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Hi, I'm Carla Nappy, and this is New Books in East Asian Studies. Welcome and thank you very much for joining us today. I recently had the Good 4chan up being able to sit down here at the University of British Columbia and talk with one of my colleagues, Joshua Maso, about as really gorgeous new book, Court Leave Visions, the ECA stories and the politics of cultural appropriation. This came out with the Brill in 2014.
Now, it is gorgeous, and I'll just say that right at the beginning. This is a book that you're going to want to have around so that you can open it up and page through some of the really beautiful images from illustrated scrolls and also from later paintings and later appropriations of the imagery of the tales of ECA. ECA stories, ECA monogotage. It's also that we're really fascinating book in terms of its modeling of how we might read images as texts.
How do we go about attending to illustrations, visual material, and really working through it to try to piece out from the ways that parts of the image relate to each other, to the ways that the stylistic decisions of the image or the ways that the image was used by readers, by other consumers of the image through time can tell us something about how to fit the image within a larger environment of arguments, both about images and about the ECA stories in particular. So it's a really great model for how to read images is what I'm saying. It's also a really important intervention into larger debates about this really, really important text in the history of Japanese literature. So what the book does is it looks at, among other things, or it focuses on the three works that constitute the oldest ECA pictures.
All of these works are from the 13th century, and all of them are in the form of illustrated scrolls, where they're written in really different styles. So the book asks, well, how do we read these images? Why are they so different? And what can those differences tell us about how these stories, these ECA stories were appropriate, where we repositioned to function in very different contexts and play very different roles in those contexts.
So it's about, as some title indicates, cultural appropriation and what it can look like to try to understand cultural appropriation as much as it's about these ECA stories and the beautiful images that we have as an archive of different ways of reading and illustrating these stories. So I'll leave it there so that you can get right to the interview, and I'll just say that it's really, again, it's a gorgeous book. It was such a pleasure to talk with Joshua about it. It's really a pleasure for me to have colleagues like this to work with at the University of British Columbia, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Thanks very much for listening. I'm here today to talk with Joshua Maasto about his new book, Coortley Visions, The ECA Stories, and the Politics of Cultural Appropriation. Welcome to new books and ECA studies on this beautiful day. Thank you for your Joshua.
Absolutely. Thank you for inviting me. Thanks so much for being here. So the book that we're talking about is about the ECA stories and also contextualize us a little bit.
In pre-modern Japan, as you say, in the beginning of the book, Ise Monogatari, also known as the Ise Stories or Tales of Ise, was considered to be one of the three most important works of literature in the Japanese language. And the book we're here to talk about looks at the appropriation of these stories from the 12th through the 17th centuries and beyond. It focuses especially on images of and in and with the text. So Joshua, can you start us off by saying a little bit about what brought you to this project?
How should we understand this in the larger context of your research? Yes, thank you. I'm interested in looking at not just classical Japanese literary texts, but how those literary texts have been understood over time. So I think the old kind of what we call a philological approach to almost any foreign text was to try to translate it as the author or the original audience understood it.
And once you've done that, you'd finished your job. You knew what the text said and you were happy. But a text such as the Ise, which has been around since the ninth century, has gone through profound change in the way it's been read and understood over the centuries. And that seems to me at least as interesting as whatever the original audience might have been doing with the text.
I'm one of the ways of understanding how the reading and interpretation of the text changes over time is through its pictorializations, its illustrations. There are aspects of a verbal text that can be left unspecified or unclear at the Japanese language. For instance, doesn't really have a distinction between singular and plural and nouns. But if you're going to pay a picture of that, you're going to have to decide whether there's one, two, three or more people.
So seeing how this originally courtly literary romance was appropriated, received, interpreted by changing populations over the course of Japanese history is what I'm interested in. I did this originally with a collection of poems, the Japanese used the 100 poets, one poem each, a book called Pictures of the Heart. And this is moving into a text that is both poetic and prosaic, right? It's the 125 short episodes that typically have some story set up and then an exchange of poems typically of a romantic nature.
And I should say, on right at the outset, you mentioned the importance of images as visualizations to the analysis. The book is also gorgeous. I mean, it's so striking. How many images are, how many color images?
171, but whose count? Yes, no, it was. The series is the Japanese visual culture series. And it does give authors the opportunity to have seemingly unlimited illustrations in color.
And when you start the project, you're very happy about that. And then when it moves into production and you discover you have to get the permissions and quality images for all of them, you wonder what in the hell you were thinking. I can't imagine that the amount of labor that goes into producing this, but I will just mention that because for listeners, this is a book that you just want to have around, that you want to be looking at and working with. But the images aren't just illustrations.
So a lot of the analysis is about reading the images as texts as much. And that's what it seems like a really important part of what's happening here of the analysis in a really important way that the images are working, not as mere illustrations. Right. And I think it's pretty much central to what I'm trying to do.
