲娘子火葬吉野時柿本朝臣人麻呂作歌二首

Two verses by Kakinomoto no Asomi Hitomaro, upon the cremation in Yoshino of Izumo no wotome, who had drowned

山際従 出雲兒等者 霧有哉 吉野山 嶺霏(雨＋微)

山の際ゆ出雲の子らは霧なれや吉野の山の嶺にたなびく

yama no ma yu/idumo no kora pa/kiri nare ya/yosino no yama no/mine ni tanabiku

From amongst the mountains/the girl from Izumo/is she now the mist?/that now on Mt Yoshino/trails across the peak?

八雲刺 出雲子等 黒髪者 吉野川 奥名豆颯

八雲さす出雲の子らが黒髪は吉野の川の沖になづさふ

yakumo sasu/idumo no kora ga/kurokami pa/yosino no kapa no/oki ni nadusapu

Myriad clouds thrust into the sky/the girl from Izumo/her black tresses/now float about in the pools/of the Yoshino river.

This is the first drowned maiden verse that I know of in MYS, although it doesn’t give much of a story other than to tell us that Hitomaro is composing at the funeral of a girl who drowned. But elegies for drowned maidens, and the tales of drowned maidens, are a persistent theme throughout the collection, and there seems to have been a certain aesthetic appeal to them, for they persist into Heian literature, albeit in different forms and generally more fleshed out (Unai no otome reappears in Yamato monogatari, and then you have Ukihime of the Genji Uji chapters, who is perhaps the most famous - although she survives). Women who cast themselves into the river, at the mercy of the tide, when faced with no other options, seem to have been a literary trope, but probably more than that - this was probably the “elegant”/”appropriate” way for a woman to die, when she needed to. Usually, this is portrayed as her choice - she chooses to seize control of her own fate and cast herself into the water; the fact that her death is later aestheticized by poets is a separate matter. She certainly doesn’t do it for them. In most cases that I know of where female suicide is aestheticized, however, it is because she is faced with an impossible situation in life, one which usually involves having to choose between two men and being unable to do so (not because she is conflicted, necessarily, but moreso because choosing one over the other or vice versa will result in negative repercussions beyond merely a scorned suitor - such as causing conflict within one’s group/village, or with another family/group/village). Her choice to sacrifice herself to avoid the negative ripples that might result from acting in life, is seen as beautiful - and being swept away by the waves, helpless, is somehow a method of death befitting that sort of sacrifice - admittedly, of course, this is all in the view of the male poets of the age. I am in no way endorsing this, mind you - simply noting this is a literary trope common from this time. 

Here we don’t really get any background on Izumo no otome, other than that the manner in which she died was drowning, and she did so in the Yoshino River (information which we can garner from the second poem). We know she is then cremated on Mt. Yoshino, where Hitomaro imagines that the mist trailing over the peak is the smoke from her pyre (and therefore her, herself - a very similar notion with poem #428 in my previous post - girl = smoke from her fire = mist, with no real distinction or leaps of logic in between necessary). The fact that the drowned maiden was already a trope at this time, however, allows us to extrapolate and guess her story in some way mirrors the others (indeed, there is actually no direct mention of her having taken her own life here - we might think it was an accidental death, if it were not for the whole literary matrix that had already formed around the figure of the drowned maiden). 

