Table Of ContentForm and Feeling in
Japanese Literati Culture
Matthew Mewhinney
Form and Feeling in Japanese Literati Culture
Matthew Mewhinney
Form and Feeling
in Japanese Literati
Culture
Matthew Mewhinney
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL, USA
ISBN 978-3-031-11921-7 ISBN 978-3-031-11922-4 (eBook)
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P
reface
This study grew out of my curiosity about Japanese novelist Natsume
Sōseki (1867–1916), the writer treated in Chap. 5 and the coda of this
book. I wanted to know what had informed his literary creativity, his
imagination, and the poetic nature of his prose. Over the course of my
research, I discovered that much of his inspiration derived from his long-
ing for the aesthetic attitude and sensibility of poet-painters in Japanese
literati (bunjin) culture from the Late Edo period (1750s–1867). By his
lifetime in the Meiji period (1867–1912), literati culture had declined and
survived primarily as an antiquarian avocation.
Sōseki has been called a bunjin because he practiced aesthetic forms
from the literati repertoire, including Chinese calligraphy, poetry, and
painting. While these were not his main contribution to modern Japanese
literature, they did inform it. In public, he was first and foremost a novel-
ist; he was also a scholar of English literature, a literary theorist, and a
philosopher. During a single decade, he produced thirteen major works of
fiction, each distinct in theme and style. In private, he produced works of
calligraphy, Chinese-style paintings, and impressionist watercolor paint-
ings, exchanging them with the members of his coterie.
These public and private streams merged in Sos̄ eki’s production of
poetry. Over his lifetime he composed more than 2000 poems across mul-
tiple genres. His practice in haiku and especially kanshi (Chinese poems, or
Sinitic verse) allowed him to participate in—and to memorialize—the mor-
ibund literati tradition. He integrated these poetic genres to write several
long works of prose, two of which I treat in Chap. 5 as modern prose poems.
vii
viii PREFACE
In summer of 2011 the Kanagawa Museum of Modern Literature
(Kanazawa Kindai Bungakukan) put on an exhibit entitled “Calligraphy
and Painting of Sōseki and other Bunjin.” At the exhibit, I had the oppor-
tunity to view Sōseki’s works of calligraphy and Chinese-style paintings,
alongside those by other modern writers who participated in literati cul-
ture. Among all this company, Sōseki is the most highly regarded by liter-
ary history—a reputation based upon the fact that he was one of the last
modern writers to compose kanshi. His poems earned the praise of
Yoshikawa Kōjirō (1904–1980), a renowned scholar of Chinese poetry,
who in a 1974 interview thus compared Sōseki’s kanshi to those com-
posed by other poets in the Japanese tradition: “Though kanshi to Sōseki
was likely an avocation, his poems are truly outstanding.”1
I sought to discover for myself what was so “outstanding” about
Sōseki’s kanshi and why this genre of poetry attracted Japanese readers
when the literati tradition had disappeared. I read his poems in the original
and then translated them into English, an experience that taught me about
the affordances of kanshi as a poetic form in modern Japanese literature.
When I use the word “form” in this book, I mean two things. The first
is the term’s most common use in Japanese literary studies, which refers to
the arrangement of words on the page that identifies a literary work in the
context of its tradition: the seventeen-syllable (5-7-5) poetic form is
known as haiku; the Chinese poetic form in Japan is known as kanshi. In
this sense, form is used almost interchangeably with the word genre, which
refers to a normative category determined by expectations of what a liter-
ary work should do. Haiku and kanshi are genres of both traditional
Japanese poetry and Japanese literati culture.
The second way I use the term “form” refers to something more
abstract—that is, “how a poem works as a poem.” Scholar Helen Vendler
writes that “form is content as deployed,” which I understand as the pro-
cess of bringing words into action.2 US poet laureate Robert Hass has put
this idea more poetically, as “the way the poem embodies the energy of the
gesture of its making.”3 More recently, poet and scholar Lucy Alford has
described form as an event that invites the reader’s attention: “What is
formed by and in poetic language is an event of attention generated in the
acts of both reading and writing.”4 These definitions inform my own,
namely form as that which mediates the aesthetic experience of a poem
and that which enlists the reader to participate in that experience. In other
words, form is not just the words on the page; it is what those words “do”
in the process of reading.
PREFACE ix
When reading Sōseki’s kanshi, I find most compelling their irony, an
experience that comes into being only by reading their form. His kanshi
are simultaneously ancient and modern: their external shape—the way
they look on the page—is identical to how Chinese poems look in the old
literati tradition; at the same time, how they work as poems—what they
“do” in the process of reading—distinguishes them from that tradition,
making them new.