It's, although it's got a lot of pictures, it is somewhere between art history and cultural analysis or something like that. So I try to stay away from discussions of school styles or artistic genius or especially iconographies or inherited iconographies and kind of strip that away and really ask, okay, what does this picture mean? What is it doing? Who is it doing it for?
And what does that mean about how they're using this text? And yeah. And there's a, I think it's a model among other contributions of this text. It's really a model of how we can approach and use images as evidence also to engage in debates around the meaning of and use of and understanding of the text.
It's worth it. That's right. And they really provide a kind of data that in many cases, otherwise not available. Hi.
You know, pictures do kind of create their viewer. You're supposed to stand here. You're supposed to look at this. And while the, the, the, the, has a very long and very rich commentary history, that of course remains with the elite.
And that doesn't say how less elite populations are reading or understanding. And I'll actually, at either end of the historical spectrum for the aristocratic audiences closer to its point of inception, there's no commentary. So if we want to try to imagine how it was being read, pictures are very important. At the other end, once you get into the early modern period, there are lots of levels of appropriation that don't have a corresponding verbal counter.
Right. So to actually start to understand some of these transformations and appropriations, let's start at the beginning. So for listeners who don't know anything about this story, can you talk a little bit about the context of the origin of the text that we can understand the appropriations and the different. Sure.
Sure. So current scholarly consensus is that the story stories, what was, would have been a much smaller text, came into being around an individual called, called a, we'll just call him, Nadihira, who was actually the grandson of an emperor and poor part of a political literary salon based around a son of the emperor. Japan at the spirit time and through most of its histories did not practice prime and gender. So that meant that any son of an emperor could potentially be chosen as crown prince.
And families and interest groups tended to center around the individual candidates. And, you know, I guess some of those groups were more interested in football and some were more interested in poetry. The one Nadihira was involved in was very literary. And so a small collection of stories and poems seems to have come out of that salon.
The salon was almost entirely homosexual. It was women did not participate in government. And so it was kind of the guys amongst themselves drinking, going hunting, not, yeah, not playing any kind of sports or anything like that. But it was a very kind of male story and a text.
But very early on it became kind of a standard of women's reading, aristocratic women. And part of the reason for this, of course, is it was written in the vernacular. It was written in Japanese, whereas serious stuff was written in classical Chinese. In any event, the text becomes part of what educated aristocratic women were supposed to be familiar with and read.
It was alluded to in their poetry or their own writings because vernacular writing moved very quickly to be almost exclusively feminine domain. But the original text had really been kind of mean. It was very urban. It looked down on people who lived in the provinces.
Yeah. And so it was a kind of cliche, aristocratic kind of culture. And so several of the episodes have women being kind of made fools of or embarrassed and creating faux pas. And we can actually see in some of the earliest surviving pictorializations of these episodes a kind of different reading that makes the text more acceptable to a feminine reader.
Doesn't want to see that female character abuse. And also brings the text closer to one of the major genre of women's writing, which was a kind of autobiography. So although its standard title is Isémonogatari, the Isé stories, for much of its history it was seen as a kind of biography or autobiography of Nada Chia. And these were precisely, this was precisely one of the genre that women writers excelled at.
Now before, so there's a whole chapter, a really fascinating chapter that we'll get to almost right now on sort of women readers of the text and the ways that we can start to understand how they may have appropriated the text. Through analyzing the illustrations. And we'll get to that in a moment. But I just want to mention for listeners, without asking you to talk too much about it, there's also a really wonderful discussion in the first chapter.
I thought it was a wonderful discussion of a theory that, it seems like a popular theory, that the text may have been a result of what had existed before that, which are these screen images. Right? And so there's a really nice working through of an argument against the idea that pictorial images on screens actually preceded the text. And I mentioned that not to ask you to talk too much about it.
No, because it's rather dense. And readers should be encouraged to give it a fine, narrow picture. No, no, no, I think I'm the contrary. I think it's again a real model for how to use pictorial evidence and other kinds of evidence to analyze these kinds of debates in a way that's really productive, so that we're not just relying on text, we're sort of incorporating or reading of the images into our evidentiary days.
So that brings us to the second chapter. And this is this wonderful chapter on the oldest illustrated essay work. This is the, how could you feel what you say stories, right? I'm going to mispronounce it.
So just kind of embrace it. Sure. Now, this chapter does a lot of really interesting things. It looks at the movement of the essay from the original male salon context that you talked about in the first chapter that he writes to these stories to a wider female readership in the first cultural appropriation of the essay.
So before we look at the nature of that appropriation, let's take a moment to talk about this notion of cultural appropriation. Because this is in the title, it seems central to what's going on. Can you talk a little bit about that in terms of your goals for the book? Sure.
