EA 170 Wk2a Outline

EA 170 Week 2a Outline

I. Three main points of focus in the next two weeks:

A. The marriage system and politics in real life and how it is represented in stories such as Tale of Genji

B. The literary role of jealousy and demonic possession as a response to marriage system and politics

C. Ideals of masculine and feminine in Kagero Diary, Tale of Genji and the Heian period in general.

II. The Kagero Diary (Kagero nikki, AKA Gossamer Years)

A. Main Characters

1. Unnamed narrator/implied author: referred to now as "Michitsuna's mother" (Michitsuna no haha)

2. Fujiwara Kaneie (929-990); one of the most powerful men of his generation.

3. Kaneie's principal wife, Tokihime. Not referred to by name here, but we know her name was Fujiwara no Tokihime because she became the grandmother of two emperors (Sanjo and Ichijo) and so was included in imperial genealogies. Poetry exchanges on pp. 75 and 79.

a. Note: Michinaga, one of Kaneie's sons by Tokihime, was the patron of Murasaki Shikibu, author of Tale of Genji

4. The woman in the Machi Alley

B. Marriage

1. What is the marriage pattern in Kagero Diary?

2. Why might Kaneie have married the narrator?

3. Why might she have married him, if it meant becoming the lower-ranking "2nd wife"?

4. Why are women in this period so jealous?

5. How does the narrator feel about Tokihime, the woman who becomes Kaneie's principal wife (with three sons, two daughters)?

6. How does she feel about the woman in Machi Alley? Why so different?

C. Intro to Japanese waka poetry

1. format: 31 syllables in five lines of 5-7-5-7-7

2. Imagery and language

a. allegorical imagery

1) dew = tears, instability, evanescence

2) oak = stability, protection

b. lots of puns, particularly on names: Osaka (“Meeting Slope”) Barrier; Nakoso (“not this way”) Barrier

eg. p. 61

After awhile, again from him:

How is it that this
Meeting Slope's barrier
seems so very close
yet as I struggle to cross,
I just spend my days in sorrow.

In return:

I would have you know
more difficult than Meeting Slope
where you struggle so
is the barrier I have heard of,
Nakaso, "Come not this way."

Seidensticker version p. 35

And again, somewhat later, he wrote:

"The Barrier of Osaka, the gate to pleasant meetings,
Is so very near and yet, alas, so difficult to cross."

I answered with a similar word play:

"Well may you speak of Osaka, which summons and forbids.
But what of famous Nakoso, that Barrier “Come-not-my-way?"⁶

2. How is waka poetry useful for expressing emotions?

a. anti-hierarchical

b. indirect

3. How does it restrict expression?

D. How is poetry used to develop the relationship?

“Shall I liken you to the noiseless waterfall of Yamashiro? And when, I wonder, do we come to the pleasanter shallows?”

eg. 2 p. 59

When I sedn back, "I will answer soon," he sends this so quickly that I wonder if he was in his right mind:

No one can know/maybe now? maybe now?/ The longer I wait/without hearing ack from you/ the more wretched I become

When this arrived, my mother said, "How awful, hadn't you better be a bit more mature about this and send him a reply. So, I had a suitable person write a suitable reply. Even with that, he was genuinely happy and corresponded abundantly.

Seidensticker p. 34:

I continued to turn his messengers back with promises that I would answer later, until my mother was aroused to action by this piece of doggerel:

“Perhaps now, perhaps now, I whisper to myself. But you do not answer. I am left desolate.”

“You cannot continue to ignore such a man,” she said, “You must stop being so kittenish.”

And so I had one of my ladies compose a poem, suitable but hardly warm, and even at this secondhand reply he seemed delighted. I was besieged with poems.

eg. 3

p. 61

and so on, these serious missives went back and forth until--what kind of morning was it?

"Waiting the while/until evening flows in/flowing tears enough/to fill the Oi River/where the logs flow down."

My reply

"Brooding on many things/dusk falls on Oi River/where the logs flow/without being aware of it/my tears flow and fall"

Then again, on about the third morning:

"White light before dawn/rising in the sky....we parted,/not understanding,/strangely, I felt as if I died/fading with the morning dew"

My reply:

"With no permanence,/fading with the morning dew/tehn waht about me/left to rely in vain/on such a fleeting thing?"

