Mémoires d'une Éphémère (954–974) par la mère de Fujiwara no Michitsuna [Memoirs of an Ephemera (954–974) by Fujiwara no Michitsuna's Mother]. Translated from the Japanese [ Kagerō nikki ] into French by Jacqueline Pigeot. Paris: Collège de France, Institut des Hautes Études Japonaises, 2006. 342 pp. €23.00 (paper).
2007; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 66; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1017/s0021911807001118
ISSN1752-0401
Autores Tópico(s)Japanese History and Culture
ResumoJacqueline Pigeot, professor emeritus at Paris VII University, one of the outstanding scholars of French Japan studies, and the author of several seminal studies on medieval Japanese literature (see Michiyuki-bun: Poétique de l'itinéraire dans la littérature du Japon ancien [Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1983]; and Questions de poétique japonaise [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997]), hereby offers us a translation and a substantial study of a text that has been translated twice into English, by Edward Seidensticker and more recently by Sonja Arntzen (The Kagerō Diary: A Woman's Autobiographical Text from Tenth-Century Japan [Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1997).The volume is composed of literary keys for the reading of Kagerō nikki; a translation with explanatory footnotes (pp. 9–195); and commentaries on the life of the author, who is successively designated as Tomoyasu's daughter, Kaneie's wife, and Michitsuna's mother, and on Kagerō nikki itself (pp. 238–98). The volume also includes a general and synthetic list of all facts, notions, and toponyms referred to (pp. 319–27); a shorter list of the main characters (p. 329); and an analytic table of the main episodes (pp. 331–32), a map (p. 333), a bibliography inclusive of all European translations and studies of Kagerō nikki (pp. 335–40), and plates including the author's photographs of Japanese realia and sites referred to.The framework of Kagerō nikki is well known. In the second half of the tenth century, a woman of the middle-class nobility, designated Michitsuna's mother in this edition, undertakes to write down the events that marked her lifetime as the wife of Kaneie, an influential member of the upper-class nobility, and the mother of Michitsuna, the son conceived with her husband. Kaneie, a seductive and funny fellow, brings her happiness at times, but he is also a wanton man, does not show up very often, has more than one affair, discomfits her, and makes her so tired that she leaves him. She cultivates several friendships, feels concerned enough with religious faith to try to live in a mountain temple, cleverly composes waka and chōka, travels to discover the world or goes on pilgrimages, writes travel narratives, and starts an ambiguous relationship with one of her admirers.Pigeot's commentaries, written in a firm, clear, and concise French, are far too dense to pay them full tribute here. Suffice it to say that she establishes that Kagerō nikki, owing to its vivid landscape descriptions, subtle psychological touches, and liberty of tone, inaugurates autobiographical literature in Japan, as well as women's literature. Pigeot discusses all extant international studies on the subject, clarifying important points and producing evidence of the uniqueness of Kagerō nikki as a work in which the author or narrator manages to focus the reader's attention first on herself and secondarily on Kaneie as her husband, with whom she maintains quite a polar relationship for twenty years and for which she wants to be remembered.The child of a province governor who intended to marry his daughter to a man of a superior rank in order to promote his own career, Michitsuna's mother is said to be one of the three most beautiful women of the realm. She is trained in both the domestic arts—she represents herself mending her husband's clothes—and poetry, the main literary medium of the time. She is well versed in imperial anthologies, as well as in Chinese poetry, which contradicts the stereotype according to which Japanese women of letters could not read or write Chinese: They did, just as their European counterparts did in Latin.Michitsuna's mother focuses her narrative on the twenty years separating Kaneie's proposal of marriage and her acknowledgment of divorce. She only wants to depict herself at what she considers the peak of her lifetime, when she was Kaneie's wife and, secondarily, Michitsuna's mother. From one episode to the other, she offers more an orthograph of ethopoeia than a portrait of Kaneie as a charming but wanton man whom she keeps waiting for. Through Kaneie's misconduct, she experiences life's precariousness. However, she reacts against Kaneie and at times dismisses him. I did appreciate the paraclausithyron scenes. She neither confesses nor delves into herself but considers herself a woman without recourse.Outside her marriage, Michitsuna's mother's life is punctuated with pleasures. She meets influential people and corresponds with them through waka, enjoys traveling and looking for mirabilia, deems everything worthy of reporting, and is the first writer to combine such trivial experiences into a prosaic travel text. In the episode known as “the aborted proposal of marriage by Tōnori, the Director of Imperial Stables, to Michitsuna's mother's adoptive child,” the negotiations, which are not reported at any length, are used as a pretext by the director to court her assiduously. She then starts an ambiguous relationship with him. The event appears to be her blaze of glory. She then makes her exit and dies in 995.The first commentary thus accounts for much of the historical and sociological background of Kagerō nikki and offers rigorous replies to all objections underplaying the self-assertive power of a woman in quest of herself and a proper mode of expression. In spite of the fact that autobiography is not fiction, one realizes how much the polarity developed between Michitsuna's mother and Kaneie works as a very strong pervading structural principle, resting on the presence or absence of the husband and the distance or proximity she adopts toward him, as well as on various kinds of actants, such as prohibited directions.The second commentary dwells on the innovating aspect of the text and confirms the egocentric focalization already suggested. The abstruse prologue of Kagerō nikki dismisses monogatari as a tissue of lies and enounces the project of writing an exemplum, an edifying work on the life of upper-class nobility, a target that is all the more paradoxical as Michitsuna's mother claims to be— capitatio benevolentiae, or the inception of an identity process—an insignificant person. The ritual of apology that she resorts to is actually typical of autobiography. She opts for the genre of nikki, but Kagerō nikki does not match nikki's generic requirements and instead shares a common feature with a style writing that is later called uta-monogatari. The embedded poems of Kagerō nikki are by no means ornaments but facts illustrating social life, and they read very well as theatrical lines.Pigeot then highlights and brings into relief the heterogeneous character of Michitsuna's mother's prose, which absorbs on a large scale and without quotation marks expressions borrowed from anterior poems, reported speeches, and interior monologues. Kagerō nikki's imprecision also works as a device, as her figure clearly stands out in the foreground against the hazy background, where other characters are relegated. Unlike other persons obliged to travel, who expand their feelings more than they describe the landscape, she properly creates a travelogue oscillating between description and narration without any embedded waka and substitutes a picturesque/okashi tone for the traditional elegiac one.Michitsuna's mother speaks in her own name and in the first person, thus writing the first work in prose in which an individual narrates her/himself. Linguistic analysis provides the evidence. Pigeot does not buy Arntzen's decision to use a small “i” instead of “I” to signify an inconspicuous subject, a choice she attributes to the Western assumption that the autobiography only started in Europe as a manifestation of the emerging Western consciousness. Pigeot argues that such cases of individual consciousness can also be found in Japanese women of the tenth century, expressed through life narratives.Because of her comparative approach and challenging analysis of related studies on the subject, Pigeot's edition of Kagerō nikki is fated to become essential reading for anyone who is interested in (women's) (Japanese) autobiographical literature.
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