The first banka for this poor girl from Izumo (modern Shimane), who drowns so far away from home in Yoshino (near Fujiwara/Nara), begins with an epithet for Izumo (as does the second), “yama no ma yu.” Both “Yama no ma yu” and “Yakumo sasu” play on the name “Izumo” itself, which means “emerging clouds” - so in the first case, the clouds are emerging from between the peaks, and in the second, myriad clouds are being thrust up into the sky. This leads into the girl’s name, Izumo no otome (”The Izumo Maiden”), as we are not actually in Izumo here, but this use of makura kotoba, while decorating her name and honoring her home, also contrasts sharply with the “Yoshino” that appears in the fourth ku in both poems - and reminds us that the maiden was in a foreign land, far from home, when she died. Like the corpse that Hitomaro encounters by the wayside in poem #426, who had “forgotten his home” and died alone, far away, we get the sense that Izumo no otome died a lonely death. She’s just a young girl (”kora”) but tragically meets her end alone in a foreign land (politically, by this time, Izumo had been integrated into Yamato’s sphere of influence, but was likely still somewhat culturally distinct - as the Izumo no kuni fudoki would suggest - and her presence in the Nara area may have in fact been a political one, to cement ties been the Yamato center and Izumo - this would certainly explain a court poet such as Hitomaro’s presence at her funeral). Neither poem really seems to have a sense for who she is, either - Hitomaro certainly grieves for her death, but not really for her - it’s clear he probably didn’t know her personally, and there seems to be a good amount of distance as he’s viewing her (as smoke, and then as her hair floating in the river [good old synecdoche allowing him to talk about her corpse without actually talking about it]). He views her in much the same way he views the corpse from 426 - a body that has suffered a tragic end, but not necessarily anything more than that. 

These two poems are very similar in terms of both structure and content - they mourn the maiden from a detached, even aestheticized point of view. The makura kotoba they use for Izumo is different, but the second ku is identical between the two; the first sees her in the scenery, the smoke from her pyre becoming the mist trailing over the mountains - the second sees her as part of the scenery, and brings us back to the moment and circumstances of her death in a way quite unsettling for a funeral, but perhaps important, to remind those present of the circumstances of the tragedy, and probably perhaps to ensure that her death is seen as a beautiful one, despite the pathos of her end, so young and in a foreign, far off place. 

There are certainly more interesting banka out there - these are not the most exciting or emotive of even those I’ve looked at in volume 3 so far, but I think they are important for how they touch upon the drowned maiden motif and for how we begin to see death being aestheticized, rather than merely mourned, something which continues into Heian literature. Older banka focus on the biting pain of grief and the process of mourning - #427 is all about denial, for instance - but the step to making death beautiful, to making death some literary, is interesting. Perhaps this comes out of not knowing the girl in life, and merely composing as part of the ritual, as Hitomaro is doing here - it is hard to say - but there is certainly something beginning here. In any case, this poor girl of Izumo who died at one of the most picturesque places in Yamato… now I’ll think of her when I see the mist at Yoshino, for sure…

I may need to take a break from banka for my next post… too much death, too much pathos…

Been a little slow this week - but I’m gonna just keep going with my Vol 3 banka… This photo is quite old now (taken almost 10 years ago on Mt Lafayette in NH), but I still remember this hike vividly because I remembered how close the clouds seemed, and how they seemed to me to be rising out of, rather than hovering above, the mountains - and so naturally, this is the image that was called to mind by the following poem.

土形娘子火葬泊瀬山時柿本朝臣人麻呂作歌一首

One verse, composed by Kakinomoto no Hitomaro at the time of the cremation of Hijikata no wotome on Mt Hatsuse

隠口能 泊瀬山之 山際尓 伊佐夜歴雲者 妹鴨有牟

こもりくの初瀬の山の山の際にいさよふ雲は妹にかもあらむ

komoriku no/patuse no yama no/yama no ma ni/isayopu kumo pa/imo ni kamo aramu

Hidden away/is Mount Hatsuse – along the mountain ridge/those clouds that linger above: are they my beloved?

