Musashino in Tuscany

Front matter

Musashino in Tuscany Dr

Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies Number 50

Center for Japanese Studies The University of Michigan

CHAPTER FOUR Assimilation: Late Meiji Travelogues, 1900-1912 Shimamura Hogetsu Tokutomi Roka Nagai Kafü Anezaki Chofü

Conclusion

Character List for Proper Nouns Character List for Titles

Bibliography Travelogues

Secondary Sources

178 182 192 217 225

272 272 278

Illustrations

House where Napoleon lived on the Neman River Crystal Palace daguerreotype

Mont Blanc

Cascade at Bois du Boulougne

USS Powhatan

Street scene from Paris

Crystal Palace engraving

Grand Trianon, Chamber of Napoleon The dairy, Versailles

Camel hitched to water dealer’s cart in Aden Native boys on the boat at Aden

Bay of Naples

The harbor at Marseilles

L'Arc de Triomphe

Place de la Concorde

The Tuileries

The Louvre

Napoleon's Tomb

The Luxembourg Palace

Royal Theater in Copenhagen

Lyons

The lake at Bois du Boulougne

The Medici fountains in Bois du Boulougne Panorama of San Francisco, 1919

Yasnaya Polyana

Lev Tolstoy in garden

Tolstoy in his study

New York skyline, 1908

Brooklyn Bridge

ADI

Preface

L was my aim in writing this book to provide information that would both be informative for the scholar and entertaining for the layperson. Consequently, there are copious footnotes that are of primary Interest to the researcher, but there is also a gentle reiteration of Japanese history—old hat for the Japanologist—in the text to help the non-expert place the context of the travelogues discussed. To avoid misconceptions and awkward terminology, I have left many Japanese terms untranslated, but I have also appended a glossary for those in need of it. Words that appear in italics in the main text are included in this glossary.

In the main text, titles of Japanese works are translated into English; if a work appears only in a footnote, then the title is given in romanization. Proper Japanese names appear with the surname followed by the given name, as is standard in Japan, except in the case of a citation of a work written in English by a Japanese, in which case the format is given name first, surname name second. Chinese characters (Ranji) have all been converted to postwar simplified form. Chinese names and terms are represented in Pinyin romanization. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

I have purposely chosen to use the masculine pronoun “he” as the generic marker for human beings where “one” is awkward. I know that feminists will be offended by this and wryly remark that I am bowing to the patriarchy. In my defense, I will say that in English “he” is xii Preface acceptable for this use, and to use "she" when the sex of the subject is indeterminate calls attention to a nugatory aspect of the text.

Chapter one is a revised version of "Early Overseas Travel and Travel Writing in Japanese," in The Journal of Intercultural Studies, no. 26 (1999), pp. 20-44.

Many people have provided assistance in the production of this work. The University at Albany presented me with a Faculty Research Assistance Program grant, which helped procure many of the primary sources. The interlibrary loan staff at the University at Albany was also extremely helpful in their untiring efforts towards tracking down obscure manuscripts. My colleagues in the East Asian Studies Department—Charles Hartman, Jim Hargett, Tony DeBlasi, Shirley Chang, Mark Blum, Sachiko Funaba, and Michiyo Kaya Wojnovich— have been tremendously supportive of this project, and have provided many valuable comments and suggestions on the work-in-progress. Mike Rich and Pat Caddeau generously read an earlier draft of the manuscript and gave many helpful suggestions. Will Thomas patiently proofread draft after draft, providing yet more suggestions. Without all these people, the work would be a much lesser product, but the errors and omissions that are undoubtedly still buried within it are fully my responsibility.

eS

Introduction ds address any topic, one must define the concept. Many literary critics have attempted to delineate what constitutes a travelogue, but there is no universal agreement on the issue. Some writers, in discussing travelogues, quickly diverge onto the idea of a mental journey, and equate that with a physical journey. An author, it is proposed, makes a journey in the process of relating a narrative (and the reader, likewise, makes a journey in reading the text), but this definition would then make almost any text a travelogue, and one is left with little in the way of useful defining characteristics. Likewise, many writers chose to describe their own evaluation and perusal of literature as a "journey" through texts, as is revealed by such titles as A Journey in Search of the Self: Reading Children’s Literature,! A Journey to tbe Literature of Sakhalin,? and A Mud Hen’s Journey of Collected Literary Griticisms: Solzbenitsin, Yasuda Yojüro, Shimao Toshio, and Otbers.?

