Assumptions about the production of Ise monogatari

The idea of Zhuangzi as a possible ideological force in the production of Ise monogatari (henceforth, IM)Footnote ¹ emerged in the course of an ongoing project to study the representation of types of decision making and their relation to the socio-cosmological structures in some mid-Heian texts.Footnote ² While an essential part of the general argument for ideological cohesionFootnote ³ is grounded in the representation of perception, decision making and action, it stands to reason that any such hypothesis requires specific evidence from individual sections. In what follows, six sections are analysed in detail. There are, of course, no explicit references to Zhuangzi.Footnote ⁴ The suggestion is that the Zhuangzi intertext works across the poetry and quintessential wabun prose, registering by a combination of a slight narrative elaboration and one or more lexemes or expressions that stand out in the sparse narrative texture. The lack of interpretational certainty conveyed by sinograms, or even the absence of the precise lexical or situational equivalence usually expected in demonstration of Chinese influence, do not, I believe, necessarily detract from the hypothesis of the Zhuangzi pretext. On the contrary, to discard reference to the tradition that went with sinograms and to invent a radically innovative native idiom would seem a sensible step if the intention was to call into question conventional referentiality and fixed viewpoints, picking up points in Zhuangzi and transposing them to a Japanese context. The suggestion is that this was an essential aspect of the production of at least the core part of IM, which might, for instance, have been a collaborative effort between someone familiar with the Chinese text(s)Footnote ⁵ and someone who could recast it in Japanese and produce paronomasia in the proper ideological mould.Footnote ⁶

It is to be noted that the six sections discussed below belong to different historical layers in the production of IM according to the historical-textual methodology of modern scholarship, which stipulates three distinct stages of the text depending on the occurrence of poems in Narihira-shū and the imperial anthologies.Footnote ⁷ Three sections (2, 4, 69) contain poems identified in Kokin wakashū as written by or to Ariwara no Narihira (825–880)Footnote ⁸ and have accordingly been thought to belong to the oldest pre-905 layer; and one poem in section 1 is found in an almost identical version in the same text, where it is attributed to Minamoto no Tōru (822–895). The poem in section 6 is only attested in later anthologies, and the poems in section 63 are not attested elsewhere. If one accepts the evidence to be presented below for Zhuangzi as a source in the creation of IM and also maintains the hermeneutic perspective of the three-stage production, this must presumably mean that several IM redactors over several generations worked within this esoteric understanding and that a circle of insiders were familiar with or could detect Zhuangzi's function. On the other hand, none of what is said here excludes the possibility that IM was essentially the work of one person or perhaps a small closely co-operating group of contemporaries working on similar ideological premises. What seems clear is that sections vary as to how intertextual material was used. If studied more closely, some sections will probably turn out to be inspired by specific Zhuangzi passages (e.g. section 71 below), but the majority look likely to illustrate the general epistemological points.Footnote ⁹

The interpretation of IM attempted here makes some general assumptions about its production. Above all, a dynamic ideological vision based on Zhuangzi sustained its elaboration. Crucially, someone around 900 or earlier must have come up with the idea of using themes from Zhuangzi for composing waka. That person – assuming that it was a man – might well have had a keen eye for the connections between matrimony and political power at the Japanese court, and it might have occurred to him that the discourse of power in Zhuangzi could be wittily explored. In Zhuangzi, ambition and intention were represented in Confucian ethical qualities such as benevolence (ren 仁) and righteousness (yi 義): those who were ambitious sought office with rulers, while others were unbound by intent and fixed viewpoints and appeared powerful to the rulers by their detached dynamism. In Japan, ambition for power was arguably manifested in sexual politics,Footnote ¹⁰ above all in the forcing of sexual desire as the ambitious secured their royal marriage alliance. Analogy to Zhuangzi would suggest no lack of socio-political advantage for those unbound by intentional perspective in remaining on the periphery, in “seeing and meeting”, and in behaving with moderation, when, as parents, they might be in a position to force.Footnote ¹¹ The text was shaped so as to capture Zhuangzi's ideas with subtlety, bringing out a promising perspective on power in the form of poetic articulation, while the prose delineated contrastive epistemological positions. It is impossible to be certain how far those with whom the idea originated took it, or on what terms the text was elaborated. The point is that the basic idea was malleable, and that it encouraged literary creativity. Perhaps the stories in Zhuangzi that told of serial actions leading to actional competenceFootnote ¹² were at some point picked up as a framework. One or two inspired poems or prose-poem sections would have been sufficient; this study envisages the second poem in section 1 in that pivotal function. The production would (at some point?) have been guided by the notion of a supra-individual life in a Japanese socio-political space, charting how easy sexual and social competence developed by serial actions, in the end mutating into something that looked like equanimity.

The valorized episteme and its construction

What, at a general level, points the reader towards Zhuangzi as the ideological source and guiding force in the production of IM, is the representation of knowledge, cognition and actions in the text. That, and not the biographical details of any individual, is what gives IM its structuredness. Indecidability or semantic indeterminacy was the core notion, which modern semiotics has already rightly made acceptable in the exegesis of IM.Footnote ¹³ Still the almost rule-bound ways of its working and the patterns it forms in the text could be better understood. I would like to suggest Zhuangzi's discussion in Qiwulun 斉物論 (Discussion on making all things equal (BW)/The sorting which evens things out (ACG)) of “(it is) that” and “(it is) this” (彼 vs. 是) as a seminal passage for IM. It sets out how viewpoints about oppositions, either “that” or “this”, fluctuate; how insistence on one or the other proves foolish; how lightness might be a possible indeterminate attitude.Footnote ¹⁴ As I see it, three features of the IM text can be understood to emerge from this discussion: the deconstruction of conventional referentiality, which was its subject; an understanding that indeterminacy manifested itself in (valorized) (re)actions of immediate perception, but, being unbound by conventional signification, ultimately superseded distinctions and broke social norms; and, thirdly, a triadic narrative structure on which the semantic supersession of opposites was enacted.Footnote ¹⁵ Each is discussed briefly below.

The introductory formula mukasi wotoko arikeri, “once there was a man”, has never failed to intrigue. Traditionally, it has tended to be read as a means of veiling a historical reality rather than as a key to the text's epistemological stance, although this has changed recently. Its function as an anaphoric boundary made reference between sections at best inferential, but was offset by linking devices such as a basic time line (viz. the advancing age of actants). As such, the effect was to unsettle cognitive categorization (“naming”) and any notion of “sameness” without, however, quite doing away with them. It is less often noted that the differentiating function of mukasi wotoko arikeri was itself unsettled within three (the number is probably not accidental) sections of its first occurrence in what appears a typical supersession of semantic opposites, very likely intended to shake up certainties about referentiality. Thus, mukasi wotoko arikeri in sections 2 and 3, which had provided a fresh narrative space and a differentiation between wotoko and wotoko, so to speak, were overtaken in section 4 by fito, which was shown in spite of its homophony with fitosi “be like”, easily to shift its reference from the particular “someone” or “other” to the general and indefinite “others” from one sentence to another. Additionally, the section concluded with the famously intractable poem on the notion of “sameness”.Footnote ¹⁶ Be that as it may, like a refrain, mukasi wotoko arikeri drew attention to the parallelisms between sections and, in due course, approached a function that was neither anaphoric nor non-anaphoric, cf. the exegetical tradition's “man of old” (mukasi wotoko), but indifferent to judgements of “same” or “different”. Whether or not one ultimately considers that this feature of the text was inspired by Zhuangzi's discussion of “that” and “this”,Footnote ¹⁷ it remains a uniquely inventive creation.

