The Way of Shikishima: Waka Theory and Practice in Early Modern Japan (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Way of Shikishima: Waka Theory and Practice in Early Modern Japan Edward Kamens (bio) The Way of Shikishima: Waka Theory and Practice in Early Modern Japan. By Roger K. Thomas. University Press of America, Lanham, Md., 2008. xxiv, 219 pages. $33.95, paper. Books and scholarly articles of any quality that treat in English the rich subject of waka, the oldest and the core traditional form of Japanese poetry, in the eras during and after the rise to prominence of renga, haikai, and related linked and short forms, are rare. Translations of selections from the works of some waka poets of the early modern period are to be found in a few anthologies that may lend themselves to use as textbooks, such as Steven D. Carter's Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press, 1991) and Haruo Shirane, ed., Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology 1600–1900 (Columbia University Press, 2001). Other books devoted to translations of the representative works of one of the best-known poets of the period, Ryōkan (1758–1831), are in print: they are targeted at general rather than scholarly readers. The misguided assumption that waka did not prosper in this period and therefore does not matter much in literary history has generally discouraged serious scholarly inquiry by scholars outside Japan. Now, to stand alongside the substantial corpus of very serious and in some cases landmark studies of major figures, movements, concepts, and texts in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century intellectual history by Harry Harootunian, Tetsuo Najita, Peter Nosco, Susan Burns, Mark McNally, and others, and to join the library of important studies of other early modern literary genres, theater, and visual culture that provide routes into the deeper study of the culture of this vibrant period, Roger K. Thomas has provided a solid study of "waka theory and practice in early modern Japan." He shows that waka poetry and poetics at that time was, as always, a field in which cultural currents continued to reshape and redirect text production, criticism, and commentary in ways that are well worth detailed study, especially because of the degree to which trends in waka culture were extensions of developments and movements in other literary, scholarly, and sociopolitical sectors. It is significant that this book is not an anthology of translations, nor is it a single-author study or an analysis of a single "school." Such approaches might well have offered themselves as ways to begin to fill this void in English-language published scholarship on early modern waka, and such studies would of course be welcome. But Thomas has been much more ambitious and, apparently, well aware of the need for a book that would lay [End Page 399] the groundwork for such studies in English. Accordingly, The Way of Shikishima works steadily through the period, offering detailed accounts and assessments of the careers and oeuvres of the major canonical figures who wrote waka and wrote and taught about waka. The book does so in six main chapters defined according to a standardized chronology: "Bakusho" (the earliest phase of government by the Tokugawa bakufu), 1600–1683; "Genroku," conventionally recognized as a cultural high-water mark, 1680–1740; "the Mid Eighteenth Century," 1740–70; "the Late Eighteenth Century," 1800–1840; and "Bakumatsu" (when Tokugawa rule came to an end), 1840–68. Under these headings the reader encounters, in sequence, the poets Hosokawa Yūsai, Fujiwara Seika, Matsunaga Teitoku, and Kinoshita Chōshōshi; the scholars Keichū, Toda Mosui, Kada no Azumamaro, Itō Jinsai, and Ogyū Sorai; the theorist/critics Kada no Arimaro, Tayasu Munetake, and Kamo no Mabuchi; Motoori Norinaga, Ozawa Roan, Katō (or Tachibana) Chikage, Murata Harumi, and Ueda Akinari; Kagawa Kageki and the aforementioned Ryōkan; Ōkuma Kotomichi, Tachibana Akemi, and Ōtagaki Rengetsu—and many others treated in less detail but in terms of their relationships to these. Many of these names are familiar from other contexts, especially those such as the Neo-Confucian scholars Jinsai and Sorai and the nativists Norinaga and Akinari. Matsuo Bashō and later bunjin poets are not absent from view, but their roles in relationship to waka are kept in focus. Knowing readers will note that only the...