These figurative uses of the term "journey" aside, I propose that the unifying factor and defining characteristic of all travelogues is that they record a physical journey from one point to another. This journey can be short or long, domestic or abroad, solitary or accompanied, new or repeated, and for one or more of any number of purposes, such as work, leisure, or study. A travelogue is not necessarily a factual

1. Jibun sagasbi no tabi : jido bungaku o yomu (Kyoto: Kamogawa shuppan, 1993). 2. Sabarin bungaku no tabi (Sapporo: Kyodo bunkasha, 1994) 3. Sakka ronsbü kuina no tabi : Sorujenitsuin, Yasuda Yojuro, Sbimao Toshio boka (Tokyo: Yumani account of a journey—in many cases, authors fictionalize some of their specific experiences while adhering to the general truths of the journey. The line between travelogues and travel fiction, then, is drawn between the records of journeys actually taken and those only conceived of in the comfort of one’s home. This necessarily eliminates works such as Jonathan Swifts (1667-1745) Gullivers Travels and Alexander Pope's (1688-1744) Tbe Dunciad, but does not eliminate Richard Halliburton's (1900-39) The Flying Carpet or Matsuo Basho's (1644-94) Narrow Road to the Deep North. Given this broad definition, it is not surprising that the resulting travelogues vary widely, but each and every one is an account of a physical journey:

In Japanese literature, the broadest term for travelogues is kikobungaku, a genre that overlaps diary literature (nikki bungaku) but is not a concentric subset; there are diaries that do not narrate a journey, and there are journeys that are not recorded in diary form. A "travel diary" is a travelogue that is necessarily narrated in the first person, and often follows the events of a journey in a chronological fashion. The style of the travel diary is often one of daily, dated installments. In Japanese literary studies, these two genres of kikobungaku and diary literature are often mentioned in the same breath, and placed together in volumes of collected works.‘ It is virtually impossible to study one without touching on the other, as many of the canonical masterpieces of Japanese literature, such as The Diary of the Waning Moon (c. 1280) and A Record of Travel on the Coast Road (c. 1223), fall into both genres. Although those works categorized as diary literature and/or travel literature date as far back as the tenth century, the term “diary literature” (nikki bungaku) itself is a relative newcomer to the literary scene: first mention of diary literature as a genre dates to the twentieth century? Likewise, kikobungaku (or kikobun) is a relatively new term, but its referent is as old as the earliest Japanese literature.

4. Four examples of such studies are: Nikki, kikobungaku, Kenkyü sbiryó Nihon koten bungaku, vol. 9, Osone Shosuke et al., ed. (Tokyo: Meiji shoin,1984); Donald Keene, Travelers of a Hundred Ages: The Japanese as Revealed through 1,000 Years of Diaries (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1989); Donald Keene, Modern Japanese Diaries: The Japanese at Home and Abroad as Revealed Through Their Diaries (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1995); and Kindai Nihon no nikki, Odagiri Susumu, ed. (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1984).

5. The editors of Nikki, kikobungaku place first mention of the term nikki bungaku in the Taisho period, in Doi Kochi's work, Bungaku josetsu (An Introduction to Literature, 1922). Nikki, kikobungaku, Kenkyü sbiryo Nibon koten bungaku, vol. 9, Osone Shosuke et al., ed. (Tokyo: Meiji shoin, 1984), 4.

The vast nature of the genre of travel literature, both Japanese and Western, leaves the scholar with a logistical problem of organization. When discussing and compiling travel literature, some scholars choose to divide their studies along lines of occupation of the traveler, such as Herbert Plutschow does in his study of medieval Japanese travel diaries, or Joshua Fogel does in his study of modern Japanese travelogues of China. This division is not unlike the division made along the lines of purpose of the journey, purposes that range from religious to exploratory to educational, as motive closely correlates to occupation. Others choose to divide according to the theme of the travelogue, as Paul Fussell does in his anthology, The Norton Book of Travel. Travelogues may be compiled according to the traveler's destination, as in the Japanese anthology A Compendium of Overseas Travel Writing, which contains a different volume for each geographic region in the world (outside of Japan).” And finally, travelogues may be categorized in chronological order.