IM narrative rhetoric consistently guided interpretation by indirect means. Explicit valorization was avoided. At an obvious narrative level, antithesis established something of a cognitive-actional pattern. For instance, wotoko in sections 42 and 43 (whether interpreted as the same or not) passed opposite judgement on the likely fickleness of a woman he fancied in essentially identical situations. Wotoko (42) was gripped by a double vision of doubt, cf. repeated (nafo) fata “(yet) on the other hand”.Footnote ¹⁸ Only wotoko (43) reacting spontaneously, cf. nafo tanomu “yet I trust you (/with my name)”, and brushing aside his fear of humiliation was happy – if, some may say, deluded. IM narratives demonstrate again and again how memory and ambition restrained actants, binding them to fixed viewpoints, and how, if unbound, actants (re)acted with perspicacity to the situation at hand, and were generally the happier for it. This point was articulated by means of a variety of linguistic links, narrative motifs, or combinations of these: a widower's insistence on eternal love (113) contrasted to someone's reaction likened to keburi “smoke” (112);Footnote ¹⁹ someone's expectation that his beloved would keep her promise to meet him (96) contrasted to wotoko's courtship that did not wait and conquered all (95); and at Nunobiki (lit. “pulling cloth”) Waterfall (87), the contrast between the Head of the Guards' weepy longing for a promotion, and the master's (aruzi) spontaneous reaction that made all those present laugh. By appearing to draw water from the waterfall into his sleeves the master showed himself spontaneously in accord with its essence.

The frequency of examples seems to justify the inference that the text privileged the kind of actional disposition that A. C. Graham described in relation to Zhuangzi as spontaneity, the disposition to act unbound by fixed or unilateral viewpoints, but “disciplined by awarenes of the objective”.Footnote ²⁰ For its part, spontaneity in IM was defined by human interaction;Footnote ²¹ it always had a social context. In particular, nasake 情 “empathetic disposition”, which was arguably the core actional notion of the text (and several other mid-Heian monogatari), was conceived of within the communicative situation.Footnote ²² As Makura no sōshi put it, it was the reaction of saying: “How heartrending!” (itofosi or afare) when faced with someone or, even, when hearing of someone in a situation that instilled that feeling.Footnote ²³ When most clearly valorized, the (re)action was represented as carrying a risk of humiliation, and its outcome for the actant was never certain. I wish to suggest that this understanding affected the overall categorization of actions. It would tend to problematize attachment beyond the situation at hand, whether the actant's own emotions such as timidity, fear, obsessive love, etc., stated or unstated ambitions, or binding speech acts such as promises or orders. It stands to reason that such a categorization shaped the narratives in ways that IM hermeneutics ignores to its loss.

The spontaneous attitude was usually played out in conventional social situations, it seemed a prerequisite for indeterminacy but it was not identical to it. Semantic indeterminacy was not arbitrarily demonstrated, it was something out of the ordinary, focused textual signification on core epistemological notions or situations. One core semantic area was actions involving two broadly reciprocal human agents. In fact, all the verbs discussed below in relation to Zhuangzi, with the exception of miru “to see (someone)”, lexically fall into that category, cf. afu “to meet”, monogatarafu “to tell things to each other”, yobafu “to call out to, to court”, toburafu “to inquire about”. Indeterminacy was typically represented in a narrative sequence of two semantically distinct elements or syntagms, the constrast between which was superseded towards the end in a poetic articulation, thereby forming a triadic narrative. Of the two opposed elements/syntagms, one was positively defined for actional features such as telicity or volition, while the other lacked one or more of these features (it could, for instance, be the negation of the first), very much like the opposition between High and Low transitivity used in discourse analysis by Hopper and Thompson,Footnote ²⁴ which terms have therefore been used here, see

.

Table 1

To see how this worked in practice, consider the narrative of an imperial messenger (uti no tukafi) and a woman at “that palace” (kano miya), i.e. the Ise Shrine, in section 71.Footnote ²⁵ The woman wished to see the messenger (mimaku fosisa ni), but problematized this, mentioning the obstacles that lay in the way of seeing, such as igaki “sacred fence” of the shrine. The messenger replied in a poem,Footnote ²⁶ which pointed out that “the way” (miti in line 5) the woman wanted to take was not one to which kami would object. Effectively, the messenger seemed to suggest that going it transformed the telic “going to see him” (mi-) into an atelic activity “going along the way” and thereby represented a supersession of the woman's dilemma. The poem would seem to extend the contrastive phonetic symbolism of the actional-cognitive choices mi and i, the combination of which appears repeatedly in ituki no miya “the consecrated princess” or “Ise Shrine” in sections 69–71. Thus, mi “seeing”, the action the woman wished for, was opposed to i, which defined the perceived spiritual obstacles in her way: isamu, the kami's “objecting”, echoed the aforementioned igaki, and in turn produced its own echo imiziu “terribly” in section 72. Regardless of whether contemporary readers associated imiziu with its cognate verb imu “to refrain, to observe a taboo”, there can be little doubt of its relevance to the woman's dilemma. Note finally that High transitivity mi- “to see” and the superseding miti “way” were partly homophonous and contrasted to the lexemes sharing initial i that were summed up semantically by Low intransitive “refraining from action”. Encouragingly from the perspective of this study, the whole of section 71, both the superseding way and the woman's dilemma, to see or not to see, appears to capture a passage in Zhuangzi rather well, cf. 可乎可、不可乎不可、道行之而成 “Allowable? – allowable. Unallowable? – unallowable. The way comes about as we walk it[.]”.Footnote ²⁷

In the reading of IM presented here, semantic indeterminacy is understood in terms of logical supersession of oppositions. There is nothing extraordinary about logical supersession as such. It is common in languages and easily observed synchronically in lexical oppositions. It has even been suggested as a universal fact of cognition of oppositions that they are generated asymmetrically within a larger conceptual space so that one element of an opposition will in the course of a development extend beyond the opposition,Footnote ²⁸ e.g. kyōdai “siblings” can be understood as superseding the opposition between kyōdai “brothers” and shimai “sisters”. The extending element has been termed extensive (e.g. kyōdai), the other one (e.g. shimai), intensive.Footnote ²⁹ Note that what appears to differentiate the IM example of mi- and i(m)- above from the straightforward linguistic examples such as kyōdai: shimai above, is the paronomastic relation between the extensive term mi- “seeing” and its superseding manifestiation miti “way”.

