Cipango - French Journal of JapaneseStudiesEnglish Selection
2 | 2013

Language and Literature

Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry(waka)
Michel Vieillard-Baron

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URL : https://journals.openedition.org/cjs/270
DOI : 10.4000/cjs.270
ISSN : 2268-1744
Éditeur
INALCO
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Michel Vieillard-Baron, « Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka) », Cipango - French
Journal of Japanese Studies [En ligne], 2 | 2013, mis en ligne le 28 juin 2013, consulté le 08 juillet 2021.
URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cjs/270 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/cjs.270

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Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka)

Male? Female? Gender confusion inclassical poetry (waka)
Michel Vieillard-Baron

NOTE DE L’ÉDITEUR
Original release: Michel Vieillard-Baron, « Homme ? Femme ? La confusion des genres(gender) dans la poésie classique (waka) », Cipango — Cahiers d’études japonaises, n o 14,
2007, p. 7-44.
1

The Man’yōshū 万葉集, the oldest surviving anthology of Japanese poetry (completed inaround 759), includes the following poem (book 4, no. 499):
Momohe ni mo
Kishikanukamo toOmohekamo
Kimi ga tsukai no
Miredo akazaramu

2

He could comeone hundred times or more,
so I think!
Your messenger, neverwill I tire of seeing him

This poem concludes a series of four pieces attributed to Kakinomoto no Hitomaro 柿本
人麻呂 (?-710): the first three lament the poet’s sadness at being separated from his
wife; the fourth (quoted above) adopts the point of view of the wife impatiently
awaiting news of her husband. An annotated edition of this anthology published in 1971
stated that: “This poem was no doubt composed by Kakinomoto no Hitomaro’s wife”. 1
However, a more recent edition2 acknowledged that the poem was in fact written by
the great poet himself, undoubtedly making it one of the oldest examples of a“transvestite poem”, in other words a poem that intentionally adopts the point of viewof a person of the opposite sex, a mode of composition which, as we shall see, enjoyed acertain success in the poetic tradition of classical Japan. As the above example
illustrates, a “gender confusion” sometimes arises in the mind of the reader – or

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Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka)

commentator – who, sensing a discrepancy between the author’s sex and the poem’s
gender, hesitates, wavers, and no longer knows to whom attribute authorship.
3

The aim of this paper is to raise the thorny issue of sexual identification in literature.
This issue can be approached from various angles. One could ask, for example, “Is therea difference between literature written by men and that written by women?” Or, “Whyis it that we can now use the term ‘women’s literature’, yet no one would think to speakof ‘men’s literature’?”3 Or even, “What constitutes the ‘feminine’ and, by contrast, the‘masculine’ in literature?” Clearly this is a complex issue with multiple ramifications. In
order to examine the subject in a concrete – and if possible effective – manner, theexact scope of the study and method used must be specified. Rather than adopting theusual method of analysing works written by women in order to identify invariablefeatures supposedly peculiar to women’s writing, I preferred a comparative approach.
Accordingly, my aim is to analyse works (poems) written by women from a man’s
perspective, and poems written by men from a woman’s perspective; only those poems
with clearly identified authors will be used, which immediately excludes all anonymous
works. I will begin by examining these poems to ascertain if gender identification ispossible in waka and if so, at what level. I will strive to define the internal (vocabulary,situation described) and external (authorship, notes indicating the context ofcomposition) elements involved in identifying the gender of a poem.

4

The subject of this paper is therefore the waka 和歌 or “Japanese poem”, also known asa tanka 短歌 or “short poem”, a quintain containing 31 syllables, the writing of which
was both the most commonplace and the most prestigious activity in classical Japan.
Every kind of event, the sending of a love letter or a letter of condolence for example,
entailed the writing of waka; similarly, various occasions – some of them extremely
formal – attached great importance to the writing and presentation of these poems.
Accordingly, waka were composed to grace the panels of folding screens, and poetry
contests, or utaawase 歌合, were commissioned by high-ranking individuals.