The poem below is a pentasyllabic ancient-style verse (gogon koshi) that
Sōseki composed in 1899 before embarking on a long voyage from Tokyo
to England, where he would study for two miserable years before return-
ing to Japan:
Ever since my eyes have known the letters of East and West,
My heart has borne the anxiety of both past and present.
A shameful twenty years of darkness and confusion;
At thirty I know where I stand, enough to look back.
5 As I sit and meditate upon weal and woe,
The open mind weighs the interplay of the pliant and rigid.
Birds fly into the clouds without a trace,
Fish swim, streams flow as they please.
In a world that began without human affairs,
White clouds take their time indifferently.
me ni toz̄ ai no ji o shiri 眼識東西字
kokoro ni kokon no urei o idaku 心抱古今憂
nijun̄ en kondaku o haji 廿年愧昏濁
jiryu ̄wazuka ni kob̄ e o megurasu 而立纔回頭
seiza shite fukuhaku o mi 靜坐觀復剝
kyokai goj̄u ̄o ekisu 虛懷役剛柔
tori irite kumo ato naku 鳥入雲無迹
uo yukite mizu onozukara nagaru 魚行水自流
jinkan motoyori buji 人間固無事
hakuun onozukara yuȳu ̄ 白雲自悠悠 5
The poem exemplifies how Sōseki’s kanshi represent modern thoughts
and feelings in ancient poetic form. In the opening couplet, the speaker
describes language as a site of tension between past and present. This dis-
sonance between Chinese characters and the Western alphabet (toz̄ ai no ji)
is a self-referential comment on the anachronism of kanshi in modern lit-
erary expression that opens a rift between sign and signified. As the speaker
holds on to an ancient poetic form, the metaphorical ground on which it
x PREFACE
stands simultaneously crumbles, leaving the speaker and the poetic mean-
ing of the poem in a liminal state of suspension.
The rest of the poem represents the speaker’s modern sensibility as he
perceives the world through metaphors of loss. He looks back on his life,
contemplating the space between “weal and woe” and “the pliant and
rigid,” binaries that represent internal feelings and perceptions of the
external world. With an “open mind,” the speaker paints an elegiac land-
scape, representing a natural world no longer in reach. The speaker’s long-
ing to return to a time when “Birds fly into the clouds without a trace, /
Fish swim, streams flow as they please” resonates with nineteenth-century
Romantic poetry, which Sōseki had read as a scholar of English literature.
His lyricism is informed as much by Anglo-European Romantism as by the
Chinese and Japanese literary traditions.
The speaker realizes that it is no longer possible to return to the way the
natural world used to be and ends the poem with “white clouds,” an
image of formlessness. He suggests that the world moved more slowly in
earlier times, before humans made their mark, evoking the feelings of
William Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much with Us.”
In the literati tradition, the image of white clouds would have afforded
the speaker hope of Daoist or Buddhist transcendence, transporting him
to the immortal realm or the Pure Land, but here he realizes that this
traditional ideal is no longer a possibility in the modern world, where
humanity has become alienated from nature. This loss is implied by the
sound of the onomatopoeic phrase that ends the poem, yuȳu ̄(translated as
“indifferently”), which also means “longing across a vast distance.” In the
present, white clouds are signs not of transcendental time and place but
rather of inexpressible feelings of loss and metaphors for longing.
Sōseki’s kanshi says much more than it at first seems to be saying: it is a
modern poem in ancient form. Although this book is not about Sōseki’s
kanshi per se, it is about how kanshi and other aspects of literati culture
informed his poetic sensibility and that of three other Japanese writers:
Yosa Buson, Ema Saikō, and Masaoka Shiki. Like Sōseki, these writers
worked in, or drew from, the kanshi form, making a claim to the literati
tradition in order to become the poets they wanted to be. This volume
demonstrates how they made these claims through close examinations of
their poetic forms.
Tallahassee, FL, USA Matthew Mewhinney
PREFACE xi
notes
1. Yoshikawa, Yoshikawa Koj̄iro ̄zenshu,̄ 23: 567.
2. Vendler, The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar, 13.
3. Hass, A Little Book on Form, 3.
4. Alford, Forms of Poetic Attention, 3.
5. Natsume Sōseki, Sos̄eki zenshu,̄ 18: 211–212. Translation mine.
references
Alford, Lucy. Forms of Poetic Attention. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2020.
Hass, Robert. A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination
of Poetry. New York: Ecco, 2017.
Natsume Sōseki. Soseki zenshu.̄ 29 vols. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2003.
Yoshikawa Kōjirō. Yoshikawa Koj̄iro ̄zenshu.̄ 27 vols. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1976.
Vendler, Helen. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.
