Tales of Ise (Ise monogatari), in
its most familiar versions, is a collection of 125 uta-gatari
(or uta-monogatari: literally, "poem tale[s]") presented as episodes in
the life of Ariwara no Narihira (820-885), a
nobleman celebrated as the greatest male poet of his age. Within a decade or so
of his death, Narihira had become the legendary anti-hero of early Heian court
society, exemplar of an ideal of sacrificing political favor, fortune and
propriety for love and poetry. The legend of Narihira flourished for centuries
and assured Tales of Ise a place -- equaled only by Kokinshū,
The Tale of Genji, and Hyakunin isshu -- among the most-read and quoted classics of
Japanese literature.
The term utagatari, as used
in The Tale of Genji (where it is first attested), refers to an account
of the circumstances of the composition of a memorable poem, typically a waka
in the 31-syllable form. For Heian courtiers, among them the author of The
Tale of Genji and her contemporaries, poetry was an indispensable medium of
verbal expression: nothing of intense or sincere feeling could be adequately
expressed in prose. Without poetry, one could hardly speak convincingly of
love, resentment, delight or regret. It was a matter of much interest,
therefore, to know not only the texts of outstanding poems of the past but
something of their contexts, and this is what poem-tales meant to supply.
In this sense, poem-tales have
something in common with the epigraphs or headnotes (kotobagaki) to
poems in Kokinshū. The differences are telling, though, and are of
interest because of the close relationship between Tales of Ise and Kokinshū:
all 30 poems by Narihira in this anthology also appear in Tales of Ise,
and the kotobagaki to about a third of these are among the longest in Kokinshū.
Even the most extensive, though, are more concise than the respective utagatari
in Tales of Ise, and since nothing distinctive is added to what appears in the respective episodes in Tales of Ise, the simplest assumption is that
the editors of Kokinshū were quoting from a version of Tales of
Ise which, as of around 905 (when a near-final draft of Kokinshū
was likely published), already included those 30 poems and, arguably, no more.
On this hypothesis, the source of poems by Narihira in Kokinshū was
a much shorter text than the later 125-episode version of Tales of Ise,
and the editors of Kokinshū cited poems from this and not from a
version of Narihira's personal waka collection.
A majority of the poems of Narihira
anthologized in Kokinshū are preceded by the kind of terse kotobagaki
employed elsewhere, as a rule, to identify the "topic" (dai) of a poem. (That kotobagaki
in Kokinshū are meant to specify a "topic"
can be inferred from the fact that when no kotobagaki is given, the
absence is noted by the term dai-shirazu [topic unknown].) |