Paronomastic supersession can be shown to be common in the IM sections examined below. The most interesting example is in the ideologically weightiest middle part of IM in the discussion of the three types of actional disposition relating to the social negotiation of matrimony, which involved not just lovers but their parents and sometimes even their children.Footnote ³⁰ The first two actional types were broadly defined as opposites: irogonomi “the amorous”, someone of fluctuating emotions and therefore given to spontaneity vs. sukimono “the obsessive” who was of fixed emotions or viewpoints and therefore averse to spontaneity. What ever the specific actions of those styled sukimono, in terms of the actional syntagm laid down by irogonomi who communicated and interacted intensely, the actions of sukimono were largely defined by avoidance or negatively defined action. Thus, opposition between syntagms of High transitivity (irogonomi) and syntagms of Low transitivity (sukimono) was played out across several sections. The third type were those to whom the term nasake could apply. Nasake was a term whose use was carefully circumscribed (in tenth- and early eleventh-century wabun generally), and nowhere more so than when its implications were most confounding. Narihira in section 63 was not directly characterized in terms of nasake; that characterization could only be inferred at the end of a line of inferences. The exceptionally clear concluding statement that Narihira was different, since he did “not distinguish between like and dislike”,Footnote ³¹ is important for an assessment of his reaction being beyond the opposition of irogonomi and sukimono. However, to the reader at the time, who may have put less store by general statements, the more impressive witty part might well have been the pragmatic recasting of the text's intentional telic action par excellence, Narihira's peeping through the fence. In 63, that action was implied rather than explicitly stated and, absurdly following the woman's lead, it was neither deliberated nor truly intentional, but rather spontaneous, yet hesitant, happening only because he happened to be standing where he was (taterite mireba).Footnote ³² It is my suggestion that the superseding character of this action was obscured, perhaps deliberately, in the text. More specifically, the conflation of notions of agency (irogonomi, sukimono) and of disposition (nasake) contributed to obscure the overall triadic configuration. A clearer, but less interesting, formulation would simply have characterized Narihira's action as the ultimate in irogonomi, i.e. irogonomi functioning as the extensive element in the opposition to sukimono. As it happens, the opposition between irogonomi and sukimono was constructed inclusively within the broader conceptual space of a third, valorized term nasake, whose social application was, if not unlimited, at least wider than either. The extensive irogonomi, although its domain was exclusively sexual, had a natural valorized affinity with possession of nasake by virtue of easy reaction; and it was opposed to intensive sukimono, which lacked the easy reaction, but had wider social applications than irogonomi. The triadic structure can be represented schematically as follows:

It may or may not be significant that the terms were introduced in the same order as in the above example of IM 71: the extensive element or narrative motif preceded the intensive one, which in turn preceded the logical supersession.

As suggested by the above examples, supersession in IM was probably never a clear-cut lexical phenomenon like kyōdai vs. shimai, but always involved pragmatic disguise as well as paronomasia, for which articulation in poetry was, of course, ideal. The qualitative asymmetry of the opposite elements finds support in the cosmological homologies, for instance, in the supersession in section 69, which incorporated a correlative structure of the Pole star–Big Dipper star configuration and Yin–Yang cosmology. What seems significant in a general way is that these homologies underlined a differentiated understanding of the events involved, afu “meeting” and nu “sleeping together”. That is, the agential roles were not simply binary, but formed an opposition characterized by asymmetry. It seems not unlikely that other communicative situations that assumed reciprocity (interdependence), such as poetry exchanges under certain circumstance, were also conceptualized as asymmetrical and available to correlative explanation, e.g. the actant taking the initiative to communicate determined the subject matter and hence was more dynamic than the interlocutor.Footnote ³³

Finally, it should be noted that the cognitive-actional categorization outlined appeared to correlate with politico-cosmological distinctions in IM, although this cannot be discussed here. Broadly, the contrast between irogonomi and sukimono represented in the climactic middle sections by Ariwara no Narihira and the monarch (mikado), respectively, correlated to cosmological views. The royal actional mode, defining those at ofomiya “court”, was defined by sexual taboos, recitation of the Buddha's names and rituals of purification (section 65), while sex and poetic articulation at Ise were correlated to a Yin–Yang and star cosmology (section 69). The possibility that the contrast extended across the text deserves more attention.

So much for the general features of IM. The individual sections are considered below in order of occurrence in IM and the discussion is focused on what is intertextually relevant.

Section 1

It was conjectured above that the seminal idea for the production of IM could be encapsulated in a single poem or a single section. The suggestion that follows is that section 1 contains such a seminal structure. By combining a paronomastic inscription of a passage of Zhuangzi in its concluding second poem with a comprehensive thematic fit of the same Zhuangzi passage and the narrative motifs of the section as a whole, this section seems to achieve a unique exoteric-esoteric double structure. Read – exoterically – from the beginning, it is a straightforward narrative of a young man who goes hunting and grasps the impetuous spontaneous way of poetry (itifayaki miyabi). If, however, the concluding second poem is read with attention to its paronomastic potential, its jo (mitinoku sinobu) can be shown to embed the definition of dao “way” in chapter 6 of Zhuangzi, and the situational determinants that follow the general definition of dao read like a summary of the overall thematic structure of section 1. The esoteric understanding of the jo therefore recasts wotoko's actions, and in so doing, so to speak, returns the reader to the opening. The section may, quite likely, in its transmitted form be a later construction inspired by the Zhuangzi passage.

Wotoko in section 1 was introduced as someone belonging in a well-defined socio-political space. His recent coming of age (ufikauburi) implied that he was new in his first official post; he went to Kasuga “spring day”, appropriately, since spring, as also the sun, correlated with the direction east, which in turn correlated with waxing Yang that characterized youth in the Yin–Yang life cycle. Kasuga was the location of the Fujiwara's ancestral shrine, and by specifying it as the location where wotoko had his domains, i.e. where he ruled (kasuga no sato ni siru yosi site), other associations seemed to open up: wotoko functioned in a ruling capacity (at court) in the new capital with/under the Fujiwara house. By seeing wonna farakara “sister”, wotoko lost sight not just of his ordered New existence, but of the distinctions between Old and New.

Significantly, the actional sequence was centred on three (broadly speaking) cognitive verbs linked by assonance, kaima- mi(tekeri) “seeing through a gap in the fence”, midare- “becoming confused (of perception)” that alternated with madofi-su “becoming confused” (note another assonance mado-/mida-), and miyabi “manifesting the ‘palace mode’”. These “three mi”Footnote ³⁴ described how wotoko's telic action of catching-sight-of was transformed into confusion about distinctions and, finally, how the opposition of the two gave way to spontaneous articulation in the poem, which was characterized in the prose as miyabi “behaviour of palaces”, and within the poem, as miti “way”.Footnote ³⁵ Details count here. Kaimamitekeri, where the perfective aspect -tu (-te) defined the action as intentional and telic, fluctuated pragmatically between the context of hunting and sexual pursuit.Footnote ³⁶ In the context of hunting, the seeing through a gap in the fence suggested a nuance of “closing in on”. Indeed, given the radical paronomasia that pervaded this section, and which was more striking on re-reading, it might have occurred to some readers that not only did (mi)kaki denote a “woven/braided fence”,Footnote ³⁷ but kaimami actually “contained” ami “net, braiding”,Footnote ³⁸ and might therefore amount to an indirect reference to Zhuangzi's famous allegory of knowledge, “Nets exist for catching fish, once a fish is caught, the net is forgotten”.Footnote ³⁹

Be that as it may, the seeing/catching occasioned young wotoko's cognitive shift from a position where distinctions were clear and unproblematic to a position of confusion (midare). The text suggests the contrast between New and Old in terms of condition, toponym and the cognitive mode: New with clear distinctions: ufikauburite … kasuga no sato ni … siru (yosi site) as just discussed, vs. Old without such clarity: (omofoezu) furusato ni ito fasitanakute arikereba, kokoti madofinikeri “(He could not understand it.) She confounded him so/It [=her presence] confounded himFootnote ⁴⁰ in his old home/place, and he lost his senses.”Footnote ⁴¹ Commentators, as far as I can tell, mostly overlook the ^_te-extended adjectival predicate, i.e. fasitanakute arikereba (rather than fasitanakarikereba). Although adjectival te-extension has yet to be studied systematically, it must be recognized as an aspectual form with distinct semantic features, perhaps akin to the perfect suffix -tari/-te ari with dynamic verbs. This opens up the possibility that fasitanakute arikereba related to wotoko: he had been away from furusato for so long that he “had become incongruous” or “was now incongruous”, which in socio-political terms, might imply that he had become accustomed to the New (Fujiwara) matrimonial ways. I interpret furusato ni as a locative adjunct to madofu “lose one's way”, i.e. wotoko's seeing resulted in his loss of the cognitive map of furusato. All in all, therefore, the experience made impossible the conventional cognitive distinctions between New and Old, the basis for wotoko's experience so far.

