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Welcome to the new books network. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of New Books in Japanese Studies, a podcast channel of the new books network. I am Jean Lee from the University of Arizona. Today, our guest is Dr.
Joshua Maustel, who's the editor of the recent volume, an Isimone Gagali reader, context and receptions. Dr. Maustel is a professor of pre-modern Japanese literature and art at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. So this volume is a part of Braille's Japanese Studies' library series.
It contains 11 chapters written by scholars from North America and Japan. From perspectives of historical context and later reception, this volume is a system medical study of the Isimone Gagali, or the Tale of Isi, one of the most well-known classic tales in Japan. So welcome, Dr. Maustel.
It's really great to have you on our channel today. Well, thank you so much for inviting me. I should just say quickly that the authors come from the US, Japan, Canada and Europe. Well, actually, England, I guess the UK doesn't count as part of Europe anymore, but...
Oh, yeah, I suppose that's quite true. So you have written so much about the tales of Isi in the past and many other topics like pre-modern poetry and narratives and visual materials. So after all these years, do you still remember how you first got interested in Japanese Studies and especially in pre-modern Japanese literature? Hmm, Japanese Studies, I grew up in Southern California, and this was a time when there were a number of Japanese families connected with Japanese industries who had children in school.
So I had classmates who were from Japan, and there was some history of interest in Japan, if you can call it that, through my father, who actually very briefly was learned to study Japanese and military intelligence during the Second World War. But for me, it actually, you know, this was the 70s. So I was quite interested in Asian religion. I was talking to a colleague who just retired, and we both talked about how our introduction to Asian religion was reading the Christopher Isherwood and Swabi Prabhavananda translation of the Bhagavad Gita when we were in middle school.
We were in junior high school. So that started my interest in Buddhism, in Hinduism, went to Buddhism, then from Buddhism to specifically Buddhist aesthetics, theories of beauty and Buddhist thinking. And then that morphed into more just art and literature. My first interest in poetry, which is, I think, what I specialize in the most in some ways, was the Manosu in the Peterson translation which started being published in Holland in about 1919 and his 20 volumes, very linguistic, but it was great raw material to try translating.
Well, that is fascinating to hear that you started getting interested in Japanese literature through Manosu. I don't think I hear that a lot. And yet, I don't do not do not-re-period literature at all. So that's the way things go.
Yeah, it is, I suppose. Now, this tale of Isha itself, it's such a famous work, but the studies in this volume extend beyond the original text. So, for listeners who might not be so familiar with Isha, what is it about and what else are there that were based on Isha? So, as we have it today, the Isha Mwana Ghatadi is a collection of 125 relatively discrete episodes, short episodes, that always include a poem, often an exchange of poems, often an exchange of poems between a man and a woman.
And it seems to have had its original conception in writings of someone named Ariwara No Narihira, who died in 880 and was the son of an emperor, though reduced commoner status. And some version and eartext of the Isha was used both for the current Isha Mwana Ghatadi and also for the Koking Shoe, the Koking Waka Shoe, the first Imperial anthology put together or ordered in 905. And how was it used in other types of materials? I mean, the book and other articles, even you mentioned how it was borrowed to make painting scrolls, it's inspired, are there some examples of these works?
Well, the biggest influence it had, of course, was on the Genji Mwana Ghatadi, the tale of Genji, and three of the essays in the collection discussed that, essays by Imanishi Uichiro, Gotosho, and Takahashi Toru. So that's kind of the inescapable subject, it's very hard to get out of the way to talk about anything else. But then, as I think we'll talk about maybe a little later, it had a big influence on No Theater and then in the early modern period. The canon of classical Japanese literature is three works.
It's the Koking Shoe, the Isha Mwana Ghatadi, and the Genji Mwana Ghatadi. And that's it. And the Genji is very long and complicated. So in a way, the real basis is the Kaku Nishu, and I mean, I'm sorry, the Koking Shoe and the Isha Mwana Ghatadi.