Actually, it's something that came to me somewhat late in the writing process, and that is probably visible in the book. There has been a lot of work, especially in English concerning classical Japanese literature over the last decade or so, on reception history and also canon formation on important anthology of, as a collection of essays by Haudenosaune and Tony Suzuki, inventing classics. And so that's the kind of discourse. Those are the words we've been using for the last decade or so in talking about this reading of later readings.
And it's not entirely satisfactory. Reception continues to sound passive, that there's something and you just receive it. Canon formation certainly sounds active, but it makes it sound like something gets canonized once and that's it. And so as I was actually working through the late stages of the book, I realized that no, really what I'm talking about is someone, someone or some groups of someone's, seizing something that really isn't theirs.
In the Japanese context, this shows the essay going from, as we've talked about, an elite male aristocracy to a somewhat wider but still very elite female readership. Then you get it taken over by the warrior class as political power moves from the court to succeeding military administrations and finally the big boom in the early modern period starting in the 17th century with urbanization, commodification, and print capitalism. And so the text can move across class lines, gender lines, and before these texts were published in the early modern period, the only way you could get one of these was by someone who had a manuscript and was willing to lend it to you. And the only way you could learn about it was to hire a nearest craft to lecture to you about it.
And then in the early modern period starting in the 17th century, the texts are printed, they get very cheap, lecture notes are printed, commentaries are printed. And then texts like the A.C. start being used for parodies and broadens popular culture. So it, you know, the aristocrats are particularly happy about that.
So in the middle of the medieval period they're actually supporting themselves by selling manuscripts and making copies of a talk. So it's a very complicated transaction and I think really is well characterized by the term of appropriation. Thank you. So to get into the details of what's happening in this particular case, which is this first appropriation, let's talk about some of the illustrations here.
So by the 12th century that you say, as you say in the book, it was a staple of aristocratic women's reading and actually a source text of telek Now the illustrations in this version of the text that you explore in this chapter represent a reading of the essay text that would appeal to these readers. Okay? You take us through different kinds of imaging and images that speak to this. Now to start us off, maybe give us an example, can you talk a little bit about what do we see in this reading of the essay that illustrates the concerns of aristocratic women?
How do we read this? And you talk about it in this chapter specifically in the context of what you call a feminine regard. I kind of proactive humanities. So can you talk about these issues in the context of how you're reading these particular images?
The feminine regard or regard is something I published earlier and I try to bring it in here. I didn't probably explain it as well as I might have. But it's a kind of complex of things that include masculine specularity, that is women being able to look at men, you know, the whole dynamics of the gaze. It includes also in verbal text expressions like look just like a picture.
And that is often used again for women looking at men and saying, oh, he looked just like a picture of a hero in a romantic tale. And it also has to do with a kind of absorption that women readers and viewers would have engaged in when looking at these illustrated tales and visual techniques in some of these illustrated works that actually kind of work against that. Push the viewer out of their absorption and call them to kind of take a somewhat more critical view of what they're reading. In this case, it should be said that drawing, ink drawing, was a polite accomplishment.
So when someone, when one of your female friends lent you one of these tales, the first thing you probably did was start copying it. And if it had illustrations, which they mostly did, you copied those two. And you might even add some illustrations of your own. I mean, ideas about authorship and whatnot were pretty loose.
So this earliest black and white version and it exists only in fragments seems to be an amateur copy of what might have been a professional polychrome original. The starting point for discussion of all these illustrations is that there are three illustrated versions of the essay that the standard explanation is all date from the 13th century. And this is really remarkable because in terms of pictorial style, they are radically different. They have almost nothing to do with each other, even though they're talking about the same little episode.
And so that was kind of the starting point is why are there these different modes of visualization and in each instance, who would they before? And so taking two of the earliest ones, this black and white one and something that's called the Kubo version, which is polychrome, we can look at the first episode. And the first episode, a young man goes out hunting into the countryside. He goes to the old capital, which has kind of been abandoned and run down.
And he just happens to peek into a house and he sees two beautiful women who would be, you know, when I teach this in class, I say, think, you know, New York models, man had models there in, you know, Surrey, right? They don't belong, right? So he's just blown away, falls in love and rips off a piece of his hunting road, writes a love poem into them and has it sent into them. Now, in the Kubo version, arguably, or even in the other 13th century version, we see, we come and we see the young man staring through the blinds at the women.
And this makes perfect sense. That's what the text says. This black and white version, however, we come in and we follow the gaze of a serving woman through the blinds to the young man sitting on the veranda of Livia's fur, writing his poem. So the picture has managed to completely reverse the visual dynamics.
Who has the gaze, who's the object of the gaze? And it seems to me for this and obviously a whole lot of other reasons. It makes sense to imagine that this was an illustrated or an illustrated mode that was designed to appeal to female readers. Awesome.