5

It is important at this point to define the historical scope of my research: waka, a genreof poem that continues to be composed today, can be found as far back as one goes in
the history of Japanese literature (the oldest extant works date from the early eighth
century but there is evidence of poems from the seventh). Within the waka’s over onethousand-year-old history, I will focus on a four-century period spanning the beginningof the tenth century to the end of the thirteenth. This period, which includes the Heianera (794-1192), was a golden age for waka composition: eight anthologies were compiled
on imperial order, including the two most prestigious collections, the Kokin Wakashū 古
今和歌集, or Collection of Ancient and Modern Poems (completed in around 905), and the
Shinkokin Wakashū 新古今和歌集, or New Collection of Ancient and Modern Poems (officiallycompleted in 1205). Before proceeding to the heart of the subject, I should explain thatthe second objective of this paper is to respond to the application of theories developed
within gender studies (translated into French as “gender identity research” [recherches
sur les identités sexuelles], “gender research” [étude sur le genre] or “research on
expressions of gender” [étude(s) des expressions du genre]) 4 to the field of classicalJapanese literature. Gender studies grew out of the feminist movements of the 1960s,
but they only became established in the United States in the 1990s, thanks in particular
to the work of the philosopher Judith Butler, considered to be the movement’s main
theorist.5 While “essentialist” feminists argue that the differences between men andwomen are derived from their very essence, and accordingly that there is no need to

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Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka)

distinguish sex from gender, for “constructionist” feminists – who include genderstudies advocates – gender and biological sex are two different things: 6 biological sex isinnate, whereas gender is a purely social construct, the result of a person’s upbringing
and cultural environment.7 To quote Françoise Héritier, “gender is something assigned
to the mind, then reproduced socially and culturally […], it relies on conceptual andsymbolic constructs that, while extremely archaic, still exist.” 8
6Although the theorisation of “constructionism” is relatively recent, its conception
dates back much further; it appears in embryonic form in the works of Simone deBeauvoir9 and apparently owes much to French feminists (in particular Julia Kristeva,
Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig and Hélène Cixous), as well as to the philosopher Michel
Foucault10 (oddly, despite its importance, the work of anthropologist Françoise Héritieris barely taken into account).11 Judith Butler considers gender to be “performative”, inother words constituted through a sustained set of acts which she describes as“repetition” and “ritual”;12 it is also normative – it constitutes a norm – and isdependent on power. For this philosopher, it is about understanding (and denouncing)
the norms that define us (heteronormativity, for example) in order to reformulate
domination in terms of power.

7

Having taken root in the United States in every discipline of the humanities and social
sciences (history, philosophy, sociology, psychoanalysis, anthropology and literature,for example), gender studies has naturally entered the field of Japanese studies and, in
my case, research on classical literature. The impression I get through my reading isthat the authors (male and female) – with a few rare exceptions – confuse “gender” and“biological sex”, and adopt an essentialist feminist perspective all the while claiming torepresent gender studies. Consequently, a caricatured and distorted view of theclassical Japanese world is often presented (women are like this and men like that), andthe interpretive frameworks applied to texts do not always do them justice. In Japan,
the gender approach has been applied – tentatively – to the field of classical literaturesince around 1995; although borrowings from these theories remain limited and in theminority, the results are generally more convincing – despite the eternal confusion
between gender and biological sex – because researchers are writing for a specialist
readership who, on the whole, know their literature (and history) reasonably well.
Approximations are therefore rarer, though not entirely absent.

8

A review of some historical facts is required in order to understand the issues at stakein this paper. Firstly, it is important to understand that literary production (and poetry
composition in particular) during the period in question was strictly limited to theworld of the imperial court; only aristocrats and those with links to the court read andproduced literature. In the tenth and eleventh centuries aristocrats and officials, alongwith their families, servants and monks (in other words, all those likely to read
literature) numbered at most a few tens of thousands out of Japan’s seven to eight
million inhabitants.13 Out of these tens of thousands of people, only a tiny minority – no
doubt scarcely more than a few dozen individuals in each generation, men and women
combined – were capable of writing literary prose. In principle the social role of waka asa means of communication obliged every courtier to know how to compose them. The
reality was no doubt very different and although we are entitled to think that more
people were capable of composing poetry than writing a piece of prose, those capableof composing high quality waka, for any occasion, represented a tiny elite who
participated in courtly poetry events and could be called on by an individual to

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Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka)

compose a poem in their stead. Thus, paradoxically, although waka poetry was seen as
the most authentic (and most natural) expression of the self, opportunities to write
commissioned waka were not rare. I will therefore analyse waka composed in a varietyof circumstances: firstly, poems for folding screens (byōbuuta 屏風歌); secondly, poems
presented at poetry contests (utaawase); thirdly, poems composed for an anthology
entitled “Poems for each Month”, Maigetsushū毎月集; and finally, poems composed onbehalf of a third party (daihitsu 代筆 or daisaku 代作).

