#sǒngsan sansǒng
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.
