Lecture 2005-02-21
"The Tales of Ise: Reading Gender, Class, and Nation in Japanese Visual Culture"
Dr. Joshua Mostow

Dr. Mostow's treatment of his subject was extremely detailed (defying the summarizer's art!), but in essence he was dealing with the various interpretations given to the Tales as shown by the illustrations in the editions that appeared over the ages. The Tales of Ise, written in the mid-tenth century, are a collection of 125 anecdotes read as recording the amorous adventures of Ariwara no Narihira, Japan's most famous lover. There is mention in Genji of illustrations to the Tales, but no original examples from this period remain. By the time of the Kamakura period divergent readings of the Tales had already emerged, as is evident from the Hakubyō and the Kubo family scrolls of the thirteenth century. In the first episode a man spies two charming sisters and impetuously writes a poem and sends it in to them with a piece of cloth cut from his hunting-robe. The Hakubyō version shows not the man peeping in but the women's maid gazing out at him; the Kubo version depicts a higher vantage point, from which the man (not shown) is peeping over the walls.

The calligraphy in the Kubo scroll is in the imperial style. At this time the imperial house was divided into two competing lines, a Senior and a Junior line, of which the Senior preferred the traditional Heian style of calligraphy, while the Junior patronized the new Chinese culture. It was in this political context that the Kubo version was created.

When we compare the depictions in the two versions of Episode 4, in which Narihira is revisiting the place where he used to meet the future Nijō Empress, we find that the Kubo version focuses not on Narihira but on the scene before him. This suggests that the Tales are no longer being read as a record of passionate love but as a source of cultural capital to bolster claims to imperial legitimacy.

Besides these two versions, there is a third, the Ihon, which only survives in an early 19th-century copy. The illustrations here are more in the emaki style, in which successive actions are juxtaposed. Thus the illustration to Episode 1 shows Narihira peeping in and also sitting composing his poem. The Ihon's illustrations seem to be related to some of the oldest extant commentaries on the Tales, those of the Reizei School, which go into almost obsessive detail about Episode 1. These are based in turn on the commentaries by Fujiwara no Tameaki (late 13th century). Tameaki's interpretation made Narihira into an incarnation of the Horse-Headed Kannon, who brought enlightenment to thousands of women through sex. The Reizei commentaries are similarly allegorical, but stripped of any religious significance.

There is a dearth of illustrations in the succeeding Muromachi period, but we find the Tales being visualized through the Noh theatre, which reflected the medieval commentaries. In the old Heian version of Episode 23, two children are standing by a well-curb, with the girl looking intently at the boy. Yet by the Muromachi period the children have come to be staring at their images in the well, as described in the Noh play Izutsu (The Well-Curb).

Extant illustrated versions of the Tales become more numerous again in the late Muromachi and early Momoyama periods, and exhibit enough similarities to suggest the emergence of a standardized iconography. This tradition reached its most durable form in the 1608 illustrations to the Saga-bon edition (which contains a picture of the children staring into the well); the artist is unknown. Another artist of this time, Tawara Sōtatsu, produced a very different iconography, based on the Ihon emaki, to which he could only have had access through aristocratic connections.

The publication of the Saga-bon led to an 'Ise boom' in more popular culture. Parodies of the classics started appearing in the 1620s, and in 1644 a work entitled Nise Monogatari (Tales of a Phony) appeared. By the 1660s the Tales had become heavily appropriated by the pleasure quarters, and 1662 saw no fewer than three parodies linked to the red-light district. It was only later, in 1679, that the first serious printed edition appeared, the Tōsho Ise Monogatari Shō, with illustrations by the first great woodblock artist, Hishikawa Moronobu, who was influenced by the Saga-bon but seems to have tried to reflect his own understanding of the text. Some of the Saga-bon's illustrations call for clarification; that of Episode 2, for example, which concerns a man sending a woman a poem, shows a maid chasing after him. An explanation seems to lie in the Ono family version of Episode 1, in which Narihira is shown first handing his poem to a young maid and then being called back by her; it seems that only half of this picture appeared in the Saga-bon and was mistakenly attached to Episode 2. The reason why the maid chased after Narihira becomes clear if we read the medieval commentaries. It was inconceivable to readers of those days that the young women, after receiving a poem from the man, would not send a poem in reply. Moronobu understood the incident in this way, so in his reworking of the Saga-bon's illustration he has the maid holding a letter out to the man.

At the beginning of Episode 1, in the Tōsho-shō version, Moronobu has Narihira decorously glancing back, over the hedge, at the young women. Yet in the Ise Monogatari Hira-kotoba (Tales of Ise in Plain Words) he shows a decidedly voyeuristic hero. How do we explain this difference? The movement to translate the classics into "plain words", that is, contemporary Japanese, grew out of the haikai movement. Haikai was a phenomenally popular humorous form of linked-verse, and the translation of classical literature into the same vernacular necessarily resulted in a humorous effect; this is what Moronobu responded to. Thus in the frontispiece three figures of Narihira are seen coming down on clouds like a Buddha, suggesting that three manifestations of Narihira have come to bring enlightenment through sex to the three women on the opposite page. This edition was claimed as being intended for children, but in fact it was designed for adult males who could not read the original language. Other works by Moronobu reveal that Narihira had been widely appropriated by the demimonde of Yoshiwara and elsewhere.