The text keeps wotoko's interlocutor from the reader's view. Grammatically, the absence of any expression of plurality presumably means that wonna farakara must be understood as having singular reference,Footnote ⁴² and hence likely to refer to wotoko's own (half-)sister rather than a pair of sisters. Seeing a female sibling – perhaps for the first time or after a long separation – seems to have caused a jolt in wotoko's cognition and brought about disorientation concerning the distinction between “own sister” and “someone else's sister”. In this perspective, his disorientation importantly hinted at the possibility of a connoted synonym. For while wonna farakara “sister”, considered in its natural interdependence, presupposed “brother”, i.e. presumably wotoko farakara, wotoko's particular confusion between New and Old might have brought to mind the Old poetic binomial imo-se with its more ready semantic fluctuation between “sister and brother” and “lover and lover”.Footnote ⁴³

Let us turn to the poems and the description of the poetic production, which made up the second half of the section:

The prose comment, about which I shall have more to say below, has it that in composing this poem wotoko took his hint from an older poem:

The disagreement on the second poem stems in part from somenisi being interpreted as a Perfective aspect or Perfect, -nu or -tari.Footnote ⁴⁶ The reading preferred here understands -si to have its regular past reference,Footnote ⁴⁷ which allows the two poems to be construed as presenting contrastive temporal perspectives on midare and its poetic articulation. Young wotoko in the first poem underscored the spatial or temporal limitlessness, as he saw it, in the immediate present perspective at Kasuga. The poet in the second poem looked from Michinoku, the north-east border region of the time, homophonous with “the end of the road” (miti no oku). Intriguingly, it is this poem rather than wotoko's that showed similarities to the narrative: phonetically, the assonance, miti (syllables 1–2), modi (9–10), mida (18–9) recalled the “three mi” and there was a rather similar consequential hiatus between the intentional action modizuri “rubbing (an invisible pattern)” and midare somenisi “colour or confusion emerged”. The poem's question concerned the beginning or origin in the past of the poet's confusion or emotional reaction (cf. some- “to begin to” punned on “to take colour”), which the poet insisted did not emanate from himself. How that should be interpreted is again debatable. I suggest that it reflected a perception of the other that was intense to the point that it blurred any clear distinction, i.e. emotions emanating from himself. It is, however, only in the paronomastic reading introduced below that we may understand the poems to amount to the view that mi(dare), as well as miti/miyabi, was generally without limits and, particularly, without temporal end or beginning.

If the above translation of the second poem appears more complex than this reading suggests, this is because it reflects my view that the jo, and specifically mitinoku no sinobu, incorporated a paronomastic structure, a rendering of part [1] of the paradoxical definition of dao in chapter 6, Dazongshi 大宗師 (The teacher who is the ultimate ancestor) of Zhuangzi:

Mitinoku and Sinobu like other place names in IM would have been expected to support paronomasia, i.e. be interpretable on several levels, phonetically, graphically, and in terms of syntactic and paradigmatic context. Graphically, mitinoku, the name of the province and perhaps a toponym conceived as the threshold or embarkation point to the wider cosmos,Footnote ⁴⁹ could be understood as “the innermost of the land” (陸奥) or, as relevant here, “the innermost of the way” (道奥).Footnote ⁵⁰ The conventional representation of the district name Sinobu 信夫Footnote ⁵¹ was interpretable as “to be trusted, what is trusted”. In a metaphorical understanding of the uncontracted form miti no oku, miti could be interpreted as “dao”, and oku “innermost” was arguably not so semantically different from 情 in the Zhuangzi passage, viz. A. C. Graham's interpretation “essential” or “something it essentially is”.Footnote ⁵² This yielded an overall proposition-like structure “the innermost of the way is to be trusted” or perhaps “the way/dao has something it essentially is and is to be trusted”. Within the poem, sinobu was understood as a constitutive element of the compound sinobu(modi)zuri, “rubbed-dyed pattern of the shinobu plant”,Footnote ⁵³ the metonym of midare “confusion of distinctions”, signifying a shape or an object in a paradoxical relationship to its defining quality, something hidden (like the plant sinobu) – and perhaps difficult to fathom – yet visible. As such, sinobu, understood as “what is hidden” (忍ぶ), enabled another semantic level that could be laid out as a function of miti/dao in relation to the intertext. The following is a schematic representation of the overall correlation between IM and Zhuangzi:

Generally speaking, there would have been nothing exceptional in a paronomastic construction of core concepts of quality. It is found in at least one important Chinese text, i.e. the pivotal homophony of ren 忍 “forebearing” and ren 仁 “humane” in Renwang huguo boruoboluomi jing 仁王護国般若波羅蜜経 (J. Ninnōgyō),Footnote ⁵⁷ where, intriguingly, ren 忍, “forebearing”, semantically overlaps with sinobu of the IM poem. Importantly, the intertextual relationship suggested here is supported by evidence in two areas. First, it is clear that the Zhuangzi passage had some “inter-ideological” currency at the time, which makes it more likely that the poet's audience would have appreciated the paronomasia. Thus, the Zhuangzi passage, either as a whole or part [1] on its own, was quoted in several Buddhist texts of Chinese or Japanese provenance with the purpose of differentiating and evaluating various non-Buddhist views.Footnote ⁵⁸ The potentially most significant example I have come by is found in the Consciousness Only (yuishiki) commentary Yuishiki gitō zōmyōki 唯識義灯増明記 written by the Hossō monk Zenju 善珠 (723–97).Footnote ⁵⁹ Zenju, whose influence can be gauged also through his work in Buddhist logic (inmyō) and the invitation extended to him by Saichō to Hieizan in 793, obviously attached great significance to that passage, since he used it in the introductory overview to define the essence of Zhuangzi.Footnote ⁶⁰ It is probable that his view was shared by others. A note, thought to be in Zenju's own handwriting, to accompany the return in 746 of a copy of a commentary to Zhao-Lun 肇論, borrowed from the Scriptorum of Sutras (shakyōsho) at Tōdaiji,Footnote ⁶¹ may be taken as further evidence of his – and probably others' – engagement with Laozi and Zhuangzi. How or whether this intellectual engagement was continued in Zenju's or other Buddhist circles remains to be explored.