Needless to say, one study cannot do all of these things, and like other authors of works on travelogues, I have found it necessary to choose a specific tack. Although my overall intent has been to write a book that can be read straight through from beginning to end, by dividing the works as I have, I hope also to have created a work that can be treated as a reader. | examine, more or less in chronological order, travelogues written by Japanese of many occupations who traveled to the West during the period 1860-1912.? Japanologists will immediately recognize this time, which covers the bakumatsu and subsequent Meiji period (1868-1912), as one of dynamic change in the country. For the nonexpert, let it suffice to say that this fifty-two year period saw a remarkably rapid modernization of Japan, a country that had been, for all intents and purposes, closed to outside contacts for over 250 years. In the midnineteenth century, Japan opened her doors to the outside world, and in essence opened the flood gates

6. Herbert Plutschow, Four Japanese Travel Diaries of the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1981) and Joshua A. Fogel, The Literature of Travel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China: 1862-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).

7. Sekai kiko bungaku zenshu (Tokyo: Horupu shuppan, 1979).

8. Even a chronological order is problematical, because in some cases the travelogue was published many years after the journey was taken. The best example is Mori Ogai's trip to Germany, which lasted from 1884 to 1888, and the diary of which, German Diary, appeared in 1938.

to Western technology, philosophy, arts, government, medicine, education, and more. Many studies have examined the changes in Japan during this time; this study does not, at least not in a direct manner. Rather, this is an examination of two things: first, the evolution of Japanese travel writing during this period, and second, how the West was portrayed, and how that portrayal changed over the decades.

Some may criticize me for playing fast and loose with the term “the West,” as if it were some monolithic entity. Others may complain that my choice to capitalize “Western” suggests a kind of Orientalism. Of course the West is not monolithic, and I would be the first to admit that. Even the earliest overseas Japanese recognized the qualitative differences between different Western countries and cultures. France was distinct from England, the United States was distinct from Germany, and so on. However, the Japanese did view these Western powers as similar in a fashion: they were industrially advanced, they maintained colonies or territories beyond their traditional boundaries, and they displayed a political domination that was enviable to an emerging nation. Hence, when I refer to “the West,” I conspicuously leave out Spain, Portugal, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, etc. Some of these countries had their heyday—certainly the Netherlands figured prominently to the Japanese from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries—but by the Meiji Period they were not the destinations of overseas travelers. My focus is primarily on the United States, England, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia, where the majority of the Japanese headed. My choice to capitalize “West” and “Western” is grammatical, to distinguish them from the common noun and adjective they also represent.

In the early Meiji period, travel abroad was prohibitively expensive, and only the lucky few who were either independently wealthy or sponsored by the government had the opportunity to leave their native shores. Westerners had more opportunity to travel to Japan, but there were still relatively few of them, and their movements were limited within the country, thus minimizing their contact with the average Japanese.? Exposure to the outside world, for the average Japanese,

9. There is the notable exception of Isabella Bird, who travelled the “unbeaten tracks” of Japan in 1878 and whose travelogue of the journey comprises the letters she wrote to her sister. In urban areas, however, such as Tokyo, there was a foreign legation established to keep the foreign community at a safe distance from the native population. [Isabella Bird, came thus not through personal experience but through others’ personal experiences, whether it be (a translation of) a Western text, or an account of the West by a fellow Japanese.!? This was a period that saw a flurry of translations of Western literature as the Japanese literary world tried to redefine its own literature vis-a-vis that of the West. Certainly many Japanese learned of the outside world by reading those (often hastily done and therefore flawed) translations.!!

However, translations, no matter how skillfully executed, do not provide a cultural outsider with interpretive commentary, the sort of commentary often needed to fully comprehend the actual content behind the text. In other words, translators could convey the literal meaning of the text but could not also provide the complex details necessary to understand the cultural context of the narrative. For a narrative that provided such things, one needed an intermediary, a kind of cultural translator, who understood both the reader’s context (early modern Japan) and the subject’s context (the West). Enter the traveler. Of those who ventured to the West during the bakumatsu and

Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1880; reprint, Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1973), and Edward Seidensticker, Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1983; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 232-33.]

10. For a list of works on the West, including travelogues, published between 1696 and 1887, see Meiji bunka zensbü, vol. 16, Yoshino Sakuzo, ed. (Tokyo: Nihon hyoronsha, 1928), pp. 558-77.

