Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T01:56:23.607Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Kyōshi: Japanese “Wild Poetry”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

David Pollack
Get access

Abstract

In Japan between 1770 and 1790, the craze for witty, comic verse forms such as kyōka and senryū, infected the ancient and noble tradition of poetry written in Chinese to produce kyōshi, “wild Chinese poetry.” Written in both Edo and Kyoto by poets of the lower samurai and educated townsmen classes, kyōshi ranged from silly puns and parodies of long-petrified Chinese verse forms to serious poems that used new subjects, language, and perceptions to revive the old genre, kanshi. Of the major poets, Ōta Nampo (Shokusanjin) of Edo, well-known as a master of kyōka, was equally famous for collections of witty kyōshi, while Hatanaka Tanomo (Dōmyaku Sensii) revived the Chinese “folk song style ballad” as a vehicle for descriptions of daily life in and around Kyoto. Because kyōshi was the product of a unique conjunction of literary, social, and political factors, it was almost forgotten by the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , May 1979 , pp. 499 - 517
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1979

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 World Within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Pre-Modern Era, 1600–1868 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), pp. 400–401Google Scholar. See also pp. 524–25 for a brief discussion of kyōshi; pp. 535–61 are devoted to poetry and prose in Chinese. For further remarks on the relationship between the political atmosphere of the Tanuma regime and the flourishing of comic literature, see pp. 518–19. Watson, Burton, Japanese Literature in Chinese, II (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1976), 1–22Google Scholar, summarizes the history of the kanshi genre; kyōshi is mentioned on p. 11.

2 Takehiko, Noguchi, Edo bungaku no shi to shinjitsu (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1971), p. 80Google Scholar; Giichirō, Hamada, Ōta Nampo (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbundō, 1970), p. 4Google Scholar.

3 For Jippensha's kyōshi, see Mitamura Engyo, ed., Kokkeibon Meisakushū, Vol. 10 of Edo Bungaku Sōsho (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1936), p. 288.Google Scholar

4 Yamagishi Tokuhei, Gozan Bungakushū, Edo Kanshishū, Vol. 89 of Nihon Koten bungaku taikei (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1967), pp. 209–10.Google Scholar

5 Noguchi, p. 20. For an account of the incident that caused Nampo to stop comic writing altogether at the age of thirty-nine, see Hamada, pp. 112 ff.

6 Tokuhei, Yamagishi, “Kyōshi to sono sakuhin,” in Yamagishi, , ed., Nihon kambungakushi ronkō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1974), pp. 568–72.Google Scholar

7 Hung, William, A Concordance to the Poems of Tu Fu (Taipei: Harvard-Yenching Institute, 1966), II, 572.Google Scholar

8 Hung, pp. 343–44

9 Chia-lo, Yang, ed., Po Hsiang-shan Shih-chi (Taipei: Shih-chieh Shu-chü, 1969), p. 166.Google Scholar

10 Yang, p. 80.

11 See for example the poems by Ling-hu Ch'u and Ku Fei-hsiung that end with punning sound effects such as t'o-t'o-t'o (“a camel carrying an iguana”) and ho-ho-ho (“a pigeon mated with a clam”), Ch'üan Tang Shih (Taipei: Ts'ui-wen Tang, 1974), pp. 9951–52.Google Scholar

12 Ch'üan T'ang Shih, pp. 9841–42.

13 Ch'üan T'ang Shih, p. 9842.

14 Ch'eng-chai Shih-chi (Ssu-pu pei-yao edition), 42, 1a. The translation is that of Chaves, Jonathan, Heaven My Blanket, Earth My Pillow (New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1975), p. 91.Google Scholar

15 Keene, p. 527; Watson, p. 11.

16 Yamagishi, Gozan Bungakushū, p. 378.

17 Blyth, R. H., Mumonkan [Zen and Zen Classics, Vol. 4] (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1942), p. 2.Google Scholar

18 Keene, p. 524.

19 Noguchi, pp. 49–52; Keene, pp. 541–44.

20 Noguchi, p. 69.

21 Ch'üan T'ang Shih, p. 1995.

22 Ch'üan Tang Shih, p. 3948.

23 Kankō, Uemura, ed., Gozan bungaku zenshū (Tokyo: Tokyo Univ. Press, 1936), II, 246Google Scholar; Yamagishi, Gozan Bungakushū, p. 113.