I apologize for the crazy syntax here (although I’m not really that apologetic), but the order of things is important here, as it is in most Japanese poetry (saving the verb to the end can make for some great twist endings!). It begins with a makura kotoba “komoriku no” meaning something along of the lines of “in an opening in a hidden spot,” i.e. hidden away, usually inferred to be among mountains - it does not only modify Hatsuse, but rather is used to set the stage for a number of place names that are fairly remote, hard to access, hidden among mountains and away from civilization/the capital. It thus serves a crucial function to set us in a particular remote locale, one that is literally “hidden away” from the rest of the world - a spot where the rituals of death and mourning can take place away from where they might pose the risk of pollution. After the introduction of Buddhism, and particularly following the cremation of Empress Jitō, who was the first royal to do so, cremation became increasingly popular as a funerary practice, and thus the mourning process was fundamentally altered – banka indeed at this point were a dying breed, being replaced by Buddhist ritual chanting appropriate to a Buddhist cremation rite. However, as we can see here, old practices didn’t just immediately give complete way to new: cremation was still taking place on mountains, far from settlement sites, where burial would have also primarily taken place (at least for the elite, whose tombs were usually positioned in some such remote locale, where the procession to the tomb site was also part of the ritual), and this would continue to generally be the case throughout the Heian period and beyond (even when done closer to the capital, the cremation was usually performed at a temple in the hills around the capital, rather than anywhere within the capital proper). Further, banka continued to be composed as part of the mourning ritual, at least through the end of the seventh and the beginning of the eighth centuries: it was perhaps re-styled as a way to process one’s feelings, as much as a ritual verse to placate the spirit itself, but the practice nevertheless persisted. And, indeed, as we can see here, cremation itself became a theme of such verses, perhaps because it was so new, and it figures more prominently into banka for such funerals than the actual burial process ever had (although there are definitely verses where the speaker proclaims his beloved to now be the mountain itself, or speaks of the tomb in some other way). In fact, here there is a touch of “elegant confusion” that seems to aestheticize the funeral pyre itself: the speaker cannot distinguish between the clouds rising above the mountain and the smoke from the pyre. 

This is a striking image, perhaps even moreso because the smoke from the pyre becomes such a prominent metaphor for the impermanence of human life in later literature; here, the clouds linger (”isayopu”), almost as if they are unable to continue on, almost as if they are reluctant to leave the site. We are presented, in the first four ku, with a long modifier, all leading up to “kumo” (clouds), and thus ultimately a single image - clouds that linger, waveringly, along the mountain ridge of Mt Hatsuse. It is only in the final ku that we are aware the speaker sees these as something other than clouds, but rather, as “imo” (beloved, referring to the “wotome”/maiden from the preface, who is probably not Hitomaro’s lover but rather just some maiden whose death he was of aware of/whose funeral he attended and was asked to compose a verse for, and thus he channeled the voice of someone who would have loved her as an “imo”). The ending is in fact a rhetorical question, wondering if the clouds could in fact be her, but the implied answer is positive–that they are. Note that they are not likened to the smoke from the pyre, but rather to her herself. She is the smoke, and she is the clouds, there is no distinction - this is strikingly reminiscent of earlier banka that saw the deceased as the tomb, making no real distinction between them (being with the tomb=being with the deceased; here, seeing smoke=seeing the deceased, not merely a sign of them, but actually them). It is possible to see this lack of distinction between sign and signifier as part of a more ritualistic consciousness present in this verse, and this is, of course, a valid interpretation; here, however, I tend to think there is a nascent awareness of the poetic value of blurring the lines between two different phenomena, all while clinging to a ritualistic worldview. In other words, there is not necessarily a need to posit a binary between ritual verse/aestheticized verse, but rather, creating the confusion, and aestheticizing the smoke of the pyre by transforming it into gently lingering clouds along the mountain ridge is a new way to integrate banka into the funerary rite, yielding the bulk of the placation of the spirit to Buddhist chants, but also creating a space where the deceased could be posited as part of the landscape (since there was no longer a permanent physical marker of their presence such a tomb), and thereby for their permanent absence to be denied/negated, a natural and important part of the mourning process for the living. Banka seemed to have filled this niche only for a short time longer, however, for the deceased’s own writings came to have a similar significance of a persistent presence even after their death, and banka mostly fell out of common practice after the age of MYS. However, in this particular moment, they were a way to bridge the gap between the old and new funerary rites, and maintain a way forward for the living to grieve even in the absence of any physical reminder of their loved one. 

It couldn’t have been easy to get used to the idea of cremation - and I think this poem shows us part of that process. There is no tomb to posit as the deceased maiden, so the clouds substitute for the smoke from her pyre - in that way, she continues to exist, and exist in a beautiful way. This was probably a comforting notion for those still bewildered by the change. In a way, it is not unlike how people handle the concept of cremation today - often they will spread the ashes of their loved ones at some spot, making them a part of the landscape, and in that way continue to feel their presence. It is a way to simultaneously acknowledge and negate the permanence of their death. Beautifully. 