Interesting. And I hear a lot of people describing this tale of Isha as the pre-modern Japanese version of Daan Wong. Would you agree with that? Yeah, I'm not well versed enough on what people mean when they talk about Daan Wong to really answer that.
There is clearly what's called Ito Gonomi, this ladies man, lysivious sort of ideal that is represented both by Nadi Hira and Prince Genji. How much that corresponds to any European ladies man. And let's begin by talking about the historical context of this tale. So when the tale of Isha was made with was written, what was the background like and what other Mono Ghatadi works were out there?
How is the tale of Isha situated among all these works? Yeah, I was very interested in you asking that question because when you think of, well, so what in Japanese literature precedes the Isha, the answer is surprisingly little. There's the Manyo Shuu, maybe the Takei Toi Minogatadi, the tale of the bamboo cutter. And that's it, right?
If the Urtex is also one of the sources for the Kōkinshu, the Kōkinshu is 905, there's not a lot before that. The Utsō Minogatadi is after that, first way, everything is after that. So the real background is actually Chinese literature. Things like the Yoishinku, the Yousen Kūtsu, the dwelling of the playful goddesses, or what's called the Yoku Daishin, the Yū Taishinyo, the new tales of the world.
And also the new songs of the Jay Teras, the kind of palace poetry. So, or the Yingying Juan, the story of Yingying, Yingying Den. And so, Yamamoto Tokoro talks about these in his chapters somewhat. So those were the continental influences, the early Tang short fiction that were influencing people like Nātihira.
And had already, to some extent, influenced the Manyo Shuu. So there's not a whole lot there beforehand. The Yisei is categorized traditionally as an Utsō Minogatadi, a poem tale in contrast to what Skūti Minogatadi, a made up tale, which means a more substantial one, like the Utsō or the Genji. But again, although it's our subsequent, the genre of the Minogatadi is actually created in the Meiji period.
And the Yisei bears resemble, well, bears' relationship to other works from the, let's say, 10th century, like the Yisei Niki, the, the, the, the, the diary of Lady Yisei. Not to be confused with the Yisei Minogatadi, or the Takamitsuniki, or even the, the, the second Imperial anthology, which has a very narrative element in a lot of its head notes to its poems. Now this name of this, our protagonist, Adi Wala Nātihira, has come up a lot. Who is this person according to materials from his time?
Well, so he's the grandson of Prince Abou, whose name is sometimes unfortunately an earlier document pronounced Ajo, which means Idiot, but I don't think that's what they mean. And so Prince Abou got caught up in the Cusco affair. This was an attempt to put an emperor who had retired back onto the throne. Cusco was his consort, and they failed.
And so that whole branch of the family got removed from the Imperial household, got reduced to commoner status, which is why Nātihira has a surname because the Imperial family doesn't have a surname, so he becomes an Adi Wala. And the way it's told in the Issei, which is, we have one essay that particularly looks at, to what extent the way the story's told in the Issei has corresponded with reality. But as is presented in the Issei, Nātihira is part of a kind of salon that surrounds Imperial Prince Kōretaka, who was the eldest son of the reigning monarch, and therefore not necessarily, but most likely to become the crown prince in the next emperor. Associated with the Adi Wala clan and the Key Clan, and yet was displaced by a much younger brother by another empress, another consort to that emperor.
And so the Adi Wala and the Key Clans become essentially disenfranchised from political power. And so that kind of marginal position, the way I like to think of it is, we're kicked out of court, but we still are the exemplars of courtliness of Mi'abi. And so the way I think of it is kind of at least according to one interpretation, part of what the Issei is about. And as many later works were influenced by the tales of Issei, more and more imagination was added to this character, Nātihira.
I remember when article one said that Nātihira was transformed, worshipped as a symbol or a god of love. So as time went by, we can find influences of Issei from the literary genres, which is discussed in part three of the book about Issei's impact on all plays. Could you tell us more about this part? It should be said that the textual evolution of the Issei is very, very complicated and went through at least three stages.