The second argument for the Zhuangzi pretext derives from the close correspondence in the overall thematic structure of IM section 1 and parts [2] and [3] of the above Zhuangzi passage. The first half of section 1, describing wotoko's cognitive transformation from kaimamiru to midaru and eventually to miti/miyabu, accorded with the paradox in [3] of the Zhuangzi passage “[It] can be grasped but not seen” (可得而不可見). The second half concerned wotoko's spontaneous composition as a reflection of another person's earlier poem, which I read as an illustration of [2], “You can hand it down, but you cannot receive it” (可伝而不可受). Note that the esoteric interpretation of the poem refers the reader back in a kind of circular movement via passage [3] to passage [2] and the beginning of section 1. The text was quite detailed about wotoko's composing and sending off his poem. There was first the decision, wotoko no kitarikeru karaginu no suso wo kirite, uta wo kakite yaru “tearing off a tear of the hunting costume the man was wearing, he wrote a poem and was about to send it in” or “… he was about to write a poem and send it in”. Although keri-narrative has recently been given the attention it deserves, it is still not clear how an occasional sentence-final predicate without the evidential past suffix like yaru should be interpreted. I have argued for a distinctly imperfective, perhaps most appropriately a conative nuance, “to decide to V” or “to be about to V”.Footnote ⁶²Yaru, then, would allow a pinpointing of wotoko's inspired sudden change of heart the moment he realized that the (non-)pattern of his costume might convey his message more succinctly than anything he could write, and this detail might in due course be adduced in the interpretation of itifayaki (miyabi), which seems to have encompassed a nuance of swiftness. Tracing wotoko's consciousness, the focus at this point appeared to shift to the material of the hunting costume that provided the poetic inspiration, sono wotoko, sinobuzuri no kariginu wo namu kitarikeru “He was wearing a hunting costume with sinobu-printed pattern”. The poetic creation itself was described as the poet's immanent stance: not something passively received and yet as an act within a transmission. The paradox – transmission, but not reception – is, it seems to me, supported by two phrases, at least one of which has traditionally posed problems, but which seem to corroborate the indeterminacy. Firstly, the near-homophony of ofitugite “hurriedly, catching up with” and woitukite/woidukite “acting old(er)”, cf. “hurriedly/in acting as an older man, he sent word in” (… to namu woitukite ifiyarikeru);Footnote ⁶³ and secondly, tuide, as “occasion” or “sequence” in tuide omosiroki koto to mo ya omofiken “perhaps he also thought the occasion/the sequence interesting”.Footnote ⁶⁴

In as much as wotoko both grasped a connection and composed the poem he did, the text stipulates that he belonged to the circle of insiders who could perceive, decipher, and enact the text's esoteric code, those characterized as mukasi fito fa, kaku itifayaki miyabi wo namu sikeru “Those of old had this impetuous ‘palace-way’”.Footnote ⁶⁵ The socio-political line drawn by this defining poetic action, miyabi grounded in miti, should not, I think, be compromised by any association to miyako “capital”.Footnote ⁶⁶ Although it cannot be discussed in detail here, what seems far more important is the opposition in later sections between miya associated with the location of Ise and actants whose actions seem spontaneous and perhaps characterizable in terms of possessing nasake, and ofomiya, defined as those at court acting without nasake.Footnote ⁶⁷ The question is perhaps whether the poets in section 1, who did not appear to belong to either of these groups, might be understood as superseding the opposition between, ofomiya centre (/New) and miya periphery (/Old)?Footnote ⁶⁸

Section 2

It could be argued that section 2 continued the movement back in time begun in section 1 by situating the narrative at a time prior to the New present of section 1, a time before the houses of the capital were determined and the power structure fixed, before the district, nisi no kyau, in which the woman lived, became the less attractive (marshy) part of the capital. The interpretation that follows uses intertextual evidence to focus on the semantic mutation of the initial interaction expressed by utimonogatarafu into the cognitive attitude expressed in the poem. As such it complements the exoteric narrative of the love-triangle, which takes utimonogatarafu to be about expressing feelings and wotoko's staring into the rain as an expression of longing and perhaps hesitation due to the fact that the woman had another man.

Three near-parallel sentences noted three points about the woman: (i) she was superior to those of the world (yofito); (ii) what distinguished her superbly was her heart-mind (kokoro), not her appearance (katati); (iii) it would appear (cf. -kerasi) that she was not alone. It can be assumed that this was meant to represent what wotoko saw, and that his view was a perspicacious one; he was after all described as mame-wotoko “a serious man”, cf. ma-me “of true eye/sight”, which in this context must mean ability to perceive the woman's heart-mind against the drawback of her looks and the location of her house, and perhaps even a disregard for any (such) distinctions. The suggestion that she was not alone, might – apart from anything else – imply that others shared his view, from which it might follow that she was in some sense aloof.

A plausible interpretation must relate the woman's character and her uniquely specified interaction with the man, the befittingly opaque verb utimonogatarafu glossed “to tell or reveal things/something to each other”, which here appeared for the first time in the tradition. A morphological analysis into its constituent elements suggests a reciprocal (-afu) and intensive (uti-) action. Judging from early examples, kataru referred to a narrative content/form which was particular to the speaker, his/her vision-version of things, to which the interlocutor did not have the same access, and the compounding with mono, whose indefiniteness “something (or other)”, “something not quite fathomable”, strengthened the possibility of a communication of enigmatic and perhaps empowering contents. Anyway, what cannot be disputed is the clear sequential or causal line in the form of te-conjoined predicates between the action of utimonogatarafu and the situation of composition and the sending off of the poem. This line was only broken to challenge the reader to guess what might have been on wotoko's mind (ikaga omofiken) when he composed his poem (cf. section 1). Given such a syntactic sequencing, one should expect a direct connection between what the woman told or revealed to him, and he to her, and the man's poetic articulation:

This is a poem rich in verbs both on the surface and below it. Indeed, the fact that two of its three nouns, yoru and faru, have an indeterminate nominal-verbal form, highlights mono “something” in faru no mono tote as the only unambiguous noun and the phonetic echo of the initial action uti monoga tarafu. Note also the semantically opposite verb pairs. Among them, akasite fa … kurasitu, one or perhaps more night–day cycles of continuous awareness, defined both the poet's fundamental existence and his most evident activity.Footnote ⁷⁰ In fact, yo wo akasu was the only unambiguous transitive event at least on the surface. This agential mode of existence in yo wo akasite was offset by a multitude of non-actions, six on my count, that could be paronomastically understood not to accompany it. Note that the two modifying verbs oki mo sezu and ne mo sede (pace the English translations) are twisted, not idiomatic opposites. This means that each could be understood in opposition to its idiomatic opposite, i.e. oki as implying fusi “lying”, ne, same “waking up”.Footnote ⁷¹ In addition, oki could be understood as punned on oku “to leave someone” and ne polysemically allowed the nuance “to sleep with”. By comparison, the pun on nagame, “looking unconcerned”, “taking a long look” and “long spring rain” was a commonplace. Wotoko's engagement with the rain, the immediate object of his seeing, was unusual.Footnote ⁷² The poem and prose seemed constructed so as to show him assimilating to the drizzle, perceiving presumably both himself and the rain “as things of spring” (faru no mono tote), and his own fluid presence agreed with the description of the rain as sofofuru “soft” or “fluid”. This last detail was particularly apt, since sofofuru as a possible (near) pun on sofu “to follow (a central figure or object), to join”, pointed to his interaction with the woman as the source of his assimilatory disposition. Lastly, there is the clausal syntax. The complementary meaning of akasu and kurasu intuitively supported an analysis of akasite fa as the direct condition for (faru no mono tote nagame) kurasitu. I wonder, however, if, alternatively, the te fa-clause and the two negative predicates might be understood as modifying faru no mono tote.Footnote ⁷³ That would mean that the spending of the night awake directly enabled seeing any unspecified object, i.e. whatever was in sight, as “thing(s) of spring” and, since that object happened to be the long spring rain, the manifested action was the assimilation to the rain. This is a small, but not insignificant, point in relation to the pretext.