Photo from Sǒngsan Sansǒng (Fortress Mountain Mountain Fortress - one of my favorite place names ever) in Haman, Kyǒngsangnam-do, South Korea

I am loving me some banka from MYS vol 3, so I am probably going to keep going through them for the foreseeable future. I think I have yet another side project in the works on “drowned maidens” as a trope in MYS and the late seventh/early eighth century aesthetic worldview, but I’ll maybe talk about that ore in a few more poems when it begins to come up (because elegies for such maidens were a popular poetic topic, particularly when you passed by one of their graves - and there’s a bunch of them in vol 3, as elsewhere in MYS). For now, this poem is fairly straightforward, but also betrays a desire for some sort of contact with people beyond death that is not so common in banka (there’s usually more of a resignation to the fact that such contact is impossible, and a focus on the tragedy of such impossibility). It also gives us a glimpse into the ritual world of the late seventh/early eighth century, as far as it connected with the landscape and travel (i.e., movement across said landscape).

田口廣麻呂死之時刑部垂麻呂作歌一首

At the time of Taguchi no HIromaro’s death, one verse composed by Osakabe no Tarimaro

百不足 八十隅坂尓 手向為者 過去人尓 盖相牟鴨

百足らず八十隈坂に手向けせば過ぎにし人にけだし逢はむかも

momo tarazu/yasokumasaka ni/tamuke seba/suginisi pito ni/kedasi apamu kamo

Not quite a hundred/on this Eighty-cornered Hill/were I to present an offering/might I be able to encounter/one who has passed on?

The euphemistic language “suginisi” for something akin to “passed on” to another realm, means that on the surface this does not necessarily need to be a poem about death, and death does not need to be spoken of directly - important, as I mentioned in my last post, in a world where death=pollution; given that words and the phenomena they signify were considered to be closely intertwined and the power of words evoked through incantation (poetry), this was likely a real concern. Banka (elegiac verse) do very rarely speak of death directly. Rather, the transition from the world of the living to that of the dead–the crossing of that border, so to speak–is aestheticized through the likening it to transitional spaces such as “journey” (see previous post), or here, a mountain. Mountains were considered the gateway to the land of the dead, as it was there that the dead were often buried. Not only that, however, but mountains connected the phenomenal world with that of the spirits/supernatural, which we see also come into play here. Mountains were always ritual sites; when on a journey, an offering needed to be presented on each mountain to show respect to the gods who occupied it/were it (really, both). Failing to do so could have disastrous consequences - see the Kojiki version of the Yamato Takeru no Mikoto tale. So here, up until the third ku, everything is straightforward–”tamuke” is what is expected on the top of the mountain (here, “saka” is “hill,” perhaps, but the ritual significance is the same). However, the place is not simply where Hiromaro is buried (although it may well be, thus inspiring the verse); its name “eighty-cornered hill” is important here. “Not quite a hundred” (momo tarazu) is a makura kotoba that leads into “yaso” (”eighty”) that makes up the first part of the place name Yasokumasaka “Eighty-Cornered Hill.” It is really just a set up/lead in (”dōshi” in Konishi Jin’ichi’s terminology) to “Yaso” since “yaso” is literally “eighty,” but in common parlance was really used just to mean “a lot.” So “Yasokumasaka” is really a “saka” (”hill”) with a lot of “kuma” (corners, turns, but could also mean dark/shady spots - spots where no light touches - the nuance of which could come into play with the idea that it is here that one might meet the spirits of the departed). In any event, there are a lot of twists, a lot of corners, a lot of dark spots on this particular hill, and so all the more opportunity/possibility that this might be a spot where the dead are passing by - or are stopping to rest, etc. I do sort of picture it more as there being a lot of intersecting paths, which I think makes sense for the top of a hill, and so this is an appropriate “meeting spot.” In any event, this intersection of all the “kuma,” in the poet’s formulation, is a place that might yield a “meeting” with a departed person, if one presents an “offering.” The editors of NKBZ propose this particular term “Yasokumazaka” might have actually referred to a mythical place thought to exist between the land of the living and the dead, but this is simple speculation - although certainly possible that this was such a designation, I think the idea here is that we are on a mountain, which is already such an “in-between space,” and the “limitless” corners/paths that intersect at this place present the possibility that spirits could be encountered as they passed through (”sugi” also, of course, in non-euphemistic context, meaning “to pass through”). The “kedasi” (”might”) of the fifth ku is also significant in this regard, because although it implies perhaps more “probability” than “possibility,” nevertheless betrays a certain uncertainty, as does the conditional “seba” of “tamuke seba” (”tamuke sureba” would be more of a definitive). Thus this place is a barrier between worlds, an “in-between space,” but the ability to cross that barrier/create a link between those two worlds is conditional, only possible and not assured. 

