Recasting the Past: An Early Modern “Tales of Ise” for Children by Laura Moretti

Abstract

Reviewed by: Recasting the Past: An Early Modern “Tales of Ise” for Children by Laura Moretti Peter MacMillan Recasting the Past: An Early Modern “Tales of Ise” for Children. By Laura Moretti. Leiden: Brill, 2016. 130 pages. Hardcover, €59.00/$65.00. Though written by multiple hands over a long time span, Tales of Ise (hereafter referred to as the Tales) is a work of great profundity, at once original, experimental, subversive, and filled with wit and humor as well as elegance and beauty. Along with The Tale of Genji, Hyakunin isshu, and the Kokin waka shū, the Tales is one of the four most important works in Japanese classical literature, and knowledge of it is a prerequisite for understanding Japanese cultural and literary history. Constructed as a series of poem tales (uta monagatari), the Tales comprises 125 short narratives that function as suitable contexts for the poems they incorporate, which are mostly love poems. The diverse episodes, many of which depict the famous real-life poet Ariwara no Narihira (825–880), together present a unified picture of the cultural mores, aesthetics, and “way of love” of aristocratic society in the early part of the Heian period. The Tales became a basic text in the éducation sentimentale of the Japanese and a fundamental part of the literary education of poets and other men and women of learning for a thousand years. Ever since it was written, it has influenced all aspects of art and literature, from waka poetry and noh theater to diaries and fiction. Indeed, without the Tales it is difficult to imagine the creation of the greatest novel of Japanese literature, the eleventh-century Tale of Genji. Over three hundred editions of the Tales were issued in the Edo period (1600–1868), making it an outstanding success and the best-selling book of that era. Unlike [End Page 258] the long chapters of The Tale of Genji, the episodes in the Tales are short and highly readable, and the work was often quoted in poetry, plays, and other literature, making it required reading for sophisticated Edoites who would have been expected to recognize such allusions. Much recent research on the Tales focuses on its reception, including its history of translation; on its inspiration of multiple works of art from paintings and screens to noh plays; and on gender issues. So broad was its readership that the Tales was even used as a textbook for teaching children, as revealed in Laura Moretti’s recent study Recasting the Past: An Early Modern “Tales of Ise” for Children, a re-creation in image and text of the 1766 picture book Ise fūryū: Utagaruta no hajimari (The Fashionable Ise: The Origins of Utagaruta). Scholarship until now has not examined the reading age of the Tales, and Moretti makes an important contribution to filling this gap. Part 1 of the book reviews scholarship on chapbooks and the similar kusazōshi, discusses Utagaruta in relation to the reception history of the original Tales, and contextualizes the former work within children’s literature. It concludes with a coda that concisely summarizes the current state of research on Japanese children’s literature, pointing out that the field is still in its formative stage. Part 2, the heart of the book, consists of a diplomatic transcription and a translation of the Utagaruta, accompanied by extensive and informed annotations to each of the picture book’s images. These annotations explain the differences between the original Tales and this version for children and provide detailed analyses of the visual iconography and motifs. In this section Moretti allocates four pages to each two-page spread in the original. The first pair of pages reproduces the original illustration and text from the National Institute of Japanese Literature on the left with the transcription on the right. The next two pages provide the English translation of the text followed by commentary on the illustration. Some would surely have preferred an edited transcription (kōtei) that would have made the text more readable by substituting hiragana with kanji and adding punctuation. By choosing the diplomatic transcription, however, Moretti offers scholars of Japanese studies the opportunity to relish a text that approximates the...