We know there must have been some sort of vertex by Nātihira, who as I said died in 880, then it seems to have undergone some more revisions and additions. This is the important thing is that news stories get added around the time of the Gossentius, around 950, and then its final influence I think is around the third imperial landfill, the Shu'ISU. By the third stage, the character of Nātihira is almost becoming a caricature of itself. He's not just in the earlier sections, he's in Irogonomi, but his true love is the Empress Taekai-kō.
And so it's kind of a situation where he sets his sights on someone who's politically too high above him. But by the third iteration, we're being told, oh, he'll sleep with anyone. He's just a great guy and it doesn't matter how old or ugly you are. He's happy to go to bed with you.
So that's within the Ise itself. We have two really wonderful essays on the influence or the use of Ise in Nātihira by... And what's important is that no studies themselves underwent a big change in the early 70s with the work of Ito Masayoshi, who showed that playwrights like Zen Shiku were not basing their no plays on the Ise itself, but on esoteric commentaries that had a kind of tantric understanding of Nātihira and his Bodhisattva task of bringing enlightenment to thousands of women through sex. And those texts, those commentaries, had only been published very early in 1969 by Kata-giri Oeichi.
So that's still kind of circling through. And as I said, we have two essays, one by Olitani Setsko and one by Susan Klein, whom you've interviewed on this program, I guess we call it, right? For her new book on Dancing the Dharma. So Susan did a very important first book on those medieval commentaries, and then she has just come up with a book looking at them specifically in the context of No.
And we were fortunate enough that she had a kind of... she had a chapter that she couldn't fit into her book. That was the translation of a specific play, and so we were able to put that in and are very happy with that. Thank you for mentioning that episode.
Listeners, if you're interested, we had a backing, I think, this summer. Dr. Susan Klein did an episode with new books in Japanese studies as well. If you're interested, you can check that out.
So back to Dr. Maastau. You mentioned this concept, Edo Gonomi, which from reading the book together, it's kind of an important concept or sort of a theme in this book. Could you sort of just unpack what this means and how it's reflected throughout the book?
Yeah, sure. I'd be happy to. So without going too far back, this is... starts again coming out of China, the idea of fang dio, and what's called hu jyu in Japanese, so a certain kind of elegance that involves poetry, involves wine, involves women, and kind of taking those Chinese texts that I mentioned earlier, that are not, I think, you would say, really part of the fundamental canon of Chinese literature as it's thought of today.
The Yu Sen Kutsu, in fact, disappears from China. It didn't exist there. It wasn't until, I think, the Meiji period that the Chinese realized it was there. And new songs of the J.
Terrace is in contrast to the Wenschuan, so not considered really canonical. It's love poetry and courtley stuff. That's not what we do if we're serious Confucian scholars. So the Japanese chose what, you know, from a Chinese context, at least now, might look like idiosyncratic texts and use those to construct this ideal of courtliness, elegance, poetry, and eroticism, all in kind of one package that we call irugonomi, which always confuses my Chinese students because the characters when pronounced in Chinese are house, and that apparently means something less elegant, ed courtley, than what the Japanese term means.
Anyway, so that, as I said, with the medieval commentaries that Susan Klein has done such great work on, is connected with tantrism, and the idea that the passions, and especially the sexual passions, can be used for enlightenment rather than just being suppressed. But what's interesting in our volume is that the place, hit irugonomi places, actually, in the commentaries of Soge, and the subsequent poets that studied with him in the later Muromachi period, where they actually want to deny the erotic aspects of the essay, which is really a tall order when you think about it. I mean, here is a text that is supposed to be about romance or eroticism, and you have a bunch of scholars who are saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that's what it says, but it doesn't mean that. No, when they say that, yeah, well, that's what it normally means, but in this context, it doesn't mean that.
The best example being the very first episode where the young man is hunting, and he does a kai-mami. He peeps through the fence at two women and sees them and falls in love. And one of the commentators says, well, you know, keeping is really not very elegant. So I can't mean that here.