It is possible to trace the expression “thing(s) of spring” to Sino-Japanese and Chinese poetry;Footnote ⁷⁴ in Zhuangzi, however, one finds correspondences to all the section's topoi, the halt to discernible activity, the man and the rain, their shared fluid disposition, the perception of things “like things of spring”, and the sage-like charisma at odds with physical appearance. A. C. Graham introduced such persons in chapter 5 Dechongfu 徳充符 (The Signs of Virtue) as living by Virtue as follows: “The test that a man lives by the Power [徳] in himself, and is wholly independent of everything outside him, is his indifference to the great irreparable disasters, death and bodily deformity, an indifference which makes others too ignore even such an obstrusive sign of mutilation and social condemnation as a foot chopped off for a crime”.Footnote ⁷⁵ The evidence for adaptation of such Chinese sages to characters in IM may be limited, but the lowly old man (katawi okina) in section 81, whose decrepit posture, but impressive poem at the banquet at Kawara no in the exegetical tradition has been at pains to explain,Footnote ⁷⁶ is surely a case in point. I suggest that the woman in Nishi no kyō deserves consideration within the same framework.

The likelihood that section 2 was constructed with reference to two Zhuangzi passages is high. If one takes the lead from the characterization of the enigmatic female and her communication with the man in the IM prose, the old yet childlike Nu Yu's account to Nanbo Zikui of how she told/informed (告) someone with “the talent of a sage” (聖人之才) comes to mind,Footnote ⁷⁷ particularly the description of how that person put life outside himself and, having got to the break of day, saw beyond temporal differentiation:

I suggest that the process of putting life outside himself to see dawn was precisely captured in the focus of wotoko's poem on “seeing the night through until dawn” (yoru wo akasite) to the exclusion of all other (non-enacted) actions.

It is, however, in Confucius's conversation with Duke Ai of Lu in Dechongfu 徳充符 that we find the metaphorical subject-matter of “things of spring”.Footnote ⁷⁹ Duke Ai grieved at having been abandoned by his ugly-faced chief minister Ai Tai-To and asked Confucius to explain the enigmatic assimilative effect the minister had on others. Confucius summed it up as follows:

The following explanation of each quality separately ties in with the characterization of wotoko in the IM poem. The minister's powers (才) were explained as the ability to react to the unfathomable mutations of fate, the ever-changing events and conditions of existence, without letting them into the mind. Confucius specified the ever ongoing (“day and night”) aspect of an attitude that “makes it be spring with everything”:

Next, the minister's virtue (徳) was compared to water (at rest):

The esoteric interpretation implied that by composing the poem wotoko had assimilated the woman's point, and the notion of a cognitive transformation was supported paronomastically by utimonogatarafu and its echo mono to in faru no mono tote. This interpretation affords a broad correlation between the communicative form inscribed on the exoteric narrative plane and the cognitive actional vehiclesFootnote ⁸² inscribed on the esoteric plane: the uta that inspired wotoko's poetry in section 1 correlated on intertextual lines with a definition of dao 道 in Zhuangzi, and utimonogatarafu that inspired wotoko in section 2, with a definition of zai 才 and de 徳.Footnote ⁸³

Sections 4 and 6

While the poet's uncomplicated to-like-and-make-love proposal (omofi araba … ne mo sinan) in a modest setting (mugura no yado) in section 3 reads on the surface like an intermezzo, the intertextual interpretation of sections 1 and 2 seems to me to have the effect of enlarging the stature of the actants, both wotoko and the empress of the Second Ward (nideu no kisaki) first mentioned in section 3, and those around her on the other side of the socio-political divide. It makes wotoko's initiative appear more risky and captivating. The historical-textual methodology has seen the concentration of so-called historical comments about the empress and her relations in sections 3–6 as “later attachments” (後人補注), placed where they are by the redactors' wish to preserve links to a historical reality. However, regardless of how one views the historical argument, an integral reading impresses on the reader that the so-called historical information (also?) had a narrative function within the text's socio-political discourse and its articulation in cognitive stances. In my reading, sections 4 and 6 both explicated scepticism about insisting on distinctions, whether by hiding or by setting up physical boundaries, and both illustrated material from chapter 2 of Zhuangzi (Qiwulun 斉物論). This point, I suggest, is reinforced by a cross-sectional numerological punning which contrasts the fluctuating referentiality of fito “(some)one” or “other”, fitosi “be like” (section 4) with divisive ni “two” as in nideu no kisaki “the empress of the second ward” (sections 3, 5 and 6) and nirubeku mo arazu “it did not look like [last year]” (section 4).Footnote ⁸⁴ The contrast appears to correlate to a cognitive dichotomy between adhering to divisions or strictly contrastive opposites, as the courtiers, i.e. those around the empress did, and acting or seeing beyond them, like fito or wotoko did (in the end).

In sections 4 and 6, the central pair of actions are the communication between a man and a woman and the hiding or disappearance of the coveted woman.Footnote ⁸⁵ It could be significant that the verb of communication in both encompassed a meaning relating to death, mourning (toburafu) and communicating with a dead spirit (yobafu), respectively. The paronomasia in section 4 was as extensive as it was simple. Fito(-) was the shared phonetic form of a series of association words (engo) in the prose and poem, which ultimately led to the poem's question of “sameness”. Conspicuously, there was no wotoko or wonna, only fito, “someone”, or “other(s)” whose reference fluctuated from sentence to sentence: the opening sentence introduced someone (fito) who lived in the west wing of the Gojō empress's residence; the next sentence, someone (else) (fito) who went to inquire about her repeatedly (yuki toburafu); and when the one who lived in the west wing disappeared, it was to “a place where the other/others could not come and go” (fito no iki kayofubeki tokoro). This then looked like an instance of logical supersession, “someone, a certain” vs. “someone (else)” superseded by “someone (indeterminate)”. The semantic fluctuation was brought to a halt in the description of the man's restless quest for last year that concluded, significantly perhaps, not with a negative form of fitosi “to be alike”, but with a form of ni- “to resemble” (nirubeku mo arazu “it would not resemble [last year]”). The poem, by conjoining this superbly fluctuating fito- with the deictic first person pronoun into (wa ga mi) fitotu “one, (my body/view) alone”, tied this line of paronomasia into a complex knot with moto no mi “original body/view”:Footnote ⁸⁶

In the context of Zhuangzi, any comparison of someone's “sameness” at two points in time naturally brings to mind Yancheng Ziyou's (顔成子游) comment at the beginning of chapter 2, when he found Ziqi (子綦) meditating:

But is there anything in section 4 to support this as a pretext? It certainly does not seem accidental that the two lexemes used in Zhuangzi to describe contemplation can be understood by a kind of creative lexico-semantic adaptation to establish a (superseding?) cognitive-actional connection between the actant's initial communication (yuki)toburafu, and his transformed disposition that enabled the concluding poetic articulation. That is, the section establishes a semantic relation between communication and perhaps sex, and a cognitive disposition possibly defined by a loss of identity, akin to what was discussed for section 2. Contemplation in the Zhuangzi passageFootnote ⁸⁷ was described as having two constitutive elements. It was a loss akin to bereavement, viz. 喪 “mourning, burial” or “to lose (a wife/husband)”,Footnote ⁸⁸ and the contemplative posture was defined as 隱 “to lean against”. As it happens, the denotations of the two verbs that defined the narrrative up until the spring night, overlapped with 喪 and 隱. Firstly, the verb toburafu “to inquire about, to console, to mourn” described the man's initial courtship; and kakure-nu “hid” and also “to disappear, to die”, the woman's disappearance. Since the man's reaction to her disappearance would naturally also be understood in terms of mourning (toburafu) his actional stance could in a paradoxical way be said to be the same, whether she was present or hidden.