And there is, there are a whole lot of really wonderful readings of images like that in the chapter. There are also a whole lot of other really amazing texts in the book. So I want to guess what this one is. So the third chapter, it looks at one of these.
This is a text called the love song of Lord Takafusa. This is a very different kind of appropriation that you say. And here, as you put illusions, the text are actually used to create a new text. Now, this is, this sounds, at least from my perspective, to be a super groovy text.
This turns out to be a hundred poem story written by Fujiwara No Takafusa, who is a very successful courtier. So I'm going to put this in your hands. Can you introduce the nature of this text and why is it so important for us to understand in this part of the book? So Takafusa is a real historical human being, and he was serving in court under the time of the Taira, Taira No Kiomori.
This was the first military government that Japan kind of fell under. The Imperial family had split into competing groups, and they kept calling the warriors into kind of settled things. And at one point, one of the warrior groups tied aside, you know, we're tired of coming and then going back out to the school, we're just going to stay. And so they pretty much took over the court.
And Takafusa was one of the courtiers, and he was involved with a lady in waiting, Lady Kogō, who was suddenly kind of reassigned to the reigning emperor, Takakura. And it's very confusing, I'm afraid, that they've got the guy named Takafusa, then we have emperor Takakura, and if you're not just too late against, kind of confusing. But in any of that. So the main kind of the big work from the Spirit of Time is called the Tale of the Hey-K, the Hey-K, the Hey-K, the Hake, the Long Gautai.
And it tells us that, you know, after Lady Kogō was put into the service of emperor Takakura, she cut off all contact with Takafusa, and that was it. Takafusa, as you said, has a collection of 100 poems, and Japanese poems are very short. They're 31 syllables in five lines, and usually they are not used narratively. So this is very unusual to have a 100-poned narrative.
And it's basically just a long complaint about how he misses Lady Kogō. But through it is quite clear that they were still seeing each other, even while she was in service to the emperor. Part of what makes this text interesting is it represents a male appropriation of the vernacular and of the autobiographical. And the way he tells this story is kind of like the text called Becoming a Heroin.
He has read that he has internalized it, but the essay has in it. As a big element, but by no means the only one, a love triangle between an emperor, Nadi-Hira, and a future empress. And so he uses that as the model to tell his own tragic triangular love affair. And so there is a consonant illusion, two poems in the essay and two situations in the essay.
So he essentially rewrites his own life following the essay. And this is something that, you know, 100 years earlier would have been much more typical of female writer. And it's a really fascinating story. You also talk about this in the context of what you call a medievalization of the essay, right?
This sort of male protagonist or this masculine appropriation of the story. And also you note a stronger religious text. That's right. So this becomes one of the earliest examples of a kind of tragic love story.
And those stories which are a staple of medieval life are always focused on one protagonist, almost always a man who, after and after and after love affair, realizes the loser in nature of the real world. And, you know, to vote himself into Buddhist practice. So it's a kind of enlightenment story, unhappy love, enlightenment story, they could call it. And that's new.
And that's not really part of the court tradition. So it is taking that, and certainly not even ever did that. So it is definitely putting that basic structure into a much different use. Great.
So as we move from this to, again, the transition that you mentioned before from this court center to our soccer seat to a warrior-based community is part of the transformation that we see from text to the world. And we see from text to text. But we also now move from this text to the next chapter, which is a very different context and also a super fascinating context about a really gorgeous text and a really puzzling kind of text. So this is a chapter on the Kubo version of the stories.
And what happens here is the Tuckafoo says, tailed when we were just talking about is appropriated by a set of emperors. This is the Jumyulian emperors who claimed him as one of their ancestors. And this becomes really important for understanding the political context of these appropriations. So we're really fascinating way.
So chapter four focuses on the East Amogatadi A with the second oldest, East Amogatadi A. Yeah, the Amaki A, whatever. Great. This is the Kubo version of the text.
So to sort of get us into what's so fascinating about the text, it's gorgeous. There's gold and silver sprinklings. There are these really fascinating underpaintings. Can you basically open up the nature of the text and describe it for a second?
Yeah, again, like the Black and White, Hakuville version, it exists in a very fragmentary form. We only have, I don't know, six pictures and maybe three pieces of text. They've now been remounted into one scroll, but they're out of order. And as I was saying, the pictures are illuminated.
They're just encrusted with silver and gold, which is such contrast from the amateurish, Black and White of the earlier version. The text passages are calligraphed over underpaintings that through hidden words and images seem to allude to yet other episodes of the essay. So there's actually some parts of the images and you point this out in the text. The tree trunk is actually stylized.
Right, through interlepts. That's right. And so you can see what those are, those words don't appear in the text that's calligraphed over it, therefore it must be some other episode. And you join the scholarly fray of trying to figure out what it is.