On the surface, this seems to just be describing ritual procedure/belief, and one does not really get a sense of Tarimaro’s grief over Hiromaro’s passing that we get from Hitomaro’s poem about the anonymous corpse (3:426, previous post). We can surmise from the poem that contact with a departed “spirit” was possible at such a transitional place while it was still “transitioning” to the other world - and this is consistent with what we otherwise know of funerary practices at the time (or rather, shortly before this time, perhaps), particularly the “mogari no miya,” where the body of the deceased was placed for an indefinite period (depending on status of the deceased) before being buried, so that the spirit might choose to return to it. Only after the spirit was thought to have transitioned to the land of the dead was the body finally interred, and later, cremated. Thus as the spirit made its way from the body to the land of the dead, it may have been possible to make contact with it, if one followed proper procedure. Elsewhere in banka it is rare to see a desire or an admission of possibility of contact with the deceased, as noted above - and here, I think it only works because the death is recent, and the spirit was thought not to have fully crossed the “barrier” yet. Not until the rise of Pure Land Buddhism among the aristocracy in the Heian period do we really begin to see a belief in the ability to “meet again” after death among people - it is not something that appears to have been prevalent in MYS times/before. Rather, here I think the “meeting” of the departed has more to do with the waiting period for/attempt to call the spirit back to the body. Making contact could with the spirit at “Yasokumasaka” could help remind it to return to the land of the living, before it crossed into the world of the dead. 

Tarimaro’s expression of grief is thus less overtly emotional, but is no less desperate, no less heart-wrenching - his reaction to the death of Hiromaro is not to mourn/grieve, but to deny its finality. This is of course, another very human way to handle such a tragedy, and something I’m sure a reader in any time can relate to. If only he could present an offering on Yasokumasaka, he might meet his dearly departed friend, and call him back to life. Then there would be no reason to grieve, no reason to mourn. This is a very different sort of banka - one I have yet to see elsewhere. Banka are usually all about the grieving process - and they may have a degree of denial - accusing the dead “how could you” and the like - but they rarely propose to do something about it. Of course, in the fifth ku’s “kedasi” there is the glimmer of realistic expectation that such a meeting may be beyond the possible, but on the whole it conveys an optimistic tone. It is not lamenting the impossibility by implying the possibility; “kedasi” indicates the speaker really believes he could meet Hiromaro’s departed spirit. Thus as readers/listeners to his verse we are keenly aware of the tragedy of his state of mind that denies the finality of death, and yet he is not - the pathos is not intrinsic to the verse in this case, but emerges in the reading process. 

My favorite part about reading MYS verse, as I have said before, is how potently I feel the emotions of the poets all these centuries later, and I think this particularly true with banka. Although the grief, the desperation of the speaker’s voice is often what moves me with these, here I can’t help but pity Tarimaro and his lack of acceptance. He can’t “move on,” so to speak, thinking that Hiromaro’s spirit has yet to “move on,” and so he takes comfort in the possibility of ritual to bridge the gap and avert the finality of death. Such ritual practice was probably already dated in his day, having been replaced by Buddhist funerary rites, and yet there is solace, there is comfort to be found in old traditions. Generations of ancestors believed in such things, and if one is desperate enough, unwilling to accept enough, then such rituals are perhaps the only relief. That too, again, is very relatable, even to me, 1300 years later..