Poems for folding screens (byōbuuta)
9

Like the majority of literary practices in classical Japan, the composing of poems forfolding screens originated in China. Folding screens were one of the main pieces offurniture in palaces and the homes of the aristocracy, serving as both decoration andpartitions for dividing space. Originally it was customary for the panels to be decorated
with Chinese-style paintings (karae 唐絵) supplemented with calligraphied Chinese
poems. The Keikokushū 経国集, or Collection for Ordering the State, a collection of poems
and prose pieces written in Japan in the Chinese language and compiled in 827 on theorders of Emperor Junna 淳和天皇, contains four poems designed to grace a landscapepainting for the Pure and Cool Palace (Seiryōden 清涼殿), the sovereign's place ofresidence. This practice was soon adapted to local tastes and it became customary tocalligraphy waka on to Japanese-style paintings (yamatoe 大和絵). The oldest surviving
example of byōbuuta dates back to between 850 and 858; the poem in question was
written by the empress (the wife of Emperor Montoku [827-859; reigned 850-858]),
known as Sanjō no Machi 三条町,14 who based it on a folding screen painting of alandscape with waterfall. This poem (no. 903) appears in the Kokin Wakashū, theCollection of Ancient and Modern Poems, the first anthology of waka compiled by imperial
edict.15 The history of folding screen poetry thus dates back to the mid-ninth century;
this mode of composition, which was closely linked to celebrations (birthdays, forexample), peaked during the tenth century before rapidly declining at the beginning of
the eleventh.16 Although many of the poems survived, no folding screens from the
Heian period were preserved. The only information we have on the paintings comesfrom the brief headnotes (kotobagaki 詞書) accompanying certain poems and which
describe the circumstances in which they were composed.

10

In his Notes on the Draft of the Collection of Gleanings (Shūishō chū 拾遺抄注, 17 1183), thepoetician Kenshō 顕昭 (ca. 1130, death unknown) describes the ideal folding screen
poem: “When a poem celebrates a painting for a folding screen or sliding door, forexample, it immediately conveys the feelings (kokoro) of a character featured in thepainting.”18 Thus, the role of the folding screen poem is not to comment on or explain
the painted image, but rather to offer a new – and original – interpretation by adopting
the perspective of a character that appears – or is imagined to appear – in the painting.

11

Let us now examine a series of ten byōbuuta composed by the woman poet Ise 伊勢, who
was born in around 874 and died in around 939. Ise entered the palace in 888, aged
approximately fifteen, in the service of Fujiwara no Onshi 藤原温子 (or Takako), thefuture wife of Emperor Uda 宇多天皇. She was soon recognised to be a first class poet,and as such took part in various poetry contests and had poems commissioned: she cantherefore be considered the first professional woman poet in waka's history. Twentytwo of her poems are included in the Kokin Wakashū, making her the leading woman

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4

Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka)

writer, ahead of Ono no Komachi, 小野小町 the anthology's other major female figure.
Ise left behind almost 500 waka,19 including several folding screen poems, a mode ofcomposition at which she excelled.
Emperor Uda had ordered that [illustrations] from the “Song of Everlasting Sorrow”
be painted on a folding screen; [below are the poems] he had [me] compose forcertain scenes.
12

The “Song of Everlasting Sorrow” (Changhenge; Chōgonka 長恨歌 in Japanese) is the titleof an extremely well known ballad by Bai Juyi白居易 (772-846), the famous Tang poet.
This long poem (comprising 120 lines of seven syllables) describes Emperor Xuan
Zong's 玄宗皇帝 (685-762) love for his favourite concubine Yang Guifei 楊貴妃(719-756) and the tragic end to their affair. The emperor's passion for the beautiful
Yang Guifei was such that he came to neglect affairs of state. Thus, when the rebellion
instigated by An Lushan 安禄山 (?-757) forced the emperor to flee the capital, the army
generals commanded that he order Yang Guifei's execution; she was assassinated on
the orders of her own lover. The poem describes the emperor's love for his favourite
concubine, her death and the immense grief that led him to use a necromancer to seek
her in the hereafter.20