But my point here is that this has become a symbolic object. It is cultural capital. It is not someone, some woman sitting by herself reading it. It is a political statement.
And it is reaffirming the importance of traditional Japanese, heon-korean culture in the face of a kind of wave of imports from the continent, new song style calligraphy emphasis on Zen Buddhism. And the, as you said, the imperial household itself is broken into a junior and senior line. And this senior line is a line itself with traditional culture while the junior line is championing some of the more recent imports. Right.
And so you make a point here in addition to leading us through the importance of the kind of puzzling out of what are these under paintings referred to because for listeners who haven't yet had a chance to read the text, it might not be obvious. It's not at all immediately clear what these scenes and the under paintings refer to, right? Which scene is it? And so it becomes a kind of game or puzzle.
And some of the chapter talks about that and takes us through that process. But as well, you talk about this is a very, very political work. And this is a concern that is worked out even further in the next chapter. So this is a chapter, chapter five.
Now that talks about the, it brings us back to the love song of Lord Takusa, who we were just talking about. And it looks at the love song of Lord Takusa illustrated scroll. So this is now done in a planning style, just like the versions of the text, the illustrations that we were talking about in the context of the production by women. Right.
Right. Right. And it's very different. So the chapter argues, and I'm just going to lay this out and ask you to kind of open this up.
Okay. The chapter argues that this illustrated scroll is also the product of the Jameoian court or the same court that produced the kubo version of the text that we just talked about. Okay. So what's going on there?
Why would these emperors illustrate a text that's basically about Imperial cuckolding? Remember this love trying and sort of what's happening? Right. Right.
Well, so we can go back to the Lord Takusa song of Lord Takusa text first. Because the last thing I consider in that chapter is why it's not less match a stick. It makes it clear that, you know, Takusa and Kogob were still having intimate relations, even though she was a service to Emperor Takukoda. How do you get away with that?
And first, it needs to be said that virginity has almost never had any cultural importance in Japan, except maybe from the early modern period onwards. And in the tale of Genji, one of the emperors has a lady in waiting that he's very fond of, but he, whom he knows is still seeing Genji. So there is that kind of permissiveness, but it's actually possible historically, even though, and it's where the picture scroll becomes relevant, in the picture scroll, the emperor, Emperor Takukoda is presented as an adult, essentially looking the same age or perhaps older than Takafusa. In fact, he was much younger.
And so it's clear that even when Lady Kogob was put into his service, he was still prepubescent. And that, until he reached his majority, so to speak, became master of his castle or whatever, it was not seen as less match a stay for her to be involved with someone else. I suspect that once he did become sexually active, then all his women were out of bounds. And then what Takafusa can do is turn that into a beautiful plate.
It in a way affirms the authority of the emperor, because we know that's not happening anymore, and the emperor wins in the sense that Kogob does not stay with Takafusa. The emperor dies pretty soon, but regardless. And so then we look at this re-appropriation, or this appropriation of the Takafusa story in a time when we have this division between imperial court. And my argument is that the Takafusa scroll makes a wonderful pendant to the Kubo scroll.
We have the classic Kubo with just heavy pigmentation and gold and silver, and then we have this incredibly elegant black and white version that's not amateurish by any sense. It's just absolutely exquisite. And it's more recent. And more to the point, it turns out that Takafusa, who's not really a household name in Japan at all, but he actually was the, well, the progenitors of the imperial line of, starting back three generations from the imperial world.
And the people who were commissioning these roles. And again, this is an interesting moment in Japanese history where, let's back up for a moment, the role of Japanese poetry in the imperial court. The place you, as a poet, the place you wanted one of your poems to appear was in what was known as an imperial anthology. The emperor would say, okay, let's gather a group of people together and say, I want an anthology of a thousand poems of the best poems of ancient times and modern times that haven't appeared in any of the previous imperial anthologies.
And there were ultimately 21 of them. So the commissioning of poetry anthologies was an imperial prerogative. And when the imperial family started splintering, so did the poetic houses. Poetry was largely hereditary right.
And so each, the two junior and senior imperial lines had schools of poetry associated with them that had their own stylistic ideas. I mean, to us, they might not call that different, but they were vitally important to them. And in this time, in fact, the senior imperial line was intimately connected with Kyogoku School of Poets. And as a matter of fact, an interesting thing that changes over time is to what extent the emperors themselves are poets.
In the earlier period, they aren't so much as this is gross simplification. But at this period of time, they were very, very involved in poetry. And so the Prime Minister, Kyogoku Tanyin, was actually the leader of this poetry school. He served as a tutor to the Crown Prince in La La La La La.
So, and Takafus's poetry, which is actually from before that period, is kind of Kyogoku-style poetry of Omeletra. It's unusually, traditionally in Japanese poetry, love poetry is expressed through natural imagery. Cherry Blossom's crying, dear, da da da da da. His love poetry is amazingly prosaic.