A contrasting artist, Ogata Kōrin, who had come up to Edo from Kyoto, also illustrated the Tales, notably Narihira's Azuma-kudari, or journey to the East, that is, the area that by the 17th century had become Edo. The prominence of Narihira in Kōrin's art is part of a larger trend. The fact that Narihira had visited the Musashi Plain could assure Edoites that they had an ancient history. In fact there is a tradition that Narihira never returned from Edo but was drowned when his boat sank in the Sumida on his way back, and there is a boat-shaped mound where he is believed to be buried.

By the 18th century there was a boom in books designed specifically for women, but at first there was considerable debate among scholars about the appropriateness of their being allowed to read romances such as Ise and Genji. However, by the middle of the century such resistance had faded; it was important for women to be able to write classical poetry, so the moral objections to the romances disappeared. At the same time, selections of poems were accompanied by a commentary drawing a moral lesson specifically applicable to housewives.

Moralized versions of Ise belong rather to the early part of the 19th century, as publishers responded to the Tenpo reforms of 1841, which called for "prints on themes of loyalty, filiality and honour" so as to "promote virtue for boys and girls". Thus we have Kuniyoshi's Kenjo Hakkei (Eight Views of Virtuous Women), with a picture echoing Hiroshige's Ōmi Hakkei (Eight Views of Ōmi). The image of feminine self-sacrifice and devotion shown here met with the approval of the Tokugawa regime, and it is perhaps against this background that we can understand how quickly and powerfully text and image were harnessed to create a modern nation-state during the Meiji Restoration. One influence came from the painter Kikuchi Yōsai, whose massive compendium of 571 historical personages, completed in 1836, was only published in 1868. This contains images of both Narihira and his patron Prince Koretaka, and a more impressive picture of 1875, entitled "Narihira Visiting Prince Koretaka", depicts Narihira on horseback in a martial image.

However, in the Taisho era the patriotic Narihira gave way to a more romantic image. In 1917, Yoshii Isamu published a translation of Ise into modern Japanese, and followed it up the next year with one of Genji. They were part of a series aimed at the new consumers of "women's literature". This is evidenced in Episode 1, where we are told that the young man "unintentionally" peeped in, with the addition of a word not in the original, while the ladies' reactions are taken to mean that they were impressed by the boy's precociousness in love-making. Yoshikawa Hideo, in his annotated edition of Ise, also glorifies "love", reflecting Taisho cultural attitudes that would have been unthinkable in the Meiji period, or later, in the 1930s and 1940s. At the same time he calls on Japanese poetry to save the nation from Western decadence, just as it was only poetry that had allowed Heian youth to escape the slavery of gross sensuality.

In conclusion, Dr. Mostow tried to give some conception of the popularity of the Tales in contemporary culture. A recent check on the amazon.com website had generated a list of 147 titles currently for sale, ranging from reproductions of important manuscript versions, through modern translations and several manga versions, to, finally, a video version "Hana no Narihira" by Takarazuka. This showed that the 10th-century Tales still remained a vibrant part of Japanese culture.

In the question time that followed Dr. Mostow was asked about the evolution of the Yatsuhashi (Eight Bridges) image and how it has come to be so popular. He answered by first explaining that this refers to the occasion when Narihira and his friends have proceeded up to the Mount Fuji area and stopped to rest at a marsh with eight bridges and irises in bloom. One of Narihira's travelling companions composes a poem on the subject of travel for which the first syllable of each line starts with each of the syllables in turn from the phrase kaki tsubota. The poem talks about the portions of bridges appearing here, there and everywhere in the scene. In the Ihon the bridges are depicted as one zigzag bridge.

Dr. Mostow was also asked to compare the use of the imagery from Ise with both Genji and Hyakunin-isshu (One Hundred Poets). To which he remarked that Genji was much more difficult to reduce to single images, and the same was true of Hyakunin-isshu, although some of the more well-known pictures from there had inspired parodies and in the Edo period some of these had broken out into ukiyoe. In particular, three images from the Hyakunin-isshu did spring to mind but all of this imagery is very minor when compared with the pervasiveness of the Ise imagery.

The meeting closed with a vote of thanks proposed by Dr. Charles De Wolf, who remarked that humans are the only animals to use language to talk about language and culture to talk about culture. A great work could become a model or an anti-model for others but the point is that great works endure even when interpreted in many different ways. He drew upon the example of Chaucer from the English-speaking world, whose work had been thought of as not well-constructed for many years because of a lack of understanding of the accentuation and syllabification of Middle English. But evidently the Tales of Ise had consistently been hugely admired throughout more than one thousand years of Japanese history. Dr. De Wolf concluded by stating that he envied Dr. Mostow his obviously acute sense of visual and spatial awareness as well as his literary ability.