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Synopses
Anna Beerens, In man’s shadow: biography, prosopography and the significance of anonymous women
Joshua Mostow, Illustrated Classical Texts for Women Readers in the Edo Period
Atsuko Sakaki, Taming of the Strange: Arakida Reijo Reads and Writes Stories of the Supernatural
Gaye Rowley, The Tale of Genji: Required Reading for Aristocratic Women
Mei Takagi, Women, texts and Confucianism in seventeenth-century Japan
Mara Patessio, From readers to writers: women and magazines during the 1880s and 1890s
The 'Female' as Subject: Reading and Writing in Edo period Japan
Anne Walthall
I have divided this broadly ranging survey of women as readers and writers into two sections. The first focuses on the role in happenstance in determining whether women had access to teachers and texts and what kinds of teachers and texts they encountered. It seems to me that happenstance played a much greater role in determining what women and men learned, how they learned it, and what they did with it in the Edo period than in Meiji. To demonstrate how happenstance worked, I examine women writers of kanshi, waka, and haikai.
The second section of my paper deals with the social functions of literacy.
The Edo period was marked by contradictory and conflicting traditions and assumptions regarding what men and women could and should read. The primary conflict was between the ancient classical tradition seen as feminine at best, amoral at worst, and Confucian norms expressed in didactic literature in the Onna daigaku tradition. Although some Edo period critics and later historians tried to set up distinctions between feminine versus masculine lore, I think it is better to see the range of writing as spanning a continuum or perhaps a series of continua. Men and women both read didactic literature for the purpose of self-cultivation, although the specific content varied. They studied etiquette books; they attended and commented on kabuki. The memoir written by Ôgimachi Machiko, Matsukage nikki, provides one example of how women's writings aimed at bolstering the family's reputation. An anonymous text without a title teaches wives in polygynous situations how to capture a husband's affections by remaining bashful, graceful, and gentle even after years of marriage. In warning well-born women away from pride, it echoes the message of “The origin of the Blood Bowl Hell Sutra” that speaks to women's piety. Finally I address the possibility of reading for pleasure.
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松江藩の儒者黒沢弘忠が、1657年に著し、1668年に京都の書肆から刊行された『本朝列女伝』には、天皇の后妃から貴族・大名クラスの夫人、朝廷・幕府の官吏クラスの婦人、一般武士・庶人の妻女、さらに妾女・妓女(遊女)・処女・奇女・神女といった各篇(10篇10巻)に分けて、総数217人の女性の伝記が記されている。
これは、直接には、1654年に和刻本として出版された、中国漢代の劉向(りゅうきょう)の『列女伝』の影響を受けて著されたものであるが、本朝の列女伝としては、日本で最初の著述であった。
これまでの研究では、たんに事例をあげて理解しやすくした<女訓書>にすぎないものとして評価されてきたし、そのことも事実の一面ではあるが、古代から近世初期にいたる217人もの女性人物史が叙述されたことは、これを日本で最初の<女性史>としてみることを可能にするのではないだろうか。もちろん、それらはあくまで「列女伝」として個別人物史が列記されているにすぎず、各時代における女性のあり方の特質や女性の地位の進歩の過程として叙述されているわけではない。しかし、そうした近代歴史学における女性史が生み出される以前に、その前提となりえた<女性史>は、どのようなものとして発見されえたのだろうか。
『本朝列女伝』を検討すると、<女訓書>の中に事例引用される列女伝や、劉向『列女伝』などとの違いとして、叙述の形式的側面からいえば、次のような点が指摘できる。
①后妃から庶人にいたるまで、あらゆる身分の女性をできるだけ多数採録しようとしたこと。
②劉向のそれが「母儀、賢明、仁智、貞順、節義、弁通」など、徳目の内容で分類されていたのに対し、女性の身分による分類とし、その中ではその「尊卑」に関わらず、年代の古いものから並べ、年代不明のものは、その記録の成立年代によって先後を配列したこと。
③「国史・諸記」から拾ったものであるが、「国史」（記紀・六国史などの正史で漢文）については基本的に一字も改変しないこととし、「国字小記」（仮名交じり文の記録）や「古老口伝」についてのみ、やむを得ずこれを「補綴」して漢文で表記するとしたように、基本的に史料主義の立場をとったこと。またその「褒貶」＝評価が過剰にならないようにしたこと。
④そもそも完全な貞女なるものはほとんど存在せず、いかに聡明な婦女であっても仙人や僧侶の言に惑わされて誤ることもあり、その伝の中には、君子の道４に対し、不仁３、不智２程度は含まれるが、それらも捨象せず、ことごとくこれを載せ、読者の判断に委ねたるとしたこと。
総じて、貞女・節婦といわれる女性たちについても、道徳的立場に合うようにこれを類型化するのでなく、史料でわかる限りの事例をすべて年代順に配列するとともに、できるかぎり史料に即して、その人物の全体像をありのままに提出しようとしたのである。
以上の結果として叙述された217人の伝記は、さらに次のような点で、たんなる列記、あるいは婦徳の教訓例としての解釈にとどまらないものを持っていたように思われる。
①「垂簾聴政」を行った北条政子をはじめ、酩酊した夫に代わって諸卒を指揮した妙喜尼、夫とともに強弓を引いて戦った巴御前や坂額など（「大力の女」「女武者」と呼ばれる系列の女性）、和歌に秀でた紫式部や藤原氏の女性など、女性のさまざまな多様性が示されることになる。それらは、古代から中世へ、武士の時代、戦国の時代に入ると、特に武家女性としてより積極的に展開していくようにみえる。