Of course I don’t have a photo of “Yasokumasaka,” given that we don’t know if it is a real place/where it might have been, but I offer up this photo taken this summer on an ancient mountain fortress in Haman, southern Kyǒngsang province, South Korea, because there was this odd rock arrangement in a clearing - that really could be anything, but I imagined it was a ritual space, each stone serving as an altar for the spirits of the mountain and the surrounding landscape. It may not be the special “intersection” that Yasokumasaka was, but as with any mountain (and this one is actually more of a “saka”), is an “in-between” space, where one might just meet a spirit wandering, searching for the gateway to the world of the dead. 

So, continuing on in Vol. 3 of MYS, immediately following the chōka + hanka of my last post, there’s this Hitomaro poem… that is just… wow. The pathos, the immediacy of it–there’s nothing I love more than a poem that speaks across the centuries in profound ways like this one does. Of course I’m not gonna use a photo of a corpse… but I thought one of these ground-level shots from my Yongmunsan trip went will with the image here of a body, simply collapsed on the mountain path. Perhaps it’s almost the perspective of the corpse? 

MYS 3:426

柿本朝臣人麻呂見香具山屍悲慟作歌一首

One verse composed by Kakinomoto no Asomi Hitomaro, as he grieved deeply upon seeing a corpse on Kaguyama

草枕 羈宿尓 誰嬬可 國忘有 家待<真>國

草枕旅の宿りに誰が嬬か国忘れたる家待たまくに

kusamakura/tabi no yadori ni/ta ga tuma ka/kuni wasuretaru/ipe matamaku ni

Grass for a pillow/stopped for lodging on his journey/whose spouse might he be?/he has forgotten his home/while his household surely awaits his return…

The first thing that strikes me here is that the kotobagaki (preface) is absolutely essential to an understanding of the poem… knowing that Hitomaro is reciting this upon seeing a corpse makes the impact here considerably more profound - he is not composing on a fellow traveler, himself, or even a stag or the like… and so when he speaks of “having forgotten his home” [”kuni wasuretaru”] and “household surely awaits him” [”ipe matamaku”], we know there is an implicit negation of the possibility of that waiting being fulfilled, that forgetting being reversed. As a fellow traveler, Hitomaro cannot help but be drawn in to sympathize - after all, journeys were truly dangerous then, and there was real possibility of death (although, to be honest, Kaguyama is right near the capital so it’s a bit of an exaggeration to think of it as a true “journey,” but Hitomaro nevertheless evokes the word “tabi,” leading into it with the makura kotoba/epithet “kusamakura” grass for a pillow; in any case, dying away from home was probably more or less considered the equivalent of dying on a journey - and the move to create a connection between himself and the corpse necessitates an appeal to the idea of “journey” as that is what they have in common - both are/were travelers along the mountain path - and in any event, the poem here thrives on the contrast between “journey” and “home” and their incongruence). Hitomaro, seeing the corpse lying in the mountains, immediately equates him with a traveler having stopped for the night, but one that can never return home - because he has forgotten his “home” (’kuni’ is essentially referring to his home village) in laying to rest here. He cannot return, and yet Hitomaro imagines those at home awaiting him in vain - and he cannot help but see the utmost tragedy and pathos in not only his having died here, alone, unable to make it home, but the lack of knowledge of that reality of the people at home, who can only continue to wait. Moreso than the corpse himself, the “ipe” [household] is cast as pitiable here, as the “mu” suffix (plus +ku to nominalize) creates the sense of speculation on Hitomaro’s behalf but also indefinite continuation, from the present into the future. This man - he must be someone’s husband [”ta ga tuma”], Hitomaro reasons, and it is that someone who is to be pitied in this situation, for she shall remain unaware of his fate, forever waiting for his return - he, having forgotten her as he laid to rest away from home. 