13

Ise composed ten waka inspired by this famous poem; five are written from theperspective of Emperor Xuan Zong, five from that of the lovely Yang Guifei. The folding
screen itself21 – which sadly has not survived – is mentioned in the chapter “Kiritsubo”
桐壺/ “The Paulownia Pavilion” from the famous Genji Monogatari 源氏物語. 22 My
reading draws on the headnotes (kotobagaki) that precede the series of ten poems andeach set of five poems:[Poems composed] as if written by the Emperor [Xuan Zong]:

14

This indicates that these waka should be read as the words of the emperor, and thus of aman:
No. 5223
Momijiba ni
Iro mie wakazu
Chiru mono ha
Mono omohu aki no
Namida narikeri

15

What scatters downwith colors indistinguishable
from the crimson leaves
are my tears of sorrow,longing for you this autumn.

In this first poem Ise chose to recount the emperor’s immense sorrow as he cries tearsof blood while remembering Yang Guifei. It does not refer to one line of the poem inparticular but rather to several. Accordingly, in Bai Juyi’s poem we can read thefollowing:
The emperor could only cover his face; he was unable to save her.
Looking back, the blood and tears were flowing together.

And further on in the Chinese poem:
So when he looked at them, how could he help but weep? […]In the autumn rains the wu-t’ung trees shed their leaves in season.
The West Palace and the Southern Enclosure were full of autumn grasses,
Falling leaves covered the stairs with red, and were not swept away. 24
16

Note that Ise’s waka is not a Japanese translation of the Chinese poem, but atransposition of the emperor’s emotions, expressed in first-person narrative, into the
waka form. Nothing in the waka, whether its vocabulary or the situation it describes,

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Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka)

enables the (real) author’s sex to be identified, nor that of the character whose voice Ise
adopts in the poem (the emperor).
17

Let us move on to examining the following poem (no. 53):
Kaku bakari
Otsuru namida no
Tsutsumareba
Kumo no tayori ni
Misemashi mono wo

Falling this way
my tears, gathered up,
would serve as a message
into the realm of clouds,
if only I could show them to you.25

18

Once again, Ise does not refer to one particular line of Bai Juyi’s poem but chose tocombine two themes: the emperor’s immense sorrow, symbolised by tears, and thefigure of the sorcerer sent into the heavens to find Yang Guifei. These images appear in
the previously quoted line “So when he looked at them, how could he help but weep?”,
and in the lines: “He [the sorcerer] marshalled the clouds and drove ether before him,quick as lightening/Up in the sky, down into the earth, he looked for her everywhere”.
26
Note that the idea of the emperor wanting to show his tears to the deceased camefrom Ise. Nothing in this waka indicates a particular gender.

19

Let us now examine the third poem (no. 54):
Kaherikite
Kimi omohoyuru
Hachisuba ni
Namida no tama to
Okiwite zo miru

20

Coming back,longing for you– on the lotus leaves,just like my tears –I gaze at the dewdrops.27

In this waka Ise recounts the moment the emperor returns to the capital after An
Lushan’s rebellion has been crushed: everything there reminds him of his love Yang
Guifei. Below are Bai Juyi’s moving lines from which Ise took inspiration:
When they returned, the pools and parks were as in the olden days,
Lotuses from Lake T’ai-yi, and Wei-yang Palace willows.
The lotuses were like her face, the willows like her brows,
So when he looked at them, how could he help but weep?28

And further on:
The wick in his lonely lamp burnt out and yet he [the emperor] would not sleep. 29
21

Ise introduces the term wokite into her waka, meaning both the “settling” of dewdropsand “standing up”, the emperor being unable to sleep. Nothing in the original waka
indicates a particular gender.

22

Here is the penultimate poem composed as the emperor (no. 55):
Tamasudare
Akuru mo shirade
Neshi mono wo
Yume ni mo miji to
Yume omohiki ya

23

Unaware of the dawning day,curtains still drawn,
together we slept;And even in my dreams I see you no more.
Who could have foreseen it?