24 Yamagishi, Gozan Bungakushū, p. 202.

25 Yamagishi, Gozan Bungakushū, p. 374.

26 Yamagishi, Gozan Bungakush¯, pp. 371–72;for translations of others of Ikkyū's kyōshi, see Keene, Donald, “The Portrait of Ikkyū,” in Landscapes and Portraits: Appreciations of Japanese Culture (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1971), pp. 226–41.Google Scholar

27 Yamagishi, Gozan Bungakushū, p. 454, note.

28 Yamagishi, Gozan Bungakushū, p. 320.

29 Masaru, Aoki, “Kyōto wo chūshin toshite mitaru kyōshi,” in Aoki Masaru Zernhū (Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1970), II, 95 ff.Google Scholar

30 Yamagishi, Gozan Bungakushū, p. 376.

31 Brower, Robert H. and Miner, Earl, Japanese Court Poetry (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1961), p. 24.Google Scholar

32 Yamagishi, Gozan Bungakushū, pp. 380–81.

33 Hung, pp. 22–23.

34 Aoki, p. 331.

35 Aoki, p. 295.

36 For a discussion of these elements and interpretations of their function in Chinese literary theory and criticism, see Ch'en, Shih-hsiang, “The Shih-ching: Its Generic Significance in Chinese Literary History and Poetics,” in Birch, C., ed., Studies in Chinese Literary Genres (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1974), pp. 8–41Google Scholar; and Liu, James J. Y., Chinese Theories of Literature (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975). pp. 64 ff.Google Scholar

37 Yamagishi, Gozan Bungakushū, p. 377; the last line actually reads, “Everyone calls me ‘Your Lordship.’”

38 Aoki, p. 295.

39 Noguchi, pp. 97–102 contains the details of this discussion.

40 Noguchi, p. 99.

41 Yamagishi, Gozan Bungakushū, p. 378.

42 Yamagishi, Gozan Bungakushū, p. 379. I have taken the liberty of substituting the more familiar word “beans” for the into (“potato”) of the original.

43 Keene, World Within Walls, p. 522.

44 Ch'üan Tang Shih, p. 814. P'ei Ti's poem alludes to lines in a poem by his friend Po Chü-i: “On the willows by the walls, pagoda trees in the palace, leaves slowly quiver and fall,/ But the sadness of autumn has not touched my dear friend's heart.”

45 Yamagishi, “Kyōshi,” p. 511.

46 Ch'üan T'ang Shih, p. 2721.

47 Yamagishi, “Kyōshi,” p. 512.

48 Aoki, p. 319.

49 Keene, World Within Walls, p. 5.

50 Noguchi. pp. 84–85.

51 Noguchi, pp. 77–79; Aoki, p. 307.

52 Aoki, p. 307.

53 Aoki, p. 315.

54 Aoki, p. 310.

55 Noguchi, p. 88.

56 Noguchi, pp. 162–63.

57 The poems and much of the annotation that follow are from Masaru, Aoki, “Santo anasagashi no kyōshi,” in Aoki Masaru Zenshū (Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1970), VII, 318–24.Google Scholar

58 Aoki Masaru, “Santo anasagashi no kyōshi,” pp. 319–20.

59 Aoki, “Santo anasagashi no kyoshi,” pp. 320–21.

60 Aoki, “Santo anasagashi no kyōshi,” pp. 320–21.

61 Aoki, “Santo anasagashi no kyōshi,” pp. 32 1–22.

62 Aoki, “Santo anasagashi no kyōshi,” pp. 321–22.

63 See discussion above, pp. 497–98.

64 Noguchi, p. 127.