11. Translations of Western works even found themselves on the Japanese best seller lists: Samuel Smile's Self Help, translated by Nakamura Masanao in 1871, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, translated by Nakamura Keitaro in 1872, Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, translated by Kawashima Chünosuke in 1878-80 (published in two parts), Daniel Defoe's The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner, translated by Inoue Tsutomu in 1883, Edward George Bulwerlytton's Ernest Maltravers, translated by Oda Jun'ichiro in 1884, Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, translated by Inoue Tsutomu in 1884, William Shakespeare's Mercbant of Venice, translated by Inoue Tsutomu in 1886, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Reynard the Fox, translated by Inoue Tsutomu in 1886, were all best sellers.

Translations of various nonfiction works from the bakumatsu and early Meiji period were also instrumental in introducing the West to the Japanese. These works included Yanagawa Shunsan's annotation of the Chinese translation of Circle of Knowledge (1866-68), a multiauthored translation of Peter Parley's Universal History (1870), Kawazu Magoshiro's translation of William Francis Collier’s The Great Events of History (1870), a multiauthored translation of the National Society's English History (1870), Goto Tatsuzo's translation of Friedrich Kohlrausch's History of Germany (1871), Atsu Sukeyuki ‘s translation of Francoise Mignet's Histoire de la Révolution Frangaise (1876), Nagamine Hideki's translation of François Guizot's General history of civilization in Europe (1877), and Takahashi Jiro's Chinese translation of Victor Duruy's Histoire de France (1878). (Source: Meiji bunka zensbü, vol. 16, pp. 558-77.) There were many other books available on the West, as well as periodicals, such as the journal published by the Meiji Six Society, the Meiroku zassbi, published between 1873 and 1875.

early Meiji periods, some wrote commentaries on the state of the West, and others wrote firsthand accounts of their experiences. 1? Both types of works helped disseminate information about the West to compatriots at home, but for the purposes of this study, only the latter will be examined.

During this period in Japan, the authors of travelogues of abroad had varied motives, and varied literary talents; their travelogues served different purposes, depending on the vocation of the writer and the intended audience. These travelogues reflect a changing view of the West, and changing artistic sensibilities in regard to the longstanding Japanese literary tradition of travel writing. They not only bring a new perspective of the Japanese view of the West, they also indirectly bring a new perspective of how Westerners view themselves, in that the Western reader may come to appreciate an aspect of his own culture that heretofore he had never noticed. At least one Western author believed that the Japanese travelogue was the best medium for commenting on Western society: Commander Hastings Berkeley wrote a work entitled Japanese Letters: Eastern Impressions of Western Men and Manners, in which are included the supposed letters from a young Japanese who travels about the European continent. The correspondent writes home to his friend, commenting on Western culture, politics, and religion. Berkeley writes in the preface:

In the past few years much has been written by Europeans, especially by Englishmen, concerning Japan and the Japanese. Moreover, that which has been written has been eagerly read. There is in this nothing surprising. The originality and excellence of Japanese art—particularly of Japanese decorative design—copied, disseminated, and, as usual in parallel cases, now vulgarised among us, have stimulated the slow curiosity of the public concerning this people,—a curiosity which, in inquiring minds, has grown the more lively on account of the remarkable experiment which the

12. In the bakumatsu and early Meiji period, commentaries on the West that were influential included Yanagawa Shunsan’s Bankoku shinwa (pub. 1868), which introduced Western literature; Hashizume Kan'ichis, Kaichi shinben (pub. 1869), which compiled accounts of the West by assorted repatriated Japanese and introduced Western customs and culture; Aso Tadakichi Kiki shinwa (pub. 1869), which explained the wondrous machines of the ages, such as the steam train and the magic lantern; and Fukuzawa Yukichi's works, Kaei tstigo (1860), Seiyo jijo (1866-77), Seiyd tabi annai (1867), Joyaku füicbi kokki (1867), Raijü sóbó (1867), and Shochü bankoku ichiran (1869).

Japanese nation has so thoroughly, and, thus far, so successfully conducted: nothing less than that of breaking up its ancient civilisation and recasting the fragments thereof in a European mould.

After having heard and read so much about Japan and its people from Europeans, it may prove interesting to hear what Japanese themselves have to say about Europe and Europeans in relation to this metamorphosis of the laws, customs and political institutions of their country. . . .

