Review Author(s): Rein Raud Review by: Rein Raud
Source: Japanese Language and Literature, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Oct., 2001), pp. 181-183
Published by: American Association of Teachers of Japanese
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/489696
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American Association of Teachers of Japanese is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve
and extend access to Japanese Language and Literature lOMoAR cPSD| 40799667 REVIEWS
Rhetorical Devices of the Kokinshiu: A Structrual Analysis of Japanese Waka Poetry
By Jon LaCure. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997. Japanese Studies, vol.4. 203 pp. $89.95. Reviewed by Rein Raud
This study of the rhetoric of Kokinwakasha, or Kokinsha, by Jon LaCure
"attempts to take an analytical and exhaustive approach to ... [the] liter-ary
devices" (p. 10) used in this first imperially sponsored anthology of
classical Japanese poetry, which appeared in early tenth century. The
book consists of a short introduction, a chapter dedicated to each of the
major poetic tropes of traditional Japanese poetics, i.e., the pillow-word
(makurakotoba), the preface (joshi), the pivot-word (kakekotoba), and
the song-pillow (utamakura). Each trope is described and analyzed against
a number of carefully chosen examples, in turn illustrated by poems from the
anthology and rendered by the author into reasonably exact, but most
of the time quite enjoyable English. A final chapter investigates the relations
between and combinations of various tropes. The study proper is followed
by two appendixes, a romanized index of pivot-words and another roman-
ized index of all words used in the anthology. Together, these appendixes
make up almost one half of the book.
The author has drawn on a number of Japanese and American studies
on the Kokinsha as well as a large number of editions and comments on
this work. The bibliography contains altogether 69 books and articles in
English and Japanese. Works in other languages have not been used,
probably for reasons of availability. It should nevertheless be mentioned
that the book bears remarkable similarity to the study Poetika klassiches-
kogo yaponskogo stikha by the Russian scholar Irina Boronina (Moscow:
Nauka Publishers, 1978) both in its achievements and shortcomings, al-
though the reference background of Boronina's much earlier monograph
(and evident unavailability to her of literature in Western languages) sets them apart.
Although LaCure shows considerable poetic sensitivity in his transla- lOMoAR cPSD| 40799667
182 Japanese Language and Literature
tions, the book as a whole leaves the reader somewhat confused. It is true
that it does what it promises to do, describing, albeit perhaps not quite
exhaustively, the rhetorical devices mentioned above, but it remains un-
clear, to me at least, why all of this has been done. If we suppose that any
analysis of a literary work, whatever the method used, should help us
achieve a better understanding of that work, either in terms of its content
or its historical, cultural and social role, then we simply have to admit
that this book has very little to contribute. Neither does this kind of ap-
proach disclose any particular mechanisms of achieving poeticity. After
reading it, we are certainly much better equipped to identify a makurakotoba
or ajoshi when we see one, but the expressive potential of each trope, or
the variety of their roles in the structure of waka poetry, their relations to
the general organizing principles of poetic vocabulary, and the socio-
cultural conventions of poetic creation remain unexplored, apart from
references to the widely acknowledged nature-human affairs dichotomy
at work in the anthology. And even that we are supposed to take for granted.
While reading the book, the question sometimes arises whether the tra-
ditional categorization of tropes that forms the basis of LaCure's work is
altogether relevant for the contemporary reader and whether, perhaps, it
would instead be advisable to develop new categorizations and conceptual
tools to analyze the poetic corpus in question. After all, traditional Japanese
poetics is a practical system meant in the first place to help one write, not
only read poetry. An extension of the scope of investigation into the
areas mentioned above could only have made the study more relevant to
the reader interested in Japanese poetry and also presented the material in a more favorable light.
But even within the framework to which LaCure has confined himself
there are problems to be found. There is no general overview of earlier
views on the subject, and it seems that for the better part of the study the
author has accepted the positions of earlier scholars without any critique.
For example, his appreciation of the anthology relies for the most part on
the views of Helen Craig McCullough, which I find at many points
highly questionable, but even in the cases where the author can accept
the received views with a clear conscience, the position of the author
should be stated more explicitly. Thus, having acknowledged that there is
no agreement about the definitions of the literary devices under scrutiny
(p. 1), he nevertheless does not give us definitions of his own. Instead,
the criteria for categorizing a poetic device as, for instance, a makura-
kotoba, consist in possible attributions of a particular phrase to that category lOMoAR cPSD| 40799667 Reviews 183
by Japanese editors/commentators of the anthology (pp. 18-20; similar
examples abound elsewhere). Setting up one's own distinct criteria and
judging these against the poetic corpus and commentarial tradition would,
in my mind, have been a much more sensible approach. But this would
again require a justification of why the traditional poetic system has been
taken, in unmodified form, as a point of departure in the first place.
Some formal aspects of the book also leave room for improvement. It is
organized as a collection of articles rather than a monograph, and the
footnotes, of which there are not very many, appear at the end of each
chapter instead of the end of the book or at the bottom of each page.
Large white spaces after figures and tables show that the publishers have
not paid much attention to the layout.
On the whole it should thus be said that though Jon LaCure has demon-
strated his impressive knowledge of early classical poetry and his under-
standing of it (in translations), the book is not a very helpful resource to
anybody but the specialist investigating the strictly formal aspects of tra-
ditional Japanese poetics.
Fictions of Femininity: Literary Inventions of Gender in Japanese Court Women Memoirs
By Edith Sarra. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. 342 pp. $55.00. Reviewed by Lynne K. Miyake
In Fictions of Femininity Edith Sarra investigates the ways in which
women writers attempt to construct themselves in several of the central
texts of the Heian nikki tradition. Sarra purports not to be engaged in a
study of the genre but rather to be examining the "dialogue ... taking place
among individual female memoirists of the period" (p. 3) as they
endeavor to come to terms with themselves as women and as writers.
Specifically, Sarra interrogates the "ideologically charged image of the
Heian aristocratic woman as passive yet compelling object of (masculine)
desire" (p. 4) and probes the ways in which women were both complicitious in
and subversive of this and other gender norms inherent in societal and literary
conventions of their day. Although Sarra argues that Heian women
"were in significant ways limited to and nourished by a cultural milieu