Kitamura Kigin--Kono yo nochi no yo omou koto naki

by Keiji Shimauchi

297 pages, Hardcover

First published September 10, 2004

Reviews

[G.G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A stimulating biography of Kitamura Kigin (1624-1705), the poet, scholar, and Master of Poetry (歌学方 kagakukata) to the Tokugawa shogun. Shimauchi's account ranges much more widely than a traditional "life-and-works"; and he argues that Kigin's greatest achievement was as a commentator rather than as a poet.

Shimauchi pays particular attention to Kigin's immortal Genji monogatari Kogetsushō of 1673, a sixty-volume edition of the complete text of the eleventh-century The Tale of Genji, complete with selected commentary and interlinear glosses that identify subjects, speakers, and translate into the seventeenth-century colloquial phrases that Kigin thinks may be unclear. The Kogetsushō became the most widely circulated edition of Genji until well into the twentieth century. Shimauchi argues that whereas the Kogetsushō successfully enabled readers to make their way through the classical text, modern Japanese translations--such as those by Akiko Yosano, discussed in Yosano Akiko and The Tale of Genji--have in fact distanced readers from the text. I'm convinced he is right.

The subtitle of Shimauchi's biography is the lower hemistich of Kigin's "death poem" (辞世 jisei):
花も見つほととぎすをも待ち出でつこの世のちの世思ふことなき
hana mo mitsu hototogisu o mo machiidetsu / kono yo nochi no yo omou koto naki
which might be translated: "Blossoms I have seen, cuckoos too I've waited for: in this world of ours and in the world still to come I've nothing more to long for."