Now, detractors like Ebersole would be sure to note here that there is more going on that Hitomaro simply empathizing with the plight of the anonymous corpse’s wife, and he would be right. There is certainly and necessarily a ritualistic aspect here - because corpses were considered polluting “kegare” - and were to be avoided at all costs - but death could simply not go unrecognized, either. And so it is perfectly reasonable to see Hitomaro’s poem as part of a ritual of placating the dead and the accompanying pollutant effect on the living of their presence - and also probably purifying the mountain, which was, after all, one of the three sacred mountains of the Asuka area/the Fujiwara capital. In other words, once noticed (見), the corpse needed to be dealt with in an appropriate manner, and this poem was probably part of that. However, the pathos infused in Hitomaro’s verse surely goes beyond mere ritual, in imagining him as not just a body but a person, who has left behind home and family in dying far away form them. This act of personifying the corpse and imagining those left behind is an astonishingly human reaction to death, one that even betrays a bit of self-insertion on the poet’s behalf, and goes above and beyond what was probably necessary for the purification of the precincts where he died. Hitomaro felt general emotion for this poor fellow, unable to make it home to die. How lonely for both he and his family - what a pathetic fate, one so illustrative of the cruel ways of the world. There may be no Buddhist message about the impermanence of human existence here yet, but there is a comparable almost existentialist subtext - where life and death alike are clearly “unfair” - having no inherent logic or reason to them. In any case, the emergence of a deep “pathos”  in Japanese poetry, where the poet empathically reacts to sights and sounds of the world, can be seen here even in what may have been arguably a ritual context. Emotion and empathy are indeed also a part of ritual, but there is something about the pathos that echoes in Hitomaro’s voice here that seems fresh, even new in its moment, and moves a reader even 1300 years later to tears over this poor man’s wife who would never see her husband again, he having died by the wayside, alone, on a journey.

IMG_1160 on Flickr.

I really should include the chōka for these two, but I find these two hanka quite powerful on their own:

樂浪之 思賀乃辛碕 雖幸有 大宮人之 船麻知兼津
楽浪の志賀の辛崎幸くあれど大宮人の舟待ちかねつ
Karasaki landing in Shiga, of the rippling waves, is the same as it ever was–but I cannot keep waiting for the ships of the great courtiers of the past (for they will never come).

左散難弥乃 志我能 大和太 與杼六友 昔人二 亦母相目八毛
楽浪の志賀の 大わだ淀むとも昔の人にまたも逢はめやも
Although a calm once again settles over the great cove at Shiga, of the rippling waves, could it ever hope to see those of the past once more?

These two hanka belong to Hitomaro’s famous chōka on the Ōmi capital, which I may include separately. Since these two verses deal specifically with the scenery of Lake Biwa, I wanted to pair them with a photo of the lake (although I unfortunately did not really get any great ones from near the Ōmi capital site that day, this will have to do). Both of these hanka focus on the people of the past, however, while the chōka is more interested in the architectural features - the site of the grand palace, not the people who inhabited/worked in it. Here, however, the perspective shifts to a more personal one (as if often the case with hanka) where Hitomaro looks out over the lake, and connects the landscape with the past (it is the same as before) but notes the lack of the people of the past within that landscape. This is a familiar contrast of the cyclical renewal and thus somewhat “permanent” quality of nature vs. the impermanence of human life/society. The Karasaki landing is unchanged, except for the courtiers who no longer draw their boats up to its shore (this is interesting actually - was this a way people commuted to Ōmi? It makes sense, to be sure, since it was right on the lake, but I never really thought about the logistics of it before…). The waters in the cove of Shiga once again stagnate - but they cannot hope to once again welcome those courtiers of the past into the harbor. The two hanka thus are very similar thematically, contrasting unchanging landscape vs. changing human history, highlighting the pathos arising out of the irreversibility of time, as I mentioned in the previous Ōmi post. In terms of language, there is a certain ambiguity here which merges the speaking subject/poet with the landscape, so that both are left waiting for the boats that never come, and both are left wondering if they could ever see the people of the past again. In the latter case, annotated versions seem to take the “mata” and assume the landscape is the subject of “could ever meet again” (ahame ya mo), but Hitomaro could have been around at that time - and even if he wasn’t, “mata” could really just be an emphatic. Given the ambiguity of the subject of “wait” (machi) in the previous hanka, I prefer to also accept it as being ambiguous here, with both poet and landscape being disappointed in their inability to expect a cyclical renewal on the human “side of things.” The resignation implicit in the endings of both “kanetsu” (could not continue) and “ahameyamo” (could ever meet), which both rhetorically imply the opposite, amplifies the pathos of the scene by suggesting, and then quickly negating, a return to/recovery of the lost past. What we are left with is loss and longing, pure nostalgia, as we focus on the landscape that would have been the backdrop for the efflorescence of the Ōmi court, which now has returned to merely “rippling waves.”

IMG_1113 on Flickr.

古 人尓和礼有哉 樂浪乃 故京乎 見者悲寸
古の人に我れあれや楽浪の古き都を見れば悲しき
Is it that I am in fact a person of old? When I gaze upon the old capital of the rippling waves, I am grieved…
Takechi no Furuhito, MYS 1-32
The best part about this poem, in my opinion, is that the poet is named 高市古人 - in other words, he has a pun on his own name within the poem. He asks if he is a person of old - while his name literally means “person of old.”
Outside of its cleverness in that respect, of course, this poem fits in with the other poems in Man'yoshu composed on viewing the ruins of the Ōmi capital, where the court of Emperor Tenchi once stood. Ōmi was known as the capital “of the rippling waves” (sasanami no), presumably because of its location on the shores of Lake Biwa, but the characters used to write this epithet (makura kotoba) are strangely the same as those for the Han commandery of Lelang (108 BCE - 313 CE) on the Korean peninsula - something I’ve always wondered about (“Sasanami” is not a natural reading for 樂浪; the choice of these characters for this epithet would seem to be deliberate; yet I’ve seen very little scholarship as yet that problematizes this orthography). In any case, due to the politically sensitive nature of talking about Tenchi and his reign during the so-called Tenmu dynasty (the Jinshin War of 672 having basically been a war of succession in which Tenmu, Tenchi’s brother, beat out Ōtomo, Tenchi’s son), it would seem that one of the only ways in which it was acceptable to express regret over the loss of the culture of the Ōmi court (known for its great “literariness) was through nostalgic reflections at the site of the former capital. This was decidedly "apolitical,” at least officially, in that it was merely the pathos of the site, the irreversibility of time and the irrecoverability of what was once there, that is the topos of the poem. Of course, it is possible to read this and other poems like it (like that of Hitomaro) as subversively political, but given that Furuhito, like Hitomaro, was also likely a court poet, this may in fact be one of the ways in which the era of the Ōmi court was “officially” memorialized. Since Tenchi’s children and grandchildren were also important as consorts and other imperial family members even after Tenmu’s takeover, Tenchi couldn’t simply be “swept aside” in official history, but neither could the reason the Ōmi capital fell be alluded to directly - thus the way of coping with this tragic history was through nostalgia and the sense of “aware” - pathos - conjured up by the inability to recover the lost past. This avoided directly addressing the politically sensitive Jinshin War as a rupture, while simultaneously allowing the ancestral members of the imperial family and the place at which they resided to be properly remembered.

This photo is from the Ōmi capital site as it looks today. The ruins that have been excavated are scattered about a residential neighborhood in Nishikori, Ōtsu, Shiga prefecture, on the shores of Lake Biwa. I recently had a chance to go there on a research trip to Japan. The condition of the memorials at the ruins (having been erected in the 80s/90s, many of the placards are faded and illegible) is somehow fitting with the atmosphere of pathos that permeates the MYS verses on the Ōmi capital: abandoned, overlooked, forgotten - yet still worthy of being remembered. The sites are many just empty fields, such as this, with post-holes marked by wooden stumps, but little else. Still, one must be grateful for the preservation of the sites at all, considering the density of houses in the surrounding neighborhood - they might just as well have been swallowed by residential development. Thus there is lingering desire to memorialize the site of Tenchi’s capital, today just as there was in the early eighth century, from when Furuhito’s verse likely dates.