②著者黒沢弘忠の最大の著作動機は、伊勢神宮の神官の家来であった父の死後、自分を含む三人の男子を武士・儒者として育てた母への孝行にあった。しかしそれは、たんに母の伝記・家譜の作成といった個別的なもので済むものではなく、育児・教育・家事・紡績などを担ってきた母の生き方そのものに「我家の周公」を見出し、それを普遍的な価値をもつものとして顕彰する作業であった。さらにいえば、戦国・近世初期の時代を生き抜いた多くの庶民女性の生き方を、節婦・貞女という道徳的価値のみならず、より普遍的、歴史的に意義付けようとするものであったといえる。
③また、全体として、イザナギ・イザナミ二神に始る、「中華に愧じない」本朝・神国の女性のあり方の特質を明らかにしようとする意図もあったとされる。
報告では、さらにその内容について詳述するとともに、同時期の浅井了意『本朝女鑑』などとの関係、次いでその受容のされ方、その後の展開についても述べたい。
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In man's shadow: biography, prosopography and the significance of anonymous women
Anna Beerens
How can we avoid running up against the same well-known specimens of female erudition, who, for that matter, may be exceptional? How can we find examples of real reading and writing women from the pre-modern period? My own large-scale handling of biographical material in the context of prosopographical research has made me sensitive to the presence of anonymous women and has taught me that, in fact, any biography will do. Moreover, the prosopographical method may provide us with a way to process and evaluate our findings.
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Illustrated Classical Texts for Women Readers in the Edo Period
Joshua Mostow
I am looking at texts of the Ise monogatari and Hyakunin Isshu that were designed specifically for women. I argue that this did not happen until the very end of the seventeenth century. I explore presence and absence of annotation in such editions. I then explore how these texts were included in educational publications for women, that is, in works such as the Onna Daigaku Takura-bako. Finally, I explore what seems to be the gradual elimination of the Ise from such texts, as it falls between the floorboards, so to speak, of the Genji and the Hyakunin Isshu, in popular culture into the Meiji period.
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Taming of the Strange: Arakida Reijo Reads and Writes Stories of the Supernatural
Atsuko Sakaki
Arakida Reijo (1732-1806) was a voracious reader and prolific writer whose impressive literary output ranges from historical narratives to fantastic tales to linked poetry. Her talent however has been more obliterated than otherwise, since Motoori Norinaga's dismissal of her work, “Nonaka no shimizu,” on the account of her style that he deemed was awkward. Earlier I pointed out that Reijo's choice of genres and explicit use of Chinese language sources might have caused her relative obscurity in Japanese literary history, where women were easier to be canonized if they wrote autobiographically and in a native language—in other words, to minimize their reading knowledge of the existential/cultural other. In this paper, I will look closely at Ayashi no yogatari (1778), a collection of uta monogatari of the supernatural some of which were inspired by zhiguai, Chinese counterparts, so as to see the extent of her engagement with sources in the genre and language that Reijo, for a woman, was exceptionally privileged to read, process, and adapt. Drawing upon theories of quotation (Mieke Bal), translation (Walter Benjamin, Emily Apter) and bilingualism (Jacques Derrida), I seek to ask following questions. What was Reijo's take on transferring the foreign/supernatural into the domestic/lyrical context? To what extent did she try to naturalize what was quoted from elsewhere? In what ways did she produce the exotic? Should we hypothesize any split of subjectivity in her, reading in wenyan and writing in bungo, or should we rather identify her as a lingual transitory figure? How “translatable” does literary Chinese stories of the strange turn out to be in classical Japanese lyrical narratives? What are the conceivable effects on the readers that the trajectory of her translation/quotation creates, in terms of the concepts of authenticity and originality? What does it mean for a woman to conduct reading and writing, informed by a language and a rhetorical grammar that were not necessarily perceived as natural for a woman to master? And what was expected of the readers in their experience of reading Reijo's narratives that were ostensibly results of her own reading process?