He just says, you know, I'm feeling awful, and when I wonder why I realize it's your fault, that's the poem. And so Kyogoku was known for this kind of one hand divorce of natural imagery from its love poetry. On the other hand, in its nature poetry, some real attention to my new ship, two little moments of natural phenomenon. And one can kind of see that in Takafus's poetry.
And so here's, you know, they've got this model of Nadi Hira as the what's called the Miyadio, the Courtney Man, the Man of Elegance. And here they have one of their own ancestors from, you know, just a few generations earlier, who's kind of like a new avatar of it. And so I think that's why they seized on it and used it in this kind of political capital way along with the easy. Great.
Thank you so much. Fabulous. So after a chapter devoted to this, we have a chapter that looks at tantric commentaries and popular humor and looks at a set of scrolls called the variant EC Scrolls, or easy stories illustrated scrolls. The variant EC stories illustrated scrolls.
Now, this is a super fascinating text as well. The text of this work diverges as you point out in this chapter from the standard version of BC. And you raise a major question, who probably made this version of the text and why did they make this version? And there's all kinds of scholarly debate around this.
And this chapter kind of plugs into that scholarly debate and unravels it in a way that's very useful. So there's a theory that you're responding to here. So the text is related to esoteric tantric interpretations of ESA from the late Kamakura period. Now, you argue against this and also argue against this periodization.
So can you maybe open this up for us? Yeah. So one of the more bizarre appropriations of the ESA has to be something that happened in the provinces away from Kyoto in the Kamakura period, where it was interpreted as a tantric text. That Nari Hira was a Bodhisattva who brought enlightenment through sexual intercourse to thousands of women.
And there was a way through Al Goree's history to read the text to make it mean that. And Susan Klein is the American scholar who's really done the most of the major work on this. In this picture scroll, the E-Home, the variant text, we see Nari Hira seeming in conversation with the gods Sumi Ochi, who's kind of a god of poetry. And there is the kind of dean of the ESA studies, Kata Gedio Echi, has really wanted to see this text as somehow related to these tantric texts.
But if you look at the episodes of those tantric text reference, they by and large don't overlap with the scenes that are chosen for this very abbreviated version of the ESA. And to me the kind of clincher one is we call it the ESA stories because one of the 125 episodes is about Nari Hira having sex with the ESA creases. And the theory is that this story among the 125 was spoken to be so conspicuous popped out so much that it just kind of gave the name to the whole collection. So it's not the case that this is stories all about the ESA province or the late ESA or it's just the stories about the ESA creases and all those other ones.
Anyway, so that episode itself has its textual problems, which I've gone into in a royal Tyler and I have done a translation of the ESA Mungafetti, so the notes are all there. But by and large it was generally accepted that they actually had had sex and indeed there was a belief that their descendants were still living and people could identify who they are. And you would think that if you were doing a tantric interpretation of the text you might play that up pretty much. Certainly you wouldn't play it down.
And yet the illustration to that scene in the Ephon variant version has Nari Hira sitting on the veranda with the ESA version. The ESA creases behind what's called the curtain of state looking very decorous and also the way the text is written. It makes it pretty clear that this version of the system is suggesting that they did not have sex. So then you get into why did anyone bother with this text?
Why did they make this this this way? And a number of dollars have pointed out that in the early Muromachi periods, let's say the early 1300s, these formerly esoteric commentaries that would get passed on through rituals. We're actually starting to circulate publicly. And where this is most obvious and kind of kick off the whole reception studies of ESA in the early 60s, I guess, is in no place.
There are a number of no place that are based on ESA Mungafetti. And some of them referenced the esoteric commentaries explicitly. And no players were in no playwrights were the dragons of society. So if these formerly aristocratic esoteric commentaries are getting even down to them, then they must not be very esoteric anymore.
And in fact, they seem to have been viewed rather humorously. And so I argue that actually there's a lot of humor in this illustrated version, which no one really has argued for before. And we'll see whether I'm able to convince anyone to talk. So the chapter also, just to mention for listeners that they know it's there, it ends by looking at a fictional fan matching contest from the Muromachi period.
And there's actually a translation of that work as an appendix in this volume. Right, done by Teller Kimbro. And there's also, we should say, a complete translation of the Taka Fusa scroll has a kind of what's called a Choka, a long poem that is actually replaced by the last 30 poems of the 100 poem sequence. And that's written out in its entirety, and I translated that in one day of fantasy.
So if you're interested in that scroll, you now actually have the text to go with. It also means, or it also makes the volume among other things really useful for teaching as well. Any time we can have sources like this available is a good thing. So as we move to the last few chapters of the book, we move to a chapter, chapter seven that looks at the SAGA edition, EC stories, and gives us a window into the importance of the emergence of print culture and print technology to the transformation of iconography and also as a moment in the iconography of the text.
