Heian Literature

Literature was taken very seriously by the Heian Court. This attitude developed at the beginning of the period under Kammu’s three successors, all of whom had scholastic and literary interests as well as administrative ability. In those early days, anyone interested in fine writing needed a knowledge of Chinese and—to a lesser extent—Buddhism, as Japanese culture was still very much subject to direct influences from the mainland. Therefore there was a close association between literature and learning.

This association led, in turn, to literature being closely connected with public administration on the one hand and private conduct on the other. The Confucian and Buddhist texts were the courtier’s manuals for good government, and knowledge of them opened the way to official advancement. At the same time, these books gave their readers guidance on matters of general behavior. They were the basis of personal and family, as well as political, morality. Thus scholarship, public promotion and private ethics were all involved in literary studies, and it is not surprising that literature should have been so highly regarded, although, of course, it was also pursued for its own sake.

As in the Nara period, writing was overwhelmingly upper-class and metropolitan in tone, because only aristocrats and priests were literate, and for a time it remained largely Chinese in language as well as inspiration, owing to the continuing difficulty of writing Japanese when using only Chinese characters. This situation altered radically about the year 900 with the development of a phonetic system which made it possible to write readily intelligible

Japanese.' The invention of phonetic letters allowed the composition of enduring Japanese-language prose works from the tenth century. Nevertheless, Chinese continued for some time as the main language for business and official documents, philosophical treatises and so forth, partly because of tradition but also because it had a fuller and more precise vocabulary suited to such purposes.

Heian literature as a whole, therefore, has two very different streams. One consists of writings in the Chinese language and ideographic script, and is associated with men. The other is made up of works written in Japanese with considerable recourse to the native phonetic script, and is associated with women. The latter is more important in terms of literary merit, although it should be noted in passing that the Heian-period Chinese writings are a rich and largely unexplored source of historical information and do indeed have some artistic worth. Why did men tend to use Chinese and women Japanese? And how did Japanese women come to write so superbly?

It is often argued that men considered it beneath them to write in Japanese. Questions of dignity and education may have had some significance, but this explanation is not satisfactory since some men did write in Japanese, especially verse, and some women studied Chinese. The divergence can perhaps best be explained by differences in the occupations of men and women and by the suitability of the two languages for different purposes. Men, accustomed to coping with the everyday affairs of government, their estates, and their households in comparatively concise and concrete Chinese, doubtless found it easier to compose memoirs, family testaments, and private records of public events in that tongue. By contrast, the life of introspection and sociable leisure led by women at court and at home encouraged them to write and circulate among themselves compositions in Japanese. Japanese, after all, was their mother tongue, and its tenth-century form, however vague and limited it might have been in some respects, had a marvelous potential for communicating subtle emotion. This potential the court ladies taught themselves to exploit. Last but not least, the splendid flowering of feminine literary talent in the Heian period was made possible by a degree of social and intellectual freedom enjoyed by women of the upper class.

Japanese-language literature of the late ninth to early twelfth centuries covers a wide range. The main categories are verse, travel diaries, mixed verse and prose sketches or episodes, private journals of court and doniestic life, tales and novels, and somewhat imaginative accounts of historical personages. Printing techniques were known, but were not used outside Buddhist circles, so all these books were handwritten and circulated in a few manuscripts. As a result, what is thought of today as Heian literature is only the small surviving proportion of the period’s total literary output. Prose works, in particular, have disappeared.

Poetry

A great deal of poetry, however, has been preserved. The government gave it special encouragement, and from early in the tenth century the court issued a series of imperial (i. e., official) collections of Japanese poems. The most important of these is the first, the Kokinshu (Poems Ancient and Modem), completed about 905. The Kokinshu has a total of 1,111 poems, divided into twenty books. The seasons or nature constitute the theme of the first six books; love accounts for another five. Other topics are parting, travel, laments, and auspicious occasions. A small group of courtier poets, under the direction of Ki no Tsurayuki (d. 946), was responsible for collecting and editing the poems.

Although the Kokinshu contains some old poems, the majority of poets represented were still alive at the time of compilation. One result of this is that whereas the Manyoshu is noted for its relatively large number of long poems, most Kokinshu verses are short poems, or tanka. This was a refined form which had five lines arranged in 5, 7, 5, 7, 7 syllables. It was favored by ninth-century poets, and so great was the prestige of the first imperial anthology that tanka became the standard form of classical Japanese poetry.

Not only in the form of its poems, but also in their authorship and underlying spirit, the Kokinshu stands as a monument to the general attitudes of the age that produced it. It includes some notable pieces by women, and the studied elegance, wit, and technical skill which characterize the collection are hallmarks of a cultivated society with a good knowledge of Chinese literary traditions. Several of these traits appear in the following poem, which is one of the many contributed by Tsurayuki himself.

Sakurabana Chirinuru kaze no Nagori ni wa

Mizu naki sora ni Nami zo tachikeru

In the eddies Of the wind

That scattered the cherry blossoms

Waves indeed rose In a waterless sky.

Here, strict form is combined with a pleasing succession of sounds. Furthermore, there is a brilliant picture in terms of the sea and sky of fallen blossom being blown up and down in the wind.

Even when nature was their theme, Heian poets usually saw it through the eyes of inveterate city dwellers who were mainly concerned with the private emotional satisfaction of social relations. Heian society was definitely urban, not rustic; and its poetry was man-centered, not god - or nature-centered. One tanka by Ono no Komachi, a famous ninth-century beauty and poetess whose triumphs must have aroused much envy, expresses this clearly. Ko-machi’s idea is that there is no hatred so bad as self-hatred, and she wrote:

Utsutsu ni wa Sa mo koso arame Yume ni sae Hitome wo mom to

Miru ga wabishisa

In reality.

It may well have to be; But even in my dreams To see myself shrink from others’ eyes Is truly sad.

The two following Kokinshu poems are probably fairly early works, as their authorship was no longer known at the beginning of the tenth century. Each in its own way is an example of Heian poetry at its best, with technique used to enhance genuine feeling rather than simply for its own sake, and although they both rely on nature to some extent, the feeling they evoke is directed more toward some other person:

Can I forget you—

Aki no ta no Ho no ue wo terasu Inazuma no Hikari no ma ni mo Ware ya wasururu

Honobono to Akashi no ura no Asagiri ni Shimagakureyuku Fune wo shi zo omou

Even for the time it takes A flash of lightning To shine across The autumn fields of corn?

My thoughts are with a ship That slips island-hid Dimly, dimly Through the morning mist On Akashi bay.