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The Tale of Genji: Required Reading for Aristocratic Women
Gaye Rowley
'The Tale of Genji' was written, as we all know, by one aristocratic woman for the enjoyment of other aristocratic women. The tale also served to impress, even seduce, an emperor. At least until the text was first printed, 'Genji' remained an aristocratic text, its manuscripts the property of aristocrats and aristocrats its principal interpreters. In my paper, I shall argue that during the first thousand years of its life, 'Genji' was also required reading for aristocratic women. From the bare minimum knowledge provided by the 'Hakuzoushi' (Book for complete beginners, ca. 1200), to the maximum knowledge possessed by Keifukuin Kaoku Gyokuei (1526-after 1602) and Ogimachi Machiko (1679-1724), 'Genji' has been a major part of the cultural capital that aristocratic women both embodied and transmitted.
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男というジェンダーの持ち主が、女というジェンダーの歴史に取り組むにあたって私は、女性の書いたものに注目した。女性について書かれたものは多数あるが、女性が自ら書いたものは決して多くない。しかも生涯にわたり、ひとりの女性の書いたものがそれなりに残されているというのは、さらに稀少である。そのような稀少な例として、河内古市郡古市村の西谷さく（1842～62）がいる。
さくは、在郷町古市の商家で村役人でもある西谷家三代当主平右衛門と妻あいの間に長女として天保13年に生まれた。もちろんその誕生の記録は、さくではなく、父親によって記されているが、7歳前後と思われる①「七夕の手跡」を皮切りに、成長ぶりを示すかのように記録を書き残している。それは、②12歳の時の父宛の手紙、③13歳の小遣帳と三味線の練習帳、④16歳の金銭出納簿、⑤18歳時の妹への手紙、⑥19歳の日記と続く。しかもその間に、堺への寄宿生活と結婚・離婚という人生のドラマがあり、それが彼女の記録と重なっている。
さくは再婚後、21歳にして亡くなるが、それを死因ともに書きとどめたのは母である。母は、さくの死を悼むかのようにさくについて記すばかりか、さくの書いたものを残そうとした。こうしてさくの書いたものは残されたが、それとは別に西谷家の当主は、父平右衛門の亡き後、母あい（へいと改名）を経て、妹たづの産んだ子篤三郎に受け継がれ、今日に至っている。現在も西谷家では、あい・たづ・篤三郎の三名を、同家中興の功労者として語り継いでいる。しかしさくの記憶は、まったく忘れ去られている。継承される家の裏面でひとりの女の一生と記録が消えてしまったのである。
なお報告では、さくと母の直筆の記録をスライドで紹介する。
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The Open Road and the Blank Page: Gender, Movement, and Identity on the Roads of Edo Period Japan
Laura Nenzi
This paper will look at the experience of women travelers in Edo period Japan (1600-1868) in an effort to evaluate the function and the short and long term repercussions of the narratives they produced.
In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries educated travelers of high social standing engaged with the landscapes in a calculated effort to establish a connection with the sites' lyrical heritage, hence confirming their own position against social and cultural hierarchies. They used travel to, or through, revered lyrical sites as a way to assert and enhance their roles and identities. By the mid eighteenth century the dynamics and goals of self re-creation through cultural engagement began to diversify as the popularization of culture and the rise of commercial printing ushered in a new wave of informed travelers – commoners who had discovered the layered meanings of sites in the pages of temple school manuals and popular literature. The forging of a link with a hallowed past and the self-identification with its icons empowered this new brand of wayfarers to put identity up for debate not so much for the purpose of asserting their worth within cultural circles as to overcome, if only for the length of the journey, some of the handicaps that limited their agency in the space of the ordinary. While educated travelers of both sexes turned their movements into socio-cultural acts by investing them with rich literary meanings, women seemed particularly devoted to the search for validation in preferred sites of lyrical authority and gendered power.
