Introduction
Robert Huey
Translatorsf Note: We suggest that the reader look at the Postscript first, before reading the poems, even though it was placed at the end of the second scroll precisely as a postscript. It sets the scene very nicely and helps the reader understand the situation better.
The year is 1782, the second year of the Tenmei Era. Emperor Kōkaku is in the second year of his reign, and Tokugawa Ieharu is in his 22nd year as Shogun. Both are facing significant challenges. After a decade of off and on regional disasters, a nationwide famine begins in this year and lasts for several years, triggering significant economic and political disruption. But the guests who gathered at Mokubo-ji temple in the Eighth Month of 1782 for an evening of literary diversion seemed unaffected by all this. (See pictures on p. 89 and p. 125.)
On the east bank of the Sumida River in modern-day Tokyo, across from the more renowned Sensō-ji temple in Asakusa, Mokubo-ji was, and is, most famous for being the place where Umewaka-maru is said to have died and is even now enshrined. Featured in the early 15th century Nō play Sumidagawa, Umewaka-maru, child of a Kyoto lady, had been kidnapped by slave traders. His distraught mother searched for him and finally caught up with him by the Sumida River. Unfortunately, she was too late. He had fallen ill, and the slave traders had abandoned him to die. She arrived in time to see a service being held at his gravesite. She had a brief glimpse of him as a ghost, but in the end even that spectral trace disappeared. The tragic story caught the imagination of urban Edo, and Umewaka-maru became something of a pop hero through scroll paintings and woodblock prints. Mokubo-ji benefited from this association, though today it draws few visitors. But again, our guests at Mokubo-ji in the Eighth Month of 1782 pay no apparent mind to this dramatic tale.
Instead, they gather on the temple veranda as the evening cools, to drink saké, enjoy the blooming bush clover (hagi) and the humming of autumn insects, most notably the bell cricket (suzumushi) and the pine cricket (matsumushi). Since ancient times in China, the humming of insects in autumn has been a common poetic trope indicating loneliness, the dying of the year, and so on. [see Hilson Reidpath: “The Many ‘Voices’ of Crickets,” in this publication] Though the exact entomological identification of these two crickets has changed over time, from a literary standpoint, it is their names that are important. The suzu in suzumushi refers to a small bell with a pellet inside that causes its ringing sound – what we would call a “jingle” bell. The bell cricket’s trilling sound resembles the sound of such a bell. The matsu in matsumushi is a pun on two words: “pine,” as in pine tree, and “pine” as in to pine or long for someone. The pine cricket makes a shorter, sharper sound, often taken in poetry as a cry of longing, or assertion, or even warning.
Our guests are a poetic lot, led by two famous teachers of waka – Katō Chikage (1736–1808) and Kamo no Suetaka (1754–1841) – and including local town leaders, a fairly high-ranking “warrior,” a doctor or two, and possibly two ladies whose identities are uncertain. Inspired by the atmosphere, and by a similar literary event over eight hundred years before, called the Kishi Naishinnō Senzai Uta-awase (Princess Kishi’s Garden Poetry Contest) of 972,1 they decided to hold a poetry contest, (▼1)dividing into two teams – Left and Right – to match the literary virtues of the bell cricket and pine cricket in ten rounds of poems, one poem from each team per round, for a total of twenty poems. These were judged by Suetaka, though it is clear that the merits of each poem were discussed by the group, so he did not make his judgments unilaterally.
The group then made suhama (we call them “arrangements” in this project) to illustrate each poem, and contested and judged those arrangements, too. [see Francesca Pizarro: “The Poetry of Things,” in this publication.] The arrangements often introduced a literary reference to the Heian period, as well, and the skill with which this reference was illustrated by the arrangement was part of the criteria for judgment, which was made by Chikage, though again with discussion among the group. Then – just as people do with a beautiful plate of food nowadays – they felt the need to capture the images, so they had a talented painter (or painters?) paint the arrangements onto a scroll on which calligrapher and kokugaku scholar Mishima Kageo (AKA Mishima Jikan, 1727–1812), who also participated in the contest, had carefully recorded the poems and judgments.
Actually, it is impossible to tell how much of this project was pre-planned, and how much was spontaneous. Perhaps the drinking and poetry started it all. In any case, the arrangements, which are quite elaborate, could not have been made quickly, nor could the painters have completed their task without sketching and practice. Furthermore, at least one contestant had bell crickets brought in from Sendai just for the occasion – something that could not have been done overnight. It is more likely that the arrangements were imagined and designed by the team members, then given to artisans to execute. Even then, the arrangements show considerable knowledge of literary history, and the judgments contain lengthy quotations from older works – possible but not likely to do without reference books and research. On the other hand, there are a few historical “mistakes” in the judgments, so it seems that some of the discussions among the participants relied on memory rather than documents at hand.
The event was, in fact, part of a series of similar activities held over the course of several years that all pointed toward a revival of the courtly values and activities of the Heian period.(▼2) Given the perilous straits of Japan’s economic situation at the time, it initially struck us as elitist, to say the least. In fact, one of the participants, Doi Toshinari (1748–1813) – the very one who had imported the crickets from Sendai – was a daimyo whose constituents had filed a formal complaint against him for ignoring the problems in his domain and instead taking part in what they considered to be frivolous activities such as tea ceremony and poetry events like the one here.
Yet this Heian revival was not without its own political undertones. Its organizers, Chikage, Suetaka, and Kageo, had studied directly or indirectly under the kokugaku scholar Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769), whose efforts to recover Japan’s past were an implicit critique of the corrupt Tokugawa Bakufu and its incompetence in handling Japan’s crises. [see Tanya Barnett: “The Poetics of Nostalgia: Kokugaku and the Jūban Mushi-awase,” in this publication] Reviving an old political system centered on the emperor turned out to be exactly how the Meiji Restoration was accomplished less than a century later. Yet one senses that the group that gathered at Mokubo-ji in 1782 did not have revolution, much less imperialism, on their mind.
What attracted our University of Hawaiʻi team to this project in the first place, especially given that all but myself on the team are modern literature specialists? Several grad students and faculty from UH had been volunteering at the Honolulu Museum of Art, helping to catalog the Lane Collection after receiving training from the museum staff and a team of scholars from the National Institute of Japanese Literature. One day, the Lane Collection Research Associate, Ms. Kiyoe Minami, showed some of us the two scrolls that make up the Jūban Mushi-awase, and we were immediately taken. [see also Kiyoe Minami: “What Jūban Mushi-awase Emaki has brought to education in Hawaiʻi,” in this publication] Even before we knew anything about it, we were attracted by the richness of the mountings, the vivid details of the paintings, and the poems and written judgments (which we could scarcely read). And the sheer oddity of seeing twenty set paintings each of which had a cricket placed in it somewhere…. One of our students, Hilson Reidpath, said “We must do something with this!” We decided it would be a worthy task to try and transcribe, then translate the text so that the museum would have something for signage if they ever exhibited the scrolls. We saw it as a real-life way to learn how to read Japanese cursive script (kuzushiji) and to use our experience reading traditional Japanese poetry to interpret poems we had never seen and which had no annotations to guide us.
Little did we know what we were getting into! I remember six of us spending over three hours one afternoon trying to decipher just one of the poems, and even then, we could not get the whole thing! Grad students have their own work to worry about, so it became obvious that our grand plan would not likely come to fruition, yet most of the group wanted to continue as best we could just because of how unusual an opportunity it was.
Then, Dr. Teiko Morita, a scholar doing research in the general area of Edo poetry activities in this period, learned of the Lane Collection scrolls. She had been studying this very contest, and others like it in the Chikage/Suetaka group, and had just learned of this Lane Collection version. She flew to Honolulu, and by happy chance, our team of students and profs was available the day she came to the HoMA to look at the scrolls. In those two hours, everything she told us about the background of the contest further whetted our own enthusiasm, which in turn energized Prof. Morita. She was excited because the Lane Collection set was, she believed, a “presentation version” of the text – a set of scrolls that had been carefully painted and calligraphed on paper and mountings of the highest quality, evidently to be presented to someone of very high rank.
She returned to Japan, obtained funding for an international collaborative project, and we have been working together ever since early 2021. The pandemic was actually a blessing in one way: we ended up meeting monthly on Zoom so that our collaboration was truly ongoing – something we could not have done just by e-mail or a one or two-time visit to each other.
The collaboration has been a stimulating experience for all concerned. Naturally, the UH team learned immeasurably as the Japan scholars shared their painstaking research and approach with us. At the same time, we contributed some key observations, and also brought a broader perspective to the project. We were encouraged to add our own annotations to our work, even if in some cases we took a different tack than our Japanese counterparts. Thus, the English translation is not “just” a translation of the Japanese original and the scholarly notes provided by the Japan team, but is a product of our own scholarship, as well. [see Andre Haag: “Lost and Found in Translation of the Jūban Mushi-awase Scrolls,” in this publication] Furthermore, it was a boon to have Kiyoe Minami as part of the project. More than once she dug into the Lane Collection database and produced documentary evidence to help resolve a question the research team had encountered.
Jonathan Zwicker (UC Berkeley), though not part of the translation work team, provided historical framing at the start and end of the project. [see Jonathan Zwicker: Along the “River of Death”: On the Fate of the Mokubo-ji after the “Jūban Mushi-awase,” in this publication ] In the early stages of our Zoom meetings, Bonny McClure, a graduate student at Berkeley, also participated and offered some excellent input, but the demands of her own graduate program made continued participation impossible.
Translation Note: Following the original text, we generally use the terms “Left” and “Right” in our translation to refer to poets, poems, or arrangements from the Left team and Right team respectively. Unless otherwise noted, all translations in the text and notes are our own. In Romanizations, we followed modified Hepburn, except we spell the particle “o” as “wo.” As it was not feasible to reproduce all the paintings twice (once for the Japanese section and again for the English), the English reader of the print version of this book will need to refer to the reproductions of each round on pp. 20-23 and pp. 24-44 in the Japanese section. The scroll layout can be found on pp. 20-23 of the Japanese section, and detailed views of each round from p. 24 through p. 44. Please note that the scroll reads from right to left, and in poetry contest, the Left takes precedence over the right. So, on the pages that show closeups of each page, the illustration on the top right is actually the painting for the Left team, and vice versa. Below them is a close-up of the judgment text for each round. Other illustrations are cross-referenced in the text.
1 Princess Kishi had her garden planted with autumn flowers and plants, and stocked it with pine and bell crickets. The participants composed poems about the merits of each insect, and also created tray landscapes (suhama). Teiko Morita argues that this event inspired the Jūban Mushi-awase. Morita Teiko, “Jūhasseiki Mono-awase no Fukkō to ‘Jūban Mushi-awase Emaki,’” Kagami, #52 (Daitōkyū Kinen Bunko, March 2022), pp. 82-86.
2 Morita Teiko, “An’ei Tenmeiki Edo Kadan no Issokumen: ‘Sumidagawa Ōgi-awase’ o Tegakari toshite,” Gazoku, 4, January 31, 1997 (Kyushu University Gazokukai), pp. 111-114. Or, Morita Teiko, Kinsei Gabundan no Kenkyū (Tokyo: Kyūko Shoin, 2013).