The first three lines of Ise’s waka allude to the following in Bai Juyi’s ballad: “Withinlotus canopies they passed their spring nights in warmth/The spring nights seemedvery short, the sun would rise high”.30 The final two lines correspond to: “His thoughts

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Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka)

were on the distance between life and death, year after year without end/But her spirit
would not return, or come to enter his dreams.”31 Sexually this waka is open to any
interpretation.
24

And now for the last of the emperor’s poems (no. 56):
Kurenai ni
Harawanu niwa wa
Narinikeri
Kanashiki koto no
ha nomi tsumorite

My garden,that has gone unraked,
has turned a crimson hue –sad words of grief
are all that have collected here.32

25This waka by Ise, which is a simple description, is a variation on the previously quotedlines from Bai Juyi’s ballad: “Falling leaves covered the stairs with red, and were not
swept away”;33 it contains nothing to indicate gender.

26

Let us now turn our attention to the poems composed as Yang Guifei:
Poems as the imperial
concubine (no. 57):
Shirube suru
Kumo no fune dani
Nakariseba
Yo wo umi naka ni
Tare ka shiramashi

If there were
not this cloud-boat
to serve as guide,
who would know of this land amid the sea
where I grow weary with sorrow?34

27

In Bai Juyi’s poem the necromancer sent by the emperor to search for Yang Guifei
learns that she is living amongst other immortals on a magical mountain floating in thesea. Ise creates the image of a “cloud-boat” that draws up alongside the island andemploys in her waka the expression yo wo umi naka ni, the homophony in which makes
two interpretations possible: “to be tired of the world, weary of one’s life [or fate]” 35
and “out at sea”. Ise’s waka draws on various lines from Bai Juyi’s poem, including theone previously quoted: “He marshalled the clouds and drove ether before him, quick aslightening”, and the couplet: “Suddenly he heard of a mountain of immortals in the
sea/The mountain was in the misty realm of emptiness.” 36

28

Nothing in the original enables the gender of the poem to be established.
Poem no. 58:
Tsuki mo hi moNanuka no yohi no
Chigiri woba
Kieshi hodo nimo
Mata zo wasurenu

When both the month and day
were sevens, that night
we exchanged vows –and though that lifetime is no longer,
I still do not forget them.37

29

In this waka Ise alludes to the following passage in Bai Juyi’s poem: “About to part, shecharged him further to take these words/In these words was meaning only their twohearts knew:/‘On the seventh day of the seventh month, in the Palace of Long Life/At
midnight, with no one else there, we exchanged a secret vow:/That in the heavens wewished to fly, two birds with joined wings’”.38

30

The gender of this waka is open to interpretation as either male or female.

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Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka)

31

Let us examine the following waka (no. 59):
Kieshi mi ni
Matamo kenubeshi
Harugasumi
Kasumeru kata wo
Miyako to omoheba

32

I am dead alreadyand the springtime haze
will kill me once more;when I think that the fog
bellow conceals the capitalIn this poem Ise alludes to several lines in Bai Juyi’s ballad:“Since we parted our voices and faces are dim to one another, […]But when I turn my head to gaze down at the mortal world,
I can never see Ch’ang-an, but only fog and dust”.39

33

Nothing in the original indicates the poem’s gender.
Poem no. 60:
Ki ni mo ohizu
Hane mo narabede
Nanishikamo
Namiji hedatete
Kimi wo kikuran

34

Neither uniting our branches
nor flying side by side
For what reason,
separated from you by the sea,
have I only messages to hear?

Here Yang Guifei bewails the fate that prevents her from meeting the emperor. The two
images at the beginning of the poem (united branches and birds flying side by side)recall the famous lines from Bai Juyi’s poem (previously quoted):That in the heavens we wished to fly, two birds with joined wings,
And on the earth we wished to grow, two trees with branches entwined. 40

35Since the personal pronoun kimi, the second-person singular in polite language (theequivalent of the French “vous”), can be used by both men and women, there is nothing
in this poem to positively establish its gender.
Poem no. 61:
Wiru kumo no
Hito waki mo senu
Mono naraba
Namida wa miwoto
Nagarezaramashi

36

If these spreading clouds
did not separate mefrom the human realm,
then my tears would not flow as they dolike an open waterway.41

This final poem is a variation on the following lines by Bai Juyi:
On her jade face from loneliness the tears trickled down, […] 42
Since we parted our voices and faces are dim to one another, […] 43
But when I turn my head to gaze down at the mortal world,
I can never see Ch’ang-an, but only fog and dust.44

37

The term hito, “the person [I love]”, can refer to either a man or a woman: this poem,
therefore, provides no means of positively identifying the gender of its narrator.

38

Ise’s waka are magnificent examples of a popular mode of composition at that time
which consisted in taking Chinese verse as the subject of Japanese poems, a practiceknown as kudai waka 句題和歌.45 In addition to their obvious literary merit (at least in
the original), these poems are remarkable for their intertextual references. Using Bai
Juyi’s ballad as her inspiration, Ise focused her attention on certain scenes, no doubt

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Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka)

imposed by the paintings on the folding screens. She remodelled passages, in someways extracting their essence. Finally, she gave a voice to the emperor and his
concubine, whereas the Chinese original is essentially composed of descriptions written
using indirect speech. It is interesting to note that Ise’s waka – in the original – containnothing to indicate gender. It is an external element – the headnotes – that, by
indicating that the poems adopt the point of view of the emperor or his concubine,guide our reading and interpretation. These poems also put paid to the still widely heldview that women had no knowledge of Chinese. Remember that the majority of women
writers during the Heian period belonged to the middle-ranking aristocracy andliterary circles. These highly educated women were able to read Chinese (as evidenced
by various accounts, in addition to their works themselves), 46 and even, in some cases,
to write it – although the ideal of integrity forbade them to flaunt this ability andappear to be “erudite”.47 It should also be pointed out that although Chinese was at thattime the language of government and official texts, the language written by civil
servants had little in common with the literary language (in fact, in most cases it
consisted of Japanese written exclusively with Chinese characters). The few men
capable of writing literature in Chinese belonged for the most part to families who had
made the studying and practicing of this language – the language of erudition – their
speciality.48

The poetry contests
39

Although they appeared in the latter half of the ninth century and like folding screen
poems were of Chinese origin, the poetry contests known as utaawase enjoyed a much
longer history, for they were held more or less regularly until the first half of the
fifteenth century.49 These contests pitted two teams (kata 方), known as the Left and theRight, against each other. The waka presented during these competitions werecomposed on a set theme (dai 題), and either prepared in advance or improvised on the
spot. The poems were presented in pairs: one from each of the two opposing teams. In
the beginning the participants themselves debated the merit of the poems and decided
between the competitors. However, judges (hanja 判者) chosen from among the poets ofrenown soon took over this role. The team with the highest number of winning poems
was declared victorious. These contests played a vital role in the development andadvancement of Japanese poetics since, in order to be entered into competition, thepoems had to be composed on the same topic and the judge, in order to explain the
victory or defeat of a poem, had to justify his decision in a (more or less) objective
manner.

40

Starting at the beginning of the twelfth century some of these contests featured
extremely precise and complex topics that involved various elements (in fact, they
were referred to as “compound topics”, musubidai 結題), including some that required
participants to compose their poem from the point of view of one gender or the other.
This is evidenced by the example of Ukyō no Daibu 右京大夫 (dates uncertain, ca.
1155-1234), a famous woman poet who, during a contest whose manuscript
unfortunately has not survived, was required to compose a poem on the extremely
difficult topic “romantic tryst under an assumed name” (na wo kahete ahu kohi 名を変へて逢ふ恋).50 Tradition – in particular literary tradition – held that it was the man who
initiated a romantic liaison; it was he who, following an exchange of poems, would visit

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Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka)

his beloved by night and in the most discreet manner possible. He had to leave thelady’s home before dawn so as not to be seen. In a society in which noblewomen could
not move about freely, romantic relationships often grew from rumour. Thus, novels
feature stories of men and women falling head-over-heads in love with people they had
never seen. Furthermore, a man could take advantage of another’s glowing reputation– and the darkness – to masquerade as him in order to gain access to a woman. 51 Suchwas the topic to be covered by Ukyō no Daibu in the thirty-one syllables of a waka. It
read as follows:
Itohareshi
Ukina wo sara ni
Aratamete
Ahi miru shimo zo
Tsurasa sohikeru

By changing that detested name,
Which marked me fickle,
Bringing such unhappinessI have at last met with my love,
But now I am more wretched still!52

41

Ukyō no Daibu chose to convey the bitterness of the suitor who, having successfully
tricked his way into meeting his beloved, realises that she feels only hatred for him. In
this poem it is the situation inferred by the topic that establishes the sex of thenarrator, despite the fact that nothing in the original poem’s vocabulary points to one
particular gender.

42

Some authors voluntarily chose to compose “transvestite” poems. For example, during
the Hundred Round Palace Poetry Contest (Hyakuban utaawase 百番歌合), held at theimperial palace in 1216, Fujiwara no Teika 藤原定家 (1162-1241) decided to compose apoem on the set topic of “love” 恋 in the guise of a woman, in doing so creating one ofhis most beautiful – and most famous – poems:
Konu hito wo
Matsuho no ura no
Yuhunagi ni
Yaku ya moshiho no
Mi mo kogaretsutsu

For the man who doesn’t comeI wait in the Bay of Matsuho –In the evening calm
where they boil seaweed for salt,
I too, burn with longing!53

43

Teika chose to explore the theme of love from the perspective of waiting. As previously
mentioned, traditionally in Japan – in particular in literature – it was the man who
visited the woman. Waiting (and the distress this caused) thus became a leitmotif in“female” love poetry, whether composed by a woman or, as in the above example, by aman. Teika employs the place name Matsuho 松帆, which implicitly contains the verb
matsu待つ, “to wait”; he also uses the image of the seaweed burned to extract salt as a
metaphor for the ardour of love.54

44

Let us now examine a complete round of the Poetry Contest in Six Hundred Rounds(Roppyakuban utaawase 六百番歌合, 1192-1193). This contest, the most ambitious tohave actually been held, saw twelve poets compete against each other, men who wereamong the most important of the day (no women poets took part). The contest featured
1,200 waka composed on 100 different topics and paired off against each other in six
hundred rounds. The poems were initially evaluated collectively, then Fujiwara no
Shunzei 藤原俊成 (1114-1215), the greatest authority on poetry at that time, was given
the task of judging and writing the grounds for his decision. The poems we are about toread make up round 25 of the section Love 9; they were composed on the topic of “loveCipango - French Journal of Japanese Studies, 2 | 201310

Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka)with reference to a straw mat” mushiro ni yosuru kohi 寄席恋. The two poets incompetition were Kenshō, who we saw earlier (Left team), and Fujiwara no Tsuneie 藤
原経家 (1149-1209) for the Right.
Left55
Tie
Idenikeru
Kimi ga yodoko no
Samushiro ni
Hitori neshite ya
Hada wo furemashi
Right
Ayamushiro
Tachiyoru hito ha
Nakeredomo
Aramashi ni nomi
Shikite koso mateOn this mat of straw
where you slept
until you left,
I long to lay down alone
to feel your skinThough no-one
comes to sleep
on my woven mat,it is full of this desirethat I lay it out and wait

[Group judgment]: the two poems are said to be somewhat playful in tone (geke 戯気).
45

The judgment reads:
Left poem: […] if this poem describes a woman sleeping alone on a mat bearing theimprint of the man who has left, it seems to me a most improper attitude. Since thispoem was composed by a man [literally: it is a man’s poem otoko no uta 男の歌], isthis poem about a man sleeping on the imprint of the woman who has left [theroom]? […]The right poem says: “Though no-one comes to sleep on my woven mat”; this also
seems to be a woman’s poem (onna no uta 女の歌).56 The bantering of the left poem
and everything about the right poem are deviant, are they not? I declare this a tie.

46

Shunzei appears to have been deeply disturbed by both of the poems in this round. In
the left poem, Kenshō uses the polite form of the second-person pronoun kimi, which,as we saw, can be employed by both men and women. Moreover, he used the verb “toleave, or to go out” (translated here as “left”) which could mean to leave [the room]and thus apply to a person of either sex. Accordingly, Kenshō’s poem is open todifferent interpretations; the first one that comes to mind, and is mentioned initially by
Shunzei, leads me to interpret this poem as adopting a woman’s perspective. Shunzei
seems to have been troubled (shocked?) by the female eroticism expressed in the poem.
It is touching to see him attempt to interpret it from the male perspective (a man
sleeping on the place left empty by his wife), which he no doubt felt to be more
appropriate.