I approached the gendered history of travel in early modern Japan informed by the notion that, historically, women have always been the silenced, immobile, and confined ones. In a study of travel practices across cultures, for instance, Eric J. Leed affirms, “In a vast portion of human history, men have been the travelers; and travel literature is – with a few significant, and often modern, exceptions – a male literature reflecting a masculine point of view. […] There is no free and mobile male without the unfree and sessile female.” The Tokugawa period in particular tends to be “widely understood to represent the nadir in the status of Japanese women.” The intersection of travel and gender in early modern Japan simply proves that the picture was far more nuanced, and that women were remarkably capable not only of achieving mobility but also of exploiting the potential embedded in the pages of their travel memoirs to temporarily question some of the status and gender based parameters that defined their identities at home.
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The Woman Reader as Symbol: Changes in Images of the Woman Reader, Focusing on Ukiyoe
Itasaka Noriko
Ukiyoe provide a glimpse into the world of the common people of the Edo Period. Ukiyoe, which depict contemporary sights and events, were designed by artists who were themselves commoners, and were reproduced in mass quantities as woodblock prints that are now considered representative art works of the Edo Period. Originally, with the exception of colorful screen paintings and hand-painted ukiyoe, ukiyoe were simple, monochrome prints. But with the appearance of talented ukiyoe artists, the artistic content of the ukiyoe was raised to higher and higher levels, and with the introduction of color prints (also called nishikie), ukiyoe came to create a showy cultural world of their own. At the same time that the ukiyoe was being developed as an art form, publication and journalism, centered in Edo, were also being developed to an unprecedented level. The Edo Period also saw the publication of a variety of reading materials, many of which may be liked to products of the modern publication industry. These books were widely sold and read, and were responsible for introducing the practice of reading to a many segments of the population.
In this paper, after dividing ukiyoe prints into three historical periods, I will examine depictions of female readers in prints of these three periods. Using the examples shown in these prints, I will demonstrate how images of the woman reader changed with time, and go on to consider the symbolic meanings of these representations of the woman reader.
In early ukiyoe prints, books were depicted as a symbol of refinement and taste, and associated with two oppositional classes of women, the aristocratic lady and the high-ranking courtesan/prostitute. Later, books came to be pictured as typical accoutrements of lower-ranking prostitutes, and reading came to be depicted as an elegant activity associated with well-to-do women of the non-aristocratic classes. Finally, with the rise in popularity of the kusazôshi picture books in the latter part of the Edo Period, reading became a common activity among ordinary young women of the townsman class. In the late Edo Period, kusazôshi came to outsell other forms of publications, and in the second half of their period of production, they began to be written for the woman reader in mind, with the result that reading for pleasure became an activity ineluctably associated with women. Against this historical backdrop, I will analyze the implied values associated with reading by women and the social symbolism of images of women readers.
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浮世絵を中心とした女性の読者像の変遷
…表象としての読書する女性…
江戸期の庶民の生活を映すものとして浮世絵がある。これは民間の絵師たちが当代の事物を描いたもので、版画という手法によって大量に摺り出され、江戸を代表する美術品となっている。草創期には豪華な屏風や肉筆画を除いては、墨摺の簡素なものであった浮世絵は、個性的な絵師の登場によって徐々にその内容を高め、色鮮やかな錦絵の発明から、まさに百花繚乱の文化を創り出すようになった。そして浮世絵の発達と呼応して、江戸の出版ジャーナリズムも高度な発達を遂げていた。江戸期には現代日本の出版に通じるさまざまな書物が売り出され、かなりの層の人々が読書の習慣を持つようになっていたのである。
今回の発表では、浮世絵の変遷を三期に分け、その中に描かれた女性の読書像を辿っていく。それらを用いて女性の読書風景がどのように変化していったのか、また読書する女性像が、何を表象していたのかを考察する。
すなわち、初期の浮世絵では公家や大名家など身分の高い女性と遊女の両極の境遇にある女性達の高級な趣味対象として描かれた書物という存在が、中期にはもっぱら遊女たちの身の回りの調度品や上流町人の婦人たちの上品な習慣として扱われ、後期になると草双紙の流行と共にどこにでもいる町娘達にも広く手に取られるようになる過程を追う。そして江戸後期に他を圧してもっとも多く流通した草双紙が、後半期には読者対象を女性として発達したことから、娯楽としての読書が女性と切り離しがたく結びついていく様相を示したい。その中で女性の読書という画像がどのような価値を示したのか、その社会的な象徴性を考察する。
Women, texts and Confucianism in seventeenth-century Japan
Mei Takagi
In the early Edo period Japanese intellectuals like Fujiwara Seika and Hayashi Razan turned away from Zen Buddhism and came to embrace Confucian Learning, which was further promoted by their followers and gained the patronage of the Tokugawa house. To apply Confucian values to social, political and intellectual life was not simply a case of transplanting them from China to Japan, but a case of finding ways to harmonize them with the native and indigenous values in Japanese culture. When it comes to the question of women's reading, it was first and foremost a case of how Confucian values and ethics could be communicated to ordinary women in a language they could understand. What did Tokugawa intellectuals do in this regard? In this paper I will examine how Confucianism was used in the theorization of women's reading, with special reference to the reception of three Chinese texts. To state the obvious, the fact that Neo-Confucianism was adapted to support the bakufu and serve Tokugawa society spread didacticism in the books directed at women. I argue that the moral dimension that is characteristic of Confucianism in China and central to 'women's books' published in Japan around the middle of the century gradually waned and the end of the century saw the emergence of a new type of texts wherein morality was blended with or eclipsed by other Japanese traditions.