As a mere translator and editor of others' work, I might have permitted myself, without incurring the charge of fatuity or vanity, to say a few words in its praise, to touch on its points of utility, interest, humour or other excellence. I have not done so: for reasons which the intelligent reader will not find it difficult to guess, and with which the unintelligent reader need not be troubled.

Matters which are merely of domestic interest to the writers of these letters, or which relate to their private affairs, have been excluded from the translation; that only has been retained which appeared to possess general interest. In the process of translation certain surface peculiarities have disappeared of themselves, others have been toned down purposely. If something of the flavour of the original has thus been lost, a more than countervailing advantage has been gained, for peculiarities which are entertaining merely because they are strange or uncommon become tiresome by repetition. But for this word of explanation the ingenious reader might almost have suspected the writers of the following letters to be children of the editor's imagination.

Although this work is entirely a child of Berkeley's imagination, it shows us that the Japanese impression of the West was a topic on which more than just the Japanese themselves mused.!8

But on a more serious note, Japanese did travel to the West, and they did write of their experiences. Happily, travel literature in Japan met Westernization and adapted to it. Meiji Period travel writers created a dynamic new type of travel literature, one that had solid foundations in traditional Japanese kikobungaku, yet also showed the influence of the West. This is the story of the writers and their works.

13. Hastings Berkeley, Japanese Letters: Eastern Impressions of Western Men and Manners (London: John Murray, 1891).

This book is not a comprehensive study of all travelogues written between 1860 and 1912, nor is it an anthology of translations of works. Rather, it is a study of works from that period chosen for their lyricism and poesy. Because my goal is to examine overseas travel writing as a genre and trace trends within it, there are numerous works excluded here for the sake of literary sensibility. Most conspicuously, Fukuzawa Yukichis (1835-1901) work The State of the West is not addressed here, not because it is a work of little significance but rather because it is a collection of descriptions and not a travelogue. Many of the diaries of early governmental officials who participated in diplomatic missions to the West are omitted because they lack in literary sensibility, and also because three excellent studies already exist of them.!4 I have omitted a number of works because they recount only the ocean voyage from Japan to Europe, leaving off where the author goes ashore; however, records of such a voyage have been included if the travelogue (or a subsequent travelogue) goes on to describe Europe. I have made efforts to include a variety of works and authors to present an accurate view of the genre.

The flavor of any work is altered by its intended audience, and these overseas travelogues are no exception. In the earliest travelogues, the intended audience was often a small coterie of officials or acquaintances—most were not meant for mass consumption. Sometimes, however, the works did undergo a wider distribution, as in the case of Mori Ogai's diary of his time in Germany. In many cases, the intended audience is unclear—many texts lack colophons, indicating a private printing, one that was by chance later reprinted.!? After the 1870s, printing of travelogues became more common and standardized. Many were distributed by popular publishing houses in single volumes, and still more were published serially in newspapers and

14. W. G. Beasley, Japan Encounters the Barbarian: Japanese Travelers in America and Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Masao Miyoshi, As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States (New York: Kodansha International, 1979); Peter Duus, The ` Japanese Disocvery of America: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997).

15. Correspondence with Yumani Shobé, the publisher of Meiji Obei kenbunroku sbüsei, reveals the randomness with which modern editors have chosen to reprint this material. When asked what standards were used in choosing among the many kenbunroku-type works, a representative of the publisher replied, "There was no clear standard. The editor in charge of the project at the time went to the National Diet Library and other sources and chose the selected books from indexes and original manuscripts."

magazines for mass consumption. This transition from private record or report to public reportage certainly affected the content of the works—writers still produced informative travelogues, but often had one eye toward entertainment. Indeed, the criticism that bikobungaku gave way to Western travel writing sensibilities (and consequently lost connection with traditional aesthetics) could be partially attributed to this change in venue. The attention given in late Meiji periodical travelogues to the personal experience, trials and tribulations, and logistics of travel for the author(s) mirrors those of Western travelogues from the same period. In other words, in copying venue, the Japanese also copied style.

Ideally I would have constrained the parameters of this study to works with similar intended audiences, but the dearth of popular works in the bakumatsu and early Meiji made that impossible. Instead, I have chosen (of the early travelogues) works that transcend the category of government reportage by including lyrical passages—works that, had they been produced a few decades later, may have appeared in a more popular medium.