It must mean like, oh, I don't know. He saw them over the fence or from a distance or through something, right? And there's a long history of this in Issei interpretation. In the same first episode, the young man then sends a poem into the two women.
And in our understanding of the episode, then the narrator comes in and says, oh, he wrote this poem, which is kind of like this other poem, and gosh, people were so old. Well, that's not how that episode was read for most of the history of Japanese literature. Most readers thought that it was impossible that two elegant, well-brought up young women could receive a love poem, especially a love poem from Nadi Hira, and not have a reply poem. And so that second poem was read as their response.
Now, you have to do significant violence to the grammar of that episode to get that kind of reading out of it, but people did. And so in the same way, Soge and the Sanjianishi school worked very, very hard to deny the eroticism that was inherent in the Issei to make it a kind of proper, moralistic kind of text. And so while most of the essays, we'll talk about how the volume was put together, but most of the essays are more recent. The essay by Aoki Shisuko that we translate there is really kind of the fundamental article on this subject in Japanese and has influenced already a number of English scholars.
So I was very happy to get that into English. And then that's where my chapter is, which is the tale of Genji was written about 100 years after the Tales of Issei. And yet we often, a number of times see medieval commentators, well, commentators into the early modern period, so into the 17th century, using the Genji to explain the Issei rather than vice versa. So kind of anachronistically.
And this sometimes is very useful because, you know, the situations that are portrayed in the Genji are so much more richly described that you can take a very bare bones kind of episode as it's described in the Issei, and really kind of imagine and understand more what could be at stake when you compare it to a similar situation in the Genji. But in other cases, there are two very different moments in Japanese society. And anachronistically applying the optics of the Genji onto the Issei leads to serious misreadings. That is so fascinating.
Apparently commentary is such an important element in pre-modern Japanese literature. And I guess for these pre-modern scholars or pre-modern writers, they, well, they went ahead of Roland Bath and declared they all the dead and did whatever they like with the tale of Issei. And I think it's really great that you devoted an entire part to the book, which is part four, to talk about all these commentaries on it by later people. So in the 17th, from 17th to the 19th centuries, with the increase of literacy rates and the rise of commercial printing, the tales of Issei became more accessible to common readers in the form of woodblock printed books with illustrations sometimes.
Now, what changes are there to the reading of Issei around this time? And how did Issei readers reimagine the stories after 600 years? Yeah, thank you. So, of course, in an earlier book, Courtley Visions, I kind of ended up talking about this as a kind of appropriation, a cultural appropriation that Issei is part of court culture.
And then during most of the medieval period, it's appropriated by the warrior class and has to be changed for their needs. And this is part of where Soge fits in because the ethics he's trying to impose on the Issei are essentially warrior ethics, such as a woman has a man has only one lord and a woman has only one wife. Now, in the Hanon period among the aristocracy, that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. But Soge manages to get that into his interpretation of the Issei.
In the early modern period, of course, we have the explosion of print capitalism and suddenly, you know, two things happen. We often tend to talk about just, oh, and so the books were available for the price of a couple of bowls of noodles if you could buy a copy of this or you could buy a copy of that. But it wasn't only the text themselves, of course, it was those same commentaries, which were also previously secret, he'd been or coup d'en, were now also available for a price. So that combined with kind of eventually the kind of coco-gaku revolution, the philological one, meant anyone could gather together the commentaries and come up with an interpretation that they based on philological evidence rather than what the previous system had been, which was transmission.
So, you know, this is the teaching I got from my teacher, and I know that's right, because his teacher was so-and-so and his teacher was so-and-so and all the way back to Prince somebody or other. So, but, you know, the big event in Issei Reception in the Edo period is the 1608 Sagabon edition, which is illustrated, which is the earliest example of illustrated printed Beletra in Japanese. Okay, so it's the first text of literature that is printed and illustrated. And as I argued in my earlier book, Courtley Visions, the Sagabon really established the iconography for Issei Monogatari, the number of episodes I chose and how those episodes were represented.