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はじめに
「女大学」とは？
成立 刊行をめくる動向など
一 「女大学」の研究史から
明治、大正、昭和へと「女大学」がどのように受け止められていったか。
＜福沢諭吉＞：『「女大学評論」「新女大学」』（明治３２）
これらは、「日本婦人論」・「日本婦人論後編」「男女交際論」「日本男子論」の延長線上でまとめられたもの。江戸時代の女性たちを縛りつけてきた「女大学」を批判し、望ましい男女関係・夫婦関係を提示
＜平原北堂＞：『新註女大学』（昭和１６）
明治末から大正にかけて崩れていく家制度を眼前にして、その建て直しのために、「女大学」の復活を提唱。
本書の前半に、「女大学」の全文を載せ、支持者の言葉を援用（二宮尊徳『夜話から）。
後半には、巻間でいわれている「女大学」批判をあげ、それに対する平原の意見および平原が評価する「女大学」の長所を指摘。
末尾に「男大学和同訓」（「女大学」になぞらえた男向け１５箇条の訓辞）を著す。
平原は、福沢に代表されるような「女大学」批判を反批判し、総体として「女大学」の復活・再生を企図。
＜中川善之助＞：『「女大学」批判』（昭和２７）
戦後、「新しい家」作りを目指して、これまで女性のバイブルといわれてきた「女大学」の見直しを唱え、福沢の「女大学評論」をふまえて「女大学」を批判的に検討。
二「女大学」の受容
武士層：上杉鷹山の孫娘に与えた慈訓
庶民：嫁入り道具の一
まとめ
福沢／平原／中川それぞれに、「女大学」を各自が生きた状況下での家制度との関わりで検討・提言している。その延長線上にある現在、男女関係・親子関係・老若関係・兄弟姉妹関係を包含する家・家族というものが大きな変化を遂げつつある。その意味で、「女大学」そのものの検討もさることながら、「女大学」というものが、どのように検討されてきたのかという歴史をたどりつつ、今後の展望を探らなくてはならない。
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From readers to writers: women and magazines during the 1880s and 1890s
Mara Patessio
In this paper I analyse the development of women's participation in the periodical press and the formation of a female readership recognised as such by women themselves, a process that can be considered complete by the very beginning of the 20th century. This process went hand in hand with the development of a 'woman's society' in which women tried to obtain more public space, to further their education, and to enlarge their social rights. Such a development meant that women, and especially girls, could become a threat to the social order, and therefore had to be controlled. If the main way to do so was to impose stricter rules on women's education and limit the activities and subjects taught at schools, I argue that it was also done by criticising in the print media so-called 'dangerous readings', such as shosetsu and newspapers, that, it was feared, could allow girls to imagine different life possibilities. Thus, I explore the question as to whether women reading novels and the effects novels had upon women were topics debated by Japanese society throughout the centuries or only when women started to overcome social boundaries.
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A Father’s instruction: Inooka Gisai (1717-89) and daughter Rai Shizuko (1760-1843)
Bettina Gramlich-Oka
When Rai Shizuko, mother of Rai San’yō, left her hometown Osaka for Hiroshima, her father Inooka Gisai sent her a list of instructions that should provide guidance. It is this text, Yakakusō夜鶴草(1782), on which I will concentrate my discussion. Inooka Gisai – town physician, scholar, and poet – had spent much care in educating his daughter. Having made it his goal to put into practice the Way he was happy to have found in Rai Shunsui (1746-1816), who shared his commitment, an appropriate spouse for his daughter. When Shunsui was offered the position as teacher in the new domain school in Hiroshima, their goal seemed to have come closer. Yakakusō illuminates the designs of a father for his daughter who would not only move to a new town, but would also rise in status.
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