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4.0 out of 5 stars
A Tantric Take on Textual Tradition, January 30, 2007
This review is from: Allegories of Desire: Esoteric Literary Commentaries of Medieval Japan (Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series) (Hardcover)
"Allegories of Desire" is an ambitious study, a valiant attempt to both make sense of highly complex, esoteric commentaries whose provenance is often deliberately muddled and then take their unfamiliar approach to literature seriously. Indeed, the manner in which these medieval commentaries on the "Ise Monogatari" and the "Kokin waka shu" unpack their texts will inevitably seem bizarre and ultimately implausible to us (if extremely ingenious and fascinating, at least to me), and so most standard narratives of Japanese literary history have either dismissed them and moved on or studiously ignored them altogether. However, as Klein convincingly argues, to do so is to cheat ourselves of understanding a very important phase in the reception and interpretation of these literary works, distorting our view in a streamlined fashion that's basically too neat, linear, comfortable, and flattering to our assumptions to be true.
So leave your assumptions at the door, because this stuff is just plain weird. Whoever was writing these commentaries (probably Fujiwara Tameaki most of the time) can take the most straightforward poems of the "Kokinshu" or the most prosaic episodes of the "Ise Monogatari" and through allegorical acrobatics read into them all sorts of highly convoluted hidden meanings alluding to esoteric Shingon Buddhist doctrines. Not just any old Shingon, mind you, but a complex combinatory form weaved integrally with native beliefs and rituals (Ryobu Shinto), one with pronounced tantric tendencies in which eroticism is held to be the highway to nondual Buddhist enlightenment: the poorly understood, "heretical" Tachikawa sect, no less.
In general, Klein does a fabulous job in taking this difficult material and breaking it down in a comprehensible manner while exploring the possible reasons for the rise of such an interpretive framework (literary as well as religious, historical, and economic factors all nicely taken into account) and considering its likely impact on Noh drama and Muromachi popular culture. The social role of poetry and poetic family lineages is also discussed at length and in great detail, with intriguing glimpses of the concrete setting and dynamics of group poetry composition with all of its elaborate rituals and protocols. All of this is fascinating in its own right and, as Klein argues, does indeed fly in the face of most of our unspoken presuppositions regarding what literature's all about, making us conscious of them. So we end up learning a lot about ourselves as well.
Unfortunately, this otherwise fine study is riddled with a host of little errors and typos, and the contents are a riddle enough without this inconvenience. Especially annoying are the times when vowels in personal names play musical chairs; many of the names are annoyingly similar (Fujiwara Tameaki, Tameie, Tameakira--you get the idea), amplifying the potential confusion a typo can instigate. But that's not all. On page 274 we are told that one text was composed in 1282 while a later text was probably composed in the 1220s or 1230s. What?! A time machine in the Kamakura period?! No, Klein meant the 1320s or 1330s, as eventually becomes clear. And it is a very bad thing indeed that incorrect kanji are given for some of the names and terms; a key concept discussed in the book is "Honji Suijaku" (the process by which Buddhas and Bodhisattvas take form as local deities), but the kanji given both in the text and index for this term reads "Basic Ground/Weakness" (!) instead of "Basic Ground/Manifestation"--C'mon folks, please proofread.
Still, it's the only real book covering this interesting and important subject in English, and its overall strengths outweigh such admittedly inexcusable carelessness. So I'd still highly recommend it to anyone seriously interested in Japanese literary history and/or religion as well as to anyone generally interested in the role of allegory and allegoresis in textual interpretation.
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