And once you have an iconography, you can play with it. You can make parodies, you can make satires. And of course, that's a lot of what the subsequent history in the Edo period is of the reception of the Issei. Again, you had an Audemoretti here earlier in a podcast talking about her new book on print culture of the 17th century, and she discusses the reception of Issei Monogatari there.
We have a chapter, I'm very happy that she wrote specifically for this volume on the parodic reception of the image of Nadi Hira in 18th Century Kipyoshi. The other important thing though, as I alluded to earlier when I was talking about Issei as one of the big three of the essential canon, is that the Issei becomes fairly early on, very associated with Joukuncho, with textbooks for educational texts for women, girls women. And again, this is because the Gengis is just too long, Gengis is just too complicated to kind of fit it into or make it a stand-alone textbook, whereas Issei is just a great size. And you can have a page where two thirds of the page is the Issei text, and then up above, you can have commentary, or you can have how to do clothing, how to fold letters, how to lay out food, or all kinds of things.
So it becomes actually part of a household encyclopedia or a homemaker's manual that is part of the true soul of middle-class girls on their marriage. That is absolutely fascinating. I love all these innovative things that early modern people did with their books. We can learn so much just by reading their commentaries about how they actually lived, or how they did things, how they talked about things.
Absolutely. Now, these chapters are together, they provide a very comprehensive understanding of how Issei came to be and how he was read over the years. I'm also very interested in the process of making this volume. So out of the 11 chapters, eight were translated from Japanese, which, compared to a lot of edited volumes in Japanese studies now, it's a very big number.
So how did this project begin, and what kind of difficulties did you meet when compiling this volume? Yes. Well, when I start and say that the original impetus for the volume was an international workshop we did at UBC in 2007, that will give you a sense of the difficulty involved with the volume. The workshop itself was a little unusual in that we had a number of Japanese scholars attending.
The language of the conference with both Japanese and English, it was unusual in the sense that there were scholars who in Japan would not necessarily cooperate with each other. They were kind of different schools. So, for instance, we have, and in the volume, we have Takahashi Todu, who is a member of Monocan. But then we have Yamamoto Tokuro, who says, I think we can say, not a member of Monocan.
And so I think the Japanese participants also founded a very, you know, it was kind of outside of the usual. And so the following year, Yamamoto, says, and I edited the Japanese volume, and the idea was, of course, then we would just turn around and do the English volume the next year. There were a number of problems. I was relatively young.
This was my first attempt at this. And so I had not planned as well as probably I needed to. So finding translators and things like that was difficult. And so time went on.
And then at a certain point, Yamamoto, said, I kind of reconvened. And in the interim, he had published two more kind of substantial rombunshu collections of essays on Ise. And so it seemed more reasonable to kind of pick from all three volumes. And so that's what we did.
I deferred a lot to Yamamoto Sensay on that. In other words, I thought it would be interesting to see what he thought were the most important of the essays in those three collections, or the essays he thought would be of interest to foreign readers, or that he thought foreign readers should know. So there's, I think, a heavier emphasis on the historical background than one would expect in an analogous English work. And yeah, I think, of course, in a way, the gold standard for these sort of things are anthologies that Haru Oshirani has put together.
And they're very well done. And they are very much geared for, let's say, an undergraduate audience. And what I was after was a little different in the sense that we don't see so much Japanese scholarship translated. There was a time when that was kind of part of the field, the Journal of Japanese Studies, or whoever would, you know, every now and then have a proper Japanese article translated into English.
But often people just kind of throw up their hands and say, oh, it can't be done, or you have to add so much, or you have to adapt so much. And it may be that I just, I don't see so much of it now that I don't remember what it looks like if you're not a specialist. But I think the majority of these chapters are comprehensible in English, and that readers can make sense of them. And I think readers then get an understanding of the methodologies of Japanese scholarship that they will not get anywhere else.
I mean, we have some real tour de force in some of these where the wonderful article by Fujishimasan is looking at the image of the well-curbed and the polonia tree. And goes all the way back to China. And does, you know, it is a tour de force, you know, and so are a couple of the other ones, whereas those are joined with like the essay by Dimanishi Uichiro Sanse, which is much shorter and just enormously clever. It's a thought piece, and something he does very, very well.
So I think there's a range of methodologies on display, and those are methodologies that I don't think non-Japanese reading public gets access to. Well, I'm so glad you all overcome all these difficulties and got together to put up this volume, a very, very inclusive volume. It's nice that now more and more Japanese scholars are becoming active in joining these projects that's mostly hosted in North America or Europe. Now you have been in this field of Japanese studies for a very long time.
What changes in the field in terms of scholarly participation have you seen? And how do you think we can do better in the future? Yeah. Thanks for saying a very long time, but I suppose that's true.
You know, when I was starting out a very long time ago, everyone was talking about Cook Saikon, oh, it's all going to be internationalizing and blah, blah, blah, blah. And that didn't really happen. But I think things are very, very different now for a number of reasons, some good, some bad. So I think it is true that we have active collaboration with Japanese and non-Japanese scholars more fully now.
I mean, you know, the battle model, even before my time was the American scholar who goes and gets a Fulbright for dissertation research, manages to get the attention of some, and I sensei who, under normal circumstances, would not give them the time of day. And then, you know, kind of gets all that information, comes back to the US, publishes their dissertation, publishes their tenure book, and there's very little communication between what's happening in North America and what's happening in Japan. Partly because, you know, to be honest, Japanese scholars have a certain generation really couldn't care less. Or under the stick about Japanese literature, right?
So that has changed somewhat. You know, of course, we have Nichi Boomkin, which has always tried to be, I mean, international is in its name. So that's been there, but now the Institute for Japanese, the National Institute for Japanese Literature, Kukukin Kuchiriongon has non-Japanese professors on staff. They're trying more and more to engage internationally.
We had in the past, of course, a Sophia University, which is the home of Mona Manta Niponika, and teaching a whole cadre of students in English, but now we have also La Ceda University, which is very, very involved in a kind of international coming together. And that's kind of exemplified by Kono Kimiko and Vibika Dinnika's history of Japanese literature, three volumes, you know, Nihon Bungakushi, that is kind of trying to bring the cinemagraph back into Japanese literature to kind of correct this 19th century nationalist definition of Japanese literature as being only stuff that's written in the Japanese language. And, you know, we get that for instance, my colleague, Ross King and Christina Laffen, have just edited a translation of Saitomadeshi's kambu meaku no kinda, Nihon Bungaku. So again, that kind of Chinese element that is being reintroduced.
So I think in Japan, for demographic reasons, more and more classes are being taught in English, and the students of those classes are not just Japanese, but also other international students. I think that we have more kind of fully bilingual trained scholars, or trilingual or quadrilingual. And, you know, just looking at the University of British Columbia, the graduate students we have right now, just in studying Japanese literature, come from Canada, the US, China, India, Spain, Turkey, and of course Japan. So I really do think that there's a move away from national literatures to more trans-pan-Asian or trans-Asian, which I think will continue.
We'll see though, because there's also contravelling forces, right? We have certain incipient nationalisms, one sees in Brexit, and then now there's the pandemic. So, you know, again, on one hand, there seems to be less freedom of motion movement, and then on the other hand, precisely because of pandemic, we now are much more comfortable doing things like this, virtual things. So I think it's a very exciting future, and I think it's going to look very different than the field I grew up in, and I'm very happy to leave it to younger scholars to forge their way.
Well, thank you for saying that it's quite inspiring to see volumes like this one being so inclusive, and I certainly look forward to more like this in the future. Now, thank you so much for this very illuminating conversation. My pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me.
And for our listeners to learn more about the Telvise, check out this book by edited by Dr. Joshua Marcel, an Isamu Nogadelli reader, context and receptionist. This is Juni from New Books and Japanese Studies. Stay tuned for another episode.