The intricacies of the poem in section 4 cannot be dealt with in full. What follows is merely a suggestion. The man's assertion that he was his “original me” (moto no mi) could, within the framework of the narrative, be taken as a paradoxical reference to his original spontaneous disposition foi nasi 本意なし “absence of original intent”, “lacking original intent”, which changed when he fell in love, viz. foi ni fa arade kokorozasi fukakarikeru fito… “Quite without intending it someone falls deeply in love with her …”.Footnote ⁸⁹ If we accept this line of argument, it must mean that the spring night had changed him and that he was no longer mourning, since that emotion would imply a fixed viewpoint that disagreed with the “original me”. In point of fact, a change could be implied in the description, in that the man had come prompted by longing (kofite yuku), but at the time of the poem, he recollected what had happened (kozo wo omofi idete yomeru) rather than longed for it. The text, however, gives little away as to how this might have come about, yet is by IM standards very specific about his reclining as the moon reclines, “He burst into tears and lay on the rough floor boards until the moon (too) reclined …” (abara naru itaziki ni tuki no katamuku made fuserite). My suggestion is that the highlighting of the man's actional unity with the moon in a pose semantically close to 隱, allows the description to be understood as representing a trance-like contemplation of the moon, which recalls the Zhuangzi passage. The suggestion is then that the paronomastic reading revealed the man's actions, and indeed the woman's, from their encounter to their separation (e.g. toburafu, kakuru, katamuku) to be encompassed within the semantic space of the two verbs that defined the contemplation in Zhuangzi. Put differently, they showed the paradoxical actional consistency or sameness throughout that wotoko claimed in his poem. The final sentence, fonobono to akuru ni, nakunaku kaferinikeri “as the night grew lighter by and by, he went back home weeping”, balanced the man's crying (nakunaku) against the growing morning light (fonobono), leaving it to the reader to guess whether the man might be on his way metaphorically to “use light” (ming 明) in the way sages do in the Qiwulun chapter.Footnote ⁹⁰

By comparison to section 4, section 6 provided a relatively obvious connection between wotoko's initial communicative action, yobafu “to call out to/for (a spirit)”, and his poetic articulation, which seems relatable to the ritual action tamayobafi “soul summoning”, cf. that both asi wo suru “to stamp one's feet” and kafi nasi “there are no means” were used in earlier texts in descriptions of the summoning back a dead spirit.Footnote ⁹¹ This interpretation is consistent also with siratama being read paronomastically as siratama “white Yin spirit” 魄 (haku) or alternatively, as the compound “Yin and Yang spirits” (cf. 魂 (tama/kon)).Footnote ⁹²

There are other difficult questions, which can only be outlined here, relating to the central motif of stealth and hiding taking place in almost total darkness. When wotoko abducted the woman to the dark of Akutagawa “the river of dirt”, the dew on the grasses – presumably the only brightly shining object in the darkness – caught the woman's eye and she asked, “what is that?” (kare fa nani zo). The man did not reply, and by noting that they had far to go, that there was thunder in the air, etc., the text suggests that this was what was on his mind.Footnote ⁹³ Eventually, he hid her in a store house (kura ni osi iru). In other words, their minds would seem preoccupied with concerns beyond each other. In the intertextual perspective, both the woman's kare 彼 “that” and the man's using a storehouse kura 蔵 to hide the woman translate into Zhuangzi key terms used to make or maintain distinctions. Indeed, the scene of hiding pointed to a paronomastic connection. A near-homophonous pair, toguti “doorway” and fitokuti “one mouthful”, defined the battle for the woman (wonna) between wotoko and woni “demon” (the three actants themselves a case of assonance): wotoko sat with bow and quiver (yanagufi)Footnote ⁹⁴ in the doorway (toguti “door opening”) facing the kami's roar (kami (nari)) while the demon (woni) – above or behind him – gobbled up the woman in one mouthful (fitokuti).Footnote ⁹⁵ From the perspective of Zhuangzi's notion of the stupidity of hiding things, wotoko's hiding the woman in the dilapidated storehouse – turning his back on her – provides a delightful illustration. By placing himself in the doorway he acted as a door that could only shut, unlike the moveable door hinge, that Zhuangzi used as the metaphor for the flexible perspicacious disposition:Footnote ⁹⁶

It would seem that in whatever way the woman's question to the man is construed, at the time he articulated his poem, he had come to associate it with siratama “white jewel”:Footnote ⁹⁷

The intertextual perspective holds more interpretational possibilities for siratama than can be considered here. It would seem that siratama was understood as a metaphor for an ideal unity in Zhuangzi Footnote ⁹⁸ just like the door hinge. It seems possible that siratama might have been associated, perhaps in a form accommodated to a Japanese context, with what is critically referred to in the Qiwulun chapter and elsewhere in Zhuangzi as jianbai 堅白 “hardness and whiteness”, a kind of forced argument, said to be used by those who try to force something that is not clear to be clear.Footnote ⁹⁹ Whatever the woman intended with her question, the poem seemed to eschew the logic of the forced argument and instead took siratama as an object of two “distinct, but mutually pervasive” termsFootnote ¹⁰⁰ – hard and white, presumably metaphors for the man and the woman – uniting in the indeterminacy of tuyu “dew/nothing”.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Speculation along those lines obviously depends on evidence for the state of Chinese logical debate in the contemporaneous Japanese tradition.

It should be noted that the identification of woni as historical actants once again showed these as defined by a lack of semantic fluctuation, both numerically, cf. nideu no kisaki and wo ni, and possibly by their uniformly High transitivity actions, expressed by another verbal triad, kikituke “to get hold of news”, todome “to stop someone”, and torikafesi “to take someone back” with plosive assonance k-t, t-d, t-k.Footnote ¹⁰² This, in IM rhetorical terms, is the socio-political confrontation that forms the background for the journey (miti) eastwards.

Section 63

Kamata MasanoriFootnote ¹⁰³ noted that the story about the mature woman who wanted to meet a man and told her three sons that she had had a dream to that effect, was reminiscent of a story in Zhuangzi chapter 21, Tien Zifang 田子方, in which King Wen (文王) had decided that he wanted to summon an old man whom he had seen fishing and put him in charge of government, but fearing that his relatives and ministers might oppose the idea, he invented a dream, in which someone with the appearance of his father ordered him to hand over his rule to the old man. The old man disappeared, however, when after some years king Wen in admiration asked him whether his methods of rule could be extended to the whole world. Although Kamata referred only to the use of the dream, section 63, like the Zhuangzi story, represents a combination of two narrative motifs, a trickster (king Wen/the woman) who invented a dream to serve his or her wishes, and an extraordinary person or a sage (the old man fishing/Narihira), who was not dominated by ambition or desires, neither their own nor others'. If Kamata's suggestion is accepted, the borrowing of a complete narrative structure sets section 63 off from the other sections, and appears to support the possibility of a varied engagement with Zhuangzi.

Section 69

The intertextual connections introduced so far were made on the basis of notions of varying degree of semantic similarity between certain objects and/or situations. For each section, an isolated connection was hypothesized between a segment of IM and Zhuangzi, with rhetorical features of IM acting as supportive formal benchmarks. While this may be an acceptable initial procedure, it is obvious that recurrent terms, for instance, miti or nasake, and their associated actions should be considered on the basis of their function in the whole text(s), and that an understanding of the overall intertextual connection must be the goal.