The reader may wonder why all the authors in this study are male. Certainly there were female travelers from Japan to the West during the period 1860-1912; some of the earliest on record were five girls who were sent in 1872 by the Japanese government to the United States for study as part of the overall educational reforms of the early Meiji period.!© However, the ratio of female to male travelers was low and, to my knowledge, the number of travelogues written by them even lower (the five girls mentioned above, for example, did not write travelogues). An example of a woman writer who is not included here would be Yosano Akiko (1878-1942), who went to Europe in 1912 and who wrote a handful of travelogues from London and Paris, published in 1914.17 Given her skill at composing waka poetry and her prominent place in the literary establishment, one might expect her travelogues to be rich with natural and nostalgic poetic imagery;

16. An excellent biography of one of these girls, Tsuda Ume, is available in English: The White Plum: A Biography of Ume Tsuda, Pioneer in the Higher Education of Japanese Women by Yoshiko Furuki (New York: Weatherhill, 1991).

17. These works, “In Paris”, “Paris from a Traveler’s Window”, “From London”, “A London Inn”, and “First Impressions of Paris", are available in the Yosano Akiko zensbü, vol. 9 (Tokyo: Bunsend6 shoten, 1972).

rather, she writes mostly of women’s lives and how the West compares to Japan. In other words, her work is more a political commentary than a travelogue. To include women’s works here simply to provide a female voice among many male voices would be artificial and inconsistent with my effort to examine the works that best reflect the integration of traditional motifs with a modern world. The reader should rest assured that I eliminated many more male writers than female writers on these grounds, and that the works chosen for this study are representative of the field.

Let us begin then with the story of kikobungaku itself, with its defining characteristics in Japan and how those characteristics evolved.

Chapter One Na

When Japanese travelers, particularly writers, went abroad, how did they digest what they saw? What informed their interpretations? How do those influences appear in their travelogues? There are many variables in the mixture: the writers background and education, the intended audience, the writer's purpose in both traveling and writing, and the time period in which the journey takes place. General cultural trends also affect the style and voice of each work. In particular, the strong national identity fostered in the Tokugawa period still flavored the views of the Japanese abroad in the bakumatsu era. Although those writers were in awe of the relatively unknown world of the West, aesthetically they could not assess or integrate what they saw in their own traditions. When sentiment turned pro-Western in the mid-Meiji period, travelers wrote of a world relatively separate from Japan, a world in which Japanese sensibilities had little place. The experiences of the traveler were focused on the Western context; as before, East and West were not integrated, but at least the Japanese traveler by this point was familiar enough with Western history and civilization to appreciate its accomplishments and beauties. In the end of the Meiji era, a return to pro-Japanese attitudes, blended with a familiarity with the West, was reflected in the comparison of Western poetic locales to similar locales in Japan, such as Anezaki Chofü's association of Tuscany with Musashino in the epigraph of this book. By that time, writers accepted that Japanese literary tradition could be applied outside of its traditional borders and through that transcendence a new, albeit short-lived, art form was born.

Of course, literature rarely conforms neatly to theory, and the trends outlined above do not apply absolutely to each and every work of kikdbungaku. There is, however, a common thread that helps bring this disparate genre (which contains both domestic and international, and classical and modern works) together. It is the essence of traditional kikobungaku: the uta makura, or “poetic pillow.”

UTA MAKURA

Uta makura were originally codified poetic references, some of which became, over the centuries, strongly connected with specific meisho (“famous places”) around Japan.! Most Japanese travel literature deals with famous places in some capacity, whether by being exclusively on a famous place, or by incorporating the poetic images associated with famous places. The establishment of famous places began in the earliest times of Japanese literary history—the first examples come from the poetry anthology A Collection of Myriad Leaves, compiled in late Nara period (712-85), and the imperial histories Record of Japan (c. 720), and Record of Ancient Matters (c. 712). In these poems and histories, the mention of a famous place and what aspect of it was most prominent or noteworthy—in other words, the creation of an uta makura— often established the precedent to be followed from that point forward throughout Japanese literary history.

As a simple example, let us look at one of the earliest uta makura: in A Collection of Myriad Leaves, which contains over 4,000 poems, there is a clear development of uta makura, as when poem #456 makes direct reference to poems 4288-90. The latter poems, by Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (died c. 708-15), tell of the unhappy dilapidation of the once glorious capital at Sasanami: