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Katō Shūichi's new history of Japanese literature will be completed with the publication of its second volume, promised by the publisher for 1980, and advertised as “tak[ing] the story from the end of the Muromachi period … to the present day”). Whatever critical response ultimately greets the project, no one is likely to complain that the author tried to keep us in the dark about the theoretical assumptions, much less the analytical approach, that he means to bring to bear upon his subject. Indeed, the entire long introduction (pp. 1–26) with which the first volume of Katō's history begins is an exposition of the author's working hypotheses, under five main subheadings. We are told that “[b]y tracing these factors and seeing how they interrelate, a clear picture of the structure of Japanese literature emerges and it becomes possible to present an orderly account of the history of that literature …” (p. 1). After giving this remarkably clear statement of his analytic work-plan, the author at once plunges into his main task, in chapters on “The Age of the Manyōshū,” “The Age of the Genji monogatari and the Konjaku monogatari,” and “The Age of Nō and Kyōgen.”
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- Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1980
References
† Roy Andrew Miller is Professor of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington.
1 Kokutai no Hongi (Tokyo: Monbushō, 1937);Google ScholarKokutai No Hongi, Cardinal Principles of the National Entity of Japan, trans. Gauntlett, John Owen, ed. Hall, Robert King (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1949), cited infra as “original” and “trans.”Google Scholar
2 Most importantly by Watanabe Kazuo and Nakanishi Susumu; for an introduction to the bibliography, see my paper “Some Old Paekche Fragments,” Journal of Korean Studies 1 (1979): 6, n. 6,Google Scholar and Nakanishi's, Man'yō no shi to shijin (Tokyo: Yayoi shobō, 1972) (Yayoi sensho 22), pp. 174Google Scholar ff. In his article “Hakusuki-no-e igo,” Kodai Bunka 10 (Autumn 1976): 20–36, Nakanishi identifies specific text parallels between poems by Okura and poems from the Old Korean hyangga corpus (pp. 28 ff.).
3 This work began with a long review by Yoshitaka, Iriya in Chūgoku Bungakuhō 20(1965): 130–48,Google Scholar of Noriyuki's, Kojima edition of the Kaifōso, Bunka shūreishū, and Honchō monzui that appeared as vol. 69 ofthe Nihon koten bungaku taikei (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1964);Google Scholar the bibliography since then is too voluminous to summarize.
4 First announced to the West in Konishi Jin'ichi, “Association and Progression: Principles of Integration in Anthologies and Sequences of Japanese Court Poetry,” HJAS 21 (1958): 67–127Google Scholar; again, the subsequent bibliography, both in Japan and in the West, has been substantial.
5 Particularly important and interesting are subsequent studies that have begun to take the principles rediscovered by Konishi and his school back into the period of Old Japanese poetry. Recent examples include Cranston, Edwin A., “Five Poetic Sequences from the Manyôshû,” Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 13 (1978): 5–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Yasushi, Nagafuji, KodaiNihon bungaku to jikan ishiki (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1979), pp. 71Google Scholar ff., where Man'yōshū 147–55 are studied as an early sequence integrated by temporal progression.
6 Shinkōkai, Nippon Gakujutsu, The Manyōshū: One Thousand Poems (1940; rpt. with a foreword by Keene, Donald, New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965,Google Scholar 1969)
7 But note that when a Man'yōoshū poem cited by Katō appears in the Gakujutsu Shinkōkai translation, that translation is here reproduced verbatim (e.g., pp. 61, 62, 63), but without acknowledgement of the source. Similarly, the Kojiki poem translations on p. 48 are both taken without acknowledgement from Philippi, Donald L., Kojiki (Tokyo: Univ. of Tokyo Press, 1968), pp. 241–42 and 248.Google Scholar Apparently the concerns of the "indigetim nous Japanese world view," like those of kokutai before it, take precedence over copyright considerations.
8 Hisamatsu Sen'ichi, Man'yō shūka 1.191–92 (Tokyo: Kddansha, 1976)Google Scholar (Kodansha gakujutsu bunko, 2), on Man'yōshū 63.
9 Hisamatsu, Sen'ichi, Biographical Dictionary of Japanese Literature (Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International Ltd. in collaboration with the International Society for Educational Information, 1976)Google Scholar. The International Society for Educational Information has its offices at 7–8 Shintomi 2- chome, Chūō-ku, Tokyo 104.
10 That is, the lost Chinese Urtext whose existence must be postulated to account for the testimonia represented by surviving texts such as those cited in Kojima Noriyuki's note on p. 451b to poem 7 of the Kaifūsō in his 1964 edition cited in note 3 supra. This textual problem is examined in detail by Susumu, Nakanishi in his essay “Ōtsuno-miko no shūhen,” pp. 29–48 in his Man'yōshū no kotoba to kokoro (Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbunsha, 1975), esp. pp. 42–43Google Scholar. A Buddhist monk from Silla named Hyangsim played the Rasputin in the plot that eventually destroyed Prince Ōtsu, more evidence Katō conveniently overlooks of the role of Korean Buddhism in Japanese life of the period. Also ignored are Iriya's comments on both the grammar and the received text of this poem in his 1965 review cited in note 3 supra, pp. 139–40
11 The manuscript itself was destroyed by fire during the 15 April 1945 bombing of Tokyo; subsequent work on the document has had to be based on photographs taken before that event, Nothing is known of the history of the manuscript before the mid-nineteenth century, when it came to light in the collection of the seventy-fifth abbot of the Chion'in in Kyoto; if he had not had the bad judgment to sell it to a Tokyo collector, it would still be available for firsthand study. The authori- tative publication on the manuscript is Norio, Nakada, Tōdaiji fujumon-kō no kokugo-teki kenkyū (Tokyo: Kazama shōbo, 1969)Google Scholar.
12 Nakada, pp. 351–52.
13 Sankashū poem 77 in the edition of Keijirō, Kazamaki and Yoshio, Kojima, Nihon koten bungaku taikei, vol. 29 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1961), p. 32Google Scholar.