A Poetics of Courtly Male Friendship in Heian Japan (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Poetics of Courtly Male Friendship in Heian Japan Stephen D. Miller (bio) A Poetics of Courtly Male Friendship in Heian Japan. By Paul Gordon Schalow. University of Hawai'i Press, 2006. x, 219 pages. $49.00. Considering the amount of ink spilled in both Japanese and English on the topic of love in the imperial court of Heian Japan, it comes as a pleasant surprise to find instead here in Paul Schalow's work a study of friendship. One wonders, upon first reading the title of his work—A Poetics of Courtly [End Page 167] Male Friendship in Heian Japan—why no one else has approached the topic and why friendship has not been considered by more scholars. As a neglected category of study for Japanese scholars, friendship may have been ignored because it lacks the luster of love, the pizazz of sex, or the urgency of politics. Friendship seems to stand pure and tall, untainted by the complexities of the romantic heart and confusion wrought by carnal need. Those feelings one has for a buddy, a companion, or a confidant seem somehow ahistorical and acultural. Surely friendship must be a universal and timeless category known by all and to all. Surely we know what it is, and we don't need a full-on scholarly study of it, do we? But I am afraid we are not sure what it is, and we do need such a study, if for no other reason than to discuss the issues above. And in the work under review, Schalow does a fine job of laying the groundwork and opening the topic for discussion. He is not looking for what he calls "real-life friendships" (p. 1); instead he provides a "poetics"—a study of the "recurrent patterns of . . . [the] literary depiction" of friendship (p. 1). By giving very close readings to texts such as Wakan rōeishū, Ise monogatari, Kagerō nikki, and Genji monogatari, Schalow hopes to clarify "how Heian literature articulates the nobleman's wish to be known and appreciated fully by another man—or what may be termed the hope of transcendence through male friendship" (p. 1). He hopes to uncover "masculine experience as a subject of critical inquiry" (p. 3); and he does not ignore women, either: "Several of the narratives addressed in this study . . . depict female characters playing a central role as mediators in friendships between noblemen" (p. 3). In sum, the author's attention is primarily toward the mechanics of literature and the experience of friendship as it is depicted in literature. All this he does very well. I am concerned about two things Schalow does not do, both of which arise from the lack of a broader theoretical framework in which to place his observations about literary friendships: he neither explores the fluidity of the category "friendship" nor discusses the larger implications of his study. Schalow admits that "we cannot assume that friendship's manifestation in Heian literature should automatically be intelligible to people living in the present day . . . for its epistemological underpinnings are not necessarily our own" (p. 5). If this is the case, it would have been helpful to take a more comparativist approach in which the "underpinnings" of the category "friendship" (both ours and the Heian period's) are explored at the same time that meaning is excavated from the texts. As George Lakoff warns in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, "Categorization is not a matter to be taken lightly. There is nothing more basic than categorization to our thought, perception, action, and speech."1 Schalow recognizes that "friendship" [End Page 168] as a category is neither acultural nor ahistorical, but without a theoretical framework for the concept, he has trouble characterizing the boundaries of friendship and the meaning we might derive from it. This is not a fatal flaw, but it does help to explain some of the book's shortcomings. Starting, as Schalow does, with Wakan rōeishū, a work compiled by Fujiwara Kintō in the mid-Heian period, is logical, as it allows him to look back historically from the end point of his timeline. The seven-poem se-quence entitled "Friends" that he analyzes is...