Seidensticker p. 35:

And so the letters went, and then one morning--when might it have been?—he sent me this verse:

“Like the River Oi awaiting a flow of logs, my tears pour on as I await the eve.”

And I answered:

“Countless as the logs upon the Oi are my misgivings; and, try though I may to stop them, my tears outflow the river."

Two mornings later came another poem:

“I was swept away like the dew in the rising sun; and my
heart seemed to die within me.”

Again my answer:

“Powerless as the dew—how wretched that must be. But think of me, more
feeble yet, made to rely on the dew!"

E. What seems to be the convention for the feminine and masculine position in Heian courtship as expressed in these poems?

1. masculine:

2. feminine:

F. The effects of the marriage system on the narrator

1. What is the effect of the duolocal living relationship on the author?

a. Emotions:

2. How does she express her feelings?

3. Do you think this is useful behavior?

4. How does Kaneie respond?

a. p. 71Well, it got very strange; he carried on quite openly as though there was nothing amiss when one might expected him to try and hide the affair a little and make excuses about having to work at court and such. He became mroe and more inconsiderate; there was no end to it.

a. Seidensticker p. 38: And so he pretended that there was nothing unnatural about his behavior, nothing at which I could take offense; but I found his glibness quite distasteful and wished that he had the courtesy to hide his new affair somewhat more cleverly, perhaps to keep it out of sight for a while, as he could very easily have done, under the cloak of court business.

p. 95

..around Mt. Fuji
the smoke smolders
from a fire of jealousy
that never ends,
and while it becomes drifting clouds
that trail between us,
I am not one to cut the
tie that binds me as
fast as thread is wound to a pool.

Seidensticker p. 46
I was frowned upon by a mountain, a smoldering Fuji,
Wreathed in clouds of smoke.
The women you kept about you stood between us,
They told you I would not come, they would not have me,
They drove me away to other, kinder places.

G. The final two long poems (chôka):

1. What do each of them really mean? What is the subtext here?

a. HERS:

b. HIS:

H. Do you think Kaneie and the author are still married at the end of the book?

II. Intro to critical analysis (Questions to think about any text/image/performance we study)

A. Who was it written/created by? (male? female? upper/lower class? etc. )

B. Who was it written for? (Who was the intended audience? Was there a patron who paid for it?)

C. How is the story or image supposed to affect that audience; i.e. what is the purpose/goal of the story? (Entertainment? Didactic? Both?)

D. What was the historical context? (economic, political, religious) Does anyone (person/group) benefit from this representation?

E. What are the genre constraints? (Is it a novel, a poem, a play, an image?) What are the structural elements that define the genre that might limit representation? (live performance, written word, image etc.)

F. What are the narrative constraints? What narrative elements are necessary to make the story work? (Is there a typical plot for this kind of story? Is the narrator first or third person? etc.)

G. Historical development of stories (If this story is adapted in later periods, how has it been changed? How do the above questions help us understand why those changes occur?)

III. Example of Critical Analysis of Gossamer Years

A. Who is it written/created by?

1. A Heian period woman of the "middle class" of the aristocracy (daughter of a provincial governor), who married the highest ranking courtier of the day.

B. Who was it written for? (Who was the intended audience? Was there a patron?)

2. Her peers (other female and male aristocrats). Her "husband," Fujiwara no Kaneie, probably encouraged her to write it and helped pay for it to be reproduced.

C. How is the story or image supposed to affect that audience; i.e. what is the purpose/goal of the story? (Entertainment? Didactic? Both?)

D. What was the historical context? (economic, political, religious) Does anyone (person/group) benefit from this representation?

1. Context: Heian period marriage politics.

2. Benefits: The narrator? Kaneie? Her son?

E. What are the genre constraints? (Is it a novel, a poem, a play, an image?) What are the structural elements that define the genre that might limit representation? (live performance, written word, image etc.)

1. Memoir/Diary written in Japanese (a fairly new genre)

F. What are the narrative constraints? What narrative elements are necessary to make the story work? (Is there a typical plot for this kind of story? Is the narrator first or third person? etc.)

1. first person narration

2. "real life" versus "romances"

IV. Representation of Men

1. Is Kaneie presented positively or negatively in the book?

2. What reasons might he have had for supporting the author to write and "publish" her diary?