The analysis of section 69 that follows is one – tentative – step in that direction. It focuses on the remarkable similarity between sections 1 and 69, whose clearly triadic structure shared the constitutive themes of hunting and an extraordinary encounter as well as the phraseology of constitutive actions, omofoezu “cannot tell” and tugu “add”. Moreover, the logical supersession in both was enacted by writing on an object that at the same time enabled and embodied the supersession, sinobuzuri and sakaduki no sara, respectively. What the two sections did not share was the terms of the supersession. Section 69 read in continuation of section 63 (cf. above) as another manifestation of the cognitive-actional syntagm of nasake 情, set in motion by the Ise princess's mother issuing an imperative, kono fito itafare “Respond well to this person”. Itafaru “to show understanding” meant perspicacity towards others and was semantically close to itofosi “heartrending”, the only term of emotion apart from afare found in communications characterized as nasake in mid-Heian wabun, and it is perhaps not accidental that afare had a paronomastic appearance in itafare. The princess's mother appeared then to be an exemplar of mature parental nasake, and the messenger could be said to follow her lead. His proposition was expressed with an ear for (partial) puns on afare, warete “breaking the rules, acting heretically” and afamu “let us meet”.

That the princess, in turn, stood out as a powerful commanding figure, is something that the romantic bias of modern interpretations has not emphasized. Her actions were set out in parallelly structured prose:

The princess controlled the messenger (idasi tatete yari “prepared him and sent him off”, kosasekeri “let him come”) just as she was to place a little child in front of herself (tifisaki warafa wo saki ni tatete) when she appeared in the moonlight. Her control of space was matched by precise timing. During the day, the hunting was made to coincide with the presence of the sun in the sky; and at night the messenger's encounter with the Ise princess was specified as lasting from the first of the Hour of the Rat to the third of the Hour of the Ox (ne fitotu yori usi mitu made). The latter specification arguably took the understanding of the princess as a powerful figure one step further, since the spatial correlations of ne and usi situated the actants North to North-East,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ i.e. the directions of the pole-star and the Big Dipper in their cosmo-political encounter. These positions were replicated in the earthly setting in the sense that the princess, in her command of space, placed the messenger's lodging not far (tofoku mo yadosazu) from her own sleeping quarters (neya).

The contrast between the two main actants was made at the outset, as the messenger's afamu “Let us meet” was met with the princess's double negative, wonna mo fata ito afazi to omoferazu “and she was certainly not thinking that they should not meet”, which, it seems to me, means that something, although perhaps not exactly meeting, had crossed her mind. Appropriate to the cosmological homology that cast her as the pole star, the princess was characterized by the minimal action of nu/ne “sleeping (together)” mainly in the shape of puns (ne no toki and the negative suffix), starting with nemu “Let us sleep (together)” paronomastically included in nemugoro in the above quotation, which then read retrospectively as her proposal to the man. In the description of their encounter, the difference between afamu and nemu was glossed over by the use of ari “being”. Nonetheless, nu dominated afu, however we interpret these terms, in the sense that in the end there was an absence of reciprocity, cf. that katarafanu “not telling each other” incorporated the negative afanu “not meeting” where the negative suffix was homophonous with nu “to sleep”. The poetic exchange that followed was, perhaps for that reason, also fractured. The princess's famous row of binary questions “dream or reality?”, etc. included what can be interpreted as a statement to the effect that she could not distinguish between them (omofoezu “I cannot tell/understand it”),Footnote ¹⁰⁵ i.e. had no way of knowing whether sleeping had been a dream. Indeed, her poem is sometimes compared to Zhuangzi and his dreaming of being a butterfly. The messenger's poem took a different stance. It spoke of darkness (yami) in his heart-mind (kokoro), and although the poem did not make a syntactic connection, this feeling seemed to prompt his exhortation,”Decide tonight!” (koyofi sadame-yo). He might have been referring to any or all of the princess's rhetorical disjunctions, but given that his mind had been set on meeting (afu), the lack of reciprocity (viz. katarafanu) could have been especially troubling to him, an absence of something that would shape his understanding of the other. In the second poetic exchange, the symbolism of the enactment of writing and the poetic articulation itself suggest a changed attitude on his part.

The messenger's exhortation to the deliberate action of making distinctions (sadame-yo) set in swing the second narrative syntagm. Although there is no logical connection as such, the difference was noticeable at once in that the hunting was not controlled by the princess and indeed turned into a distracted, confused business. It is unclear how the banquet with the provincial governor-cum-head (kami) of the Ise Shrine came about, but it would seem from the approximate temporal indication, “the length of one night” (yofitoyo), that the governor and the socio-political structure he represented were less concerned about or had no command over precise time-keeping. The night ended with the messenger's crying (naku, homophonous with the infinitive of the negative adjective) and being unable to meet (the negative e afazu “cannot meet”). Without going into details, I wish to suggest that the specifications of actions and time frames, e.g. the messenger dreamt (if perhaps not of drinking) while hunting, wept in the morning, having, in fact, spent the night drinking, etc., were similar enough to sustain an argument for the following Zhuangzi pretext. Note that the princess's detached scepticism about telling dream from reality corresponded well to the first two questions of the quotation:

At the point when the messenger was “shedding tears of blood” (ti no namida wo nagasu), the princess sent forth a “sake cup vessel” (sakaduki no sara) inscribed with the first three lines of a poem. This gesture literally signalled supersession by bringing together elements of the two contrastive narrative syntagms, nasake and sake (cf. sakenomi-su), respectively.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Just as in section 1, the cognitive transformation seemed indistinguishable from the poetic articulation and was expressed in highly wrought prose. The messenger's seeing (the cup)/reading (the princess's lines) (mireba) – a recall of the pivotal action of section 1 – brought about the enactment of writing, expressed in a striking phonotactic structure, sakaduki no sarani tuimatu no sumisite uta no suwe wo kakitugu “on the sake cup vessel, he followed it up and wrote an end to the poem/the end of the poem with a charred bit of a torch”.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The adding (tugu) of a conclusion also recalled the “transmission” in section 1.

It is more specifically the paronomastic reading of the final poem that yields some suggestions for an integrated reading. The two emblematic actions of the section, meeting and sleeping (together), were paronomastically expressed, for once in their morphologically indicative form in the final poem: the negative suffix in nurenu “does not become wet” in the princess's three lines, katifito no wataredo nurenu e ni si areba “because this is an inlet that does not make the wanderer wet although he crosses it/is a bond of (becoming wet and of) sleeping”;Footnote ¹⁰⁸ and in Afusaka no seki “Barrier of Border to Meet” in the messenger's concluding two, mata afusaka no seki fa koenan “I/you/we shall surely cross the Barrier of Border to Meet again”.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ As I see it, the way in which afu “meet” was superseded by the paradoxical place name afusaka no seki “barrier of Border to Meet”, which also encompassed alliteration with nasake, closely parallelled the paronomastic association of (kaima)miru “see” and miti “way” in the place name Mitinoku Shinobu in the second poem in section 1. That such an association was indeed intended by the redactor(s) responsible for the sequence of sections gains plausibility over the following sections where the narrative triad of seeing (miru) and its supersession in miti “way” (e.g. section 71, discussed above) was aligned to that of afu, afazu and nasake. Scrutinizing these sections is likely to deepen our understanding of miru/miti and afu/nasake. Finally, a not unstriking aspect of the close contextual reading of section 69 is that it allows us to understand nasake and its two emblematic actions, afu and nu, as fitting in the Zhuangzi pretext of section 1 discussed above, as follows:

This suggestion would mean that sections 1 and 69 could be understood each to exemplify one paradox of Zhuangzi's definition of dao, thus making up a complementary entwined intertextual structure.