So this chapter shows, among other things, that the iconography in this particular text, the SAGA edition EC stories, does not, as previous scholars have argued, reflect some standardized iconography of the EC but instead represents the invention of a standardized iconography that was probably produced by a member of a particular school, a condo school that was diffused thanks to this print technology. So can you just kind of briefly tell us a little bit about why is it important for us to understand this in the larger context of the scholarship around this text? Why is this crucial as part of your argument? Yeah, many art historians, Japanese art historians have wanted to, well, okay, let's go this way.
There are, as you said, schools of Japanese art, and the two biggest ones, although they're kind of asymmetrical in terms of size, are the Kano School and the Toes of School. And the Kano were patronized, were kind of the official painters for successive military governments, and they used a kind of Chinese derived style. And whereas the Toes of were responsible for the indigenous Yamato-e Japanese style, and, you know, so if you think about pictures for the Tale of Genji, you would expect them to be in Toes of Style. And as I say in the introduction, there's evidence for some sort of solidification of iconography for the Tale of Genji very, very early.
And being that the essay is such an important text, it really is just kind of mind-boggling if the Toes of School did not have a set iconography. I admit the mind-bogglingness of it. I am not however responsible for explaining why they don't, or didn't. I'm just trying to establish that.
In fact, they did not. And so the Saga-Bon, the Saga edition, is a printed edition. It is, in fact, the first printed illustrated vernacular literary piece in Japanese history. So it's been printed, and it's the first one.
They were using a really awkward printing process. It's actually movable print, but made out of wood. And, you know, given how thin the cartographic line is and that you're not using a press, you're burnishing it, kind of a disaster. In any of that, it was a luxury good.
It was done by a group of artists in Kyoto. As much, I think as a curiosity, as anything else, the papers are different colors. You know, it's lovely, but it's a little eccentric. But it does have, I've forgotten, 48 illustrations.
And previous artists very much wanted to see, wanted to imagine, or to prove, that those must have been based on toasted school iconography. And I'm not alone. I'm based on some other Japanese scholars' work show that, you know, one can find something that looks like differing iconographic lineages as represented by a text that is in the British Library, and one is in the Chester B.D. in Ireland, in Dublin.
And you can actually see the Saga artists picking and choosing and combining them along with, you know, some other sources. So what's important is that this standardization of the e-say iconography was not some gradual process, but was actually enabled by print technology. And so is inherently early modern. And that seems to me an important take-home message, especially that then because you have this booming print culture now having an established iconography, you can do lots of things with it.
You can do parodies of it. And you know, use it in theatrical performances. This guy's living. You can use it for brothel advertisements.
So it is the moment of commodification. And it's, I think, important to see that in its historical moment. Now, in contrast, so the next chapter, which is the final body chapter for the epilogue, kind of is in dialogue with what's happening in this chapter. And this chapter is looking at the iconography of the variant e-say stories illustrated, or it's looking at another text, right?
So the iconography of this variant e-say stories illustrated scrolls from chapter six is appropriated in the early 17th century by Talwaraya, Sotatsu, right? And his Atelier. And they're using the imagery from that text that we talked about in chapter six as a kind of visual secret transmission. And you're sort of arguing here that they are creating an iconography based on rare additions of scrolls owned by high status individuals, which is actually creating a kind of niche market in the face of the sort of commodification that's coming out of the explosion of the print culture that we just talked about in the previous chapter.
Precisely, I can't tell you how encouraged I am that you got that. It's totally clear. It's totally good. That's what it's like.
So, what's just to kind of give us a little piece of what's happening here because I can't see a reference to secret transmission and not ask about it. Secret transmission. Well, yeah, he did. So, the people who created the saga edition, as I said, they were a group.
They were financed by someone named Sumino Gurdaso on their cartographic style was based on that of Co-Etsu, who was a so-on, a calligraphy teacher. And so Tatsu was involved in a lot of saga-bone additions, especially of no place. And yet, it's clear that the saga-edition illustrations are not by him. Why not?
And then it turns out that he's creating this completely different iconography about maybe a decade after the saga-bone. Why is he doing that? So Tatsu is kind of a mystery artist, not a lot of snowing about him. And when research got really serious into him after the war, Professor Yamune, people started discovering that he's kind of a pastiche artist, that especially for figural stuff he does.
The main work I talk about is what's called their album leaves. But I also discuss his large screen paintings. I also did scrolls. And as I said, he did stuff for printed works.
In an event, in almost every case, if you have a figure in one of his paintings, it has been lifted from some earlier illustrated scroll. And this is particularly true with the essay. His appropriation of imagery for the essay seems to go in, and I'm using he, just as a place marker, right? He's got three stages.
So the earliest when he's doing fans, and the Talaw Daya was actually a fan shop. That was their main business. Those are coming directly out of the variant illustrated scroll that we discussed earlier. And to be honest with you, if he had inappropriate that stuff, probably no one would pay attention to the e-home version because it exists only in a 19th century copy.
So they would have said, well, this is just clearly of no historical artistic value at all. But of course he was given access to that scroll. That is the scroll we now have just a copy of by an aristocrat. And all the scrolls that he accessed were owned by people like Retired Empower Gomise and all that.
And it is such a small group of people. They are so related through marriage and also through poetic practice, they're all Ringo poets. His audience would have recognized it. Oh yeah, I know where you got that one.
Oh, there's an illusion to such and such. So in that sense, it's kind of like a secret transmission. You don't have to say anything, but everyone recognizes it. And this is in contrast distinction too, obviously.
I don't know what their attitudes about it were. That's not the kind of work I do. But it was so on horrified. I mean, what happens very early by about the 1620s, maybe even 30s, is that those printings of the saga edition that had been done in moveable print are converted to block print.
Because it's very easy to do, right? You just get a copy, you take out the page, you paste it onto one block of wood, you re-carve it, and there you go. So that's what led to the proliferation of that text, was that it was being printed in a much cheaper medium. And was so on horrified that it was going to the white boy, I have no idea.
But the Sotatsu imagery is clearly distinct from it. Now there again, it's an Ataliye. I'm following some recent arguments that suggest that the 36 album leaves that I'm looking at, in fact, form a set. Others.
And there are album leaves that are of the same scene, so obviously they couldn't have been for the same project. But that was done for a specific clientele on a specific occasion, actually the death of so on. But, you know, Sotatsu had an Ataliye, it was a commercial place, and eventually this distinctive iconography simply becomes another commodity. It's not, people don't know what rare text is from.
They just know that it's that style, and that's a style that in the modern period we call Rinpa. So we are almost at the end of our time, and I don't want to keep you for another half hour, which we could easily do in talking about the epilogue. So I'll just mark for listeners. There is an epilogue that's full of, among other things, some amazingly beautiful images, some really, really arresting images.
This epilogue looks at the fate of the essay and its iconographies from the Edo through the modern era. So it takes us fairly late. So what looks at, among other things, the position of the essay and the construction of a modern canon of national Japanese literature, Japanese national literature, it looks at the reclamation of the essay as a feminine text. I'm using air quotes here.
You can't hear me. I'm using air quotes by women of the Taishu period in the 20th century. It also looks at the role of the essay in reformulating Japanese culture after the defeat in the Asia Pacific War and in the context of post war, boom, smooth economic and educational. And again, some of the images here are really, really striking, and I just want to direct listeners, particularly, I keep opening my copy of the book to that chapter and looking at the last two images, and it's just amazing stuff.
So Joshua, there's a ton of material in the book that we didn't have a chance to talk about. It's a really rich text, and there's amazing, as I hopefully have already made clear, amazing images as well. Is there anything in particular that we didn't have a chance to talk about, but that you'd like to mention for listeners? No, actually not.
I think of the epilogue as a bonus track, and it's not done with the same scholarly rigor, perhaps, as the other ones. I want anonymous readers from the press that you're not going to leave us there. Come on, can't you tell us a little bit about what happened then? And so it's just an opportunity to trace that and rather brought out by us, but as you say, with really some marvelous images that I try to do some justice in analyzing.
So now that the book is out, congratulations on very much a beautiful text in many respects. What's next for you? Are there any projects that are currently inspiring you? I'm continuing with this idea that I'm now calling popular literary literacy.
So there's been a fair amount of work over the last few years in Japanese studies about popular literacy. What could peasants read, and what could they, what could shop girls read, especially in the early modern period? And that's fine. I mean, there's been a fascination with Japanese literacy rates since I think the first European landed on Japan shores.
It's always seemed to have been a very high rate. And, you know, by the 19th century, even before the Meiji restoration, you have genre of popular literature designed specifically for female readers. So clearly, you know, there was a high degree of literacy, but I'm interested specifically on popular. So rather than, which some of my earlier work has done, looking at, you know, early modern scholars say about, and I'm going back to the 100 poets anthology, there are popular editions with little interpretations and again illustrations of the meaning of the poem.
And so I'm going back to that, back to the 100 poets, and now looking at, you know, a variety of genre popular retellings and humorous parodies and stuff like that, how well these poems were known and how they were known. And that's actually involved with a digitization project we're doing here at the library of a collection of these books that from the wonderful sponsorship of the Toshi Foundation, which will be eventually online, digitized and online, like the Tokavala Math question is. Awesome. Well, that's a lot with that project.
And thank you so much. It's really been a pleasure and congratulations. Well, thank you so much for inviting me. You have been listening to new books in East Asian Studies.
Thanks very much for joining us, and we will see you next time.