47

Tsuneie’s poem, while less ambiguous, is just as erotic. Although the author uses theword hito, “person”, which can refer to either a man or a woman, the situation
described – waiting – unquestionably marks this poem as being written as a woman. It
is noteworthy that Shunzei concludes his commentary by remarking that he foundthese two poems to contain deviance, literally “a disturbed or sick mind”, kyōki 狂気.

48

The two poems presented here were composed twenty-three years before Teika’s
previously cited waka. Given the long-standing tradition of transvestite poetry,
Shunzei’s harsh commentary, which contrasted sharply with the admiration elicited by
Teika’s poem, can only be explained by the overly explicit eroticism of the poems by
Kenshō and Tsuneie.

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Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka)

Poems from the Maigetsushū
49

Let us now turn our attention to another poet, Sone no Yoshitada 曽禰好忠, alias Sotan
曽丹 (ca. 923-1003), who was renowned for his inventiveness. Yoshitada’s personalcollection, entitled Sotan shū 曽丹集 or Yoshitada shū 好忠集,57 contains around 580
poems, probably written between 960 and 985, in other words, at the earliest thirty
years after the death of Ise. This collection features a series of 360 waka entitledCollection of Poems for Each Month (Maigetsu shū 毎月集). The poems are classified in theorder of the seasons, with each month illustrated via some thirty waka; the collection
can thus be read as a poetic journal. These waka – essentially descriptions of rural
scenes – include a few love poems and, in particular, twelve that tell of love from awoman’s perspective:58 it is on these poems that I will now focus.

50

Let us start by looking at poem no. 96, a summer poem:
Miru mama ni
Niwa no kusaba ha
Shigeredomo
Ima ha kari nimo
Sena ha kimasazu

The garden grasses
as I contemplate them
have grown thick,yet my man does not cometo cut them, not even for a moment

51

In this poem portraying the waiting of a woman neglected by her lover, Yoshitada
employs the term sena – translated here as “my man” – which can be found in poems
from the Man’yōshū (mid-eighth century); it is a term of affection used by women for
their husbands or older brothers. From the outset Yoshitada thus establishes a sexedinterpretation of his waka. The situation described is also “gendered”, to borrow genderstudies terminology, since in classical Japan men and women usually lived in separate
residences; according to tradition (in particular literary tradition), it was the man who
visited his beloved. Finally, note that the term kari nimo can be interpreted(intentionally) in two ways: “to cut” and “even temporarily”, “even for a moment”.

52

Poem no. 144, another summer waka, can be seen as a variation on the same theme as
the previous poem:
Waga seko ga
Kimaseritsuruka
Minu hodo ni
Niwa no kogusa mo
Katamayohiseri

My dear friend
will no doubt soon arrive,for since last I saw him
the young shoots in the garden,
thick have they grown

53

Here Yoshitada employs the term waga seko “my dear friend” which, just like sena, isused by women in Man’yōshū poems as a term of endearment for their husbands (orolder brothers); there is therefore no doubt as to the gender of the narrator. This poem
also features the same theme of the neglected woman (left so long that the grass has
had time to grow in abundance), a topos in classical literature.

54

The pair of autumn poems we will now examine, nos. 189 and 207 respectively in myanthology, is interesting for it presents both perspectives, that of the man and of thewoman:

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Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka)

Tohoyamada
Kozoni korisezu
Tsukuri okite
Moru to seshima ni
Imo ha taharenu

Despite the past failure
I once again planted
the mountain field,
and whilst I kept watch
my sweetheart was unfaithful

Waga sena ha
Stumagohi surashi
Tohoyamada
Moru ni natsukete
Hi kazuhenureba

My beloved husband
must miss his wife
while I countthe days he has goneto watch over the mountain field

55

Reading this pair of poems it is clear that the author was having fun: the tone isintentionally rustic and archaistic, for once again Yoshitada employs the term sena (myman, my husband) and its female equivalent imo (my sweetheart). It is important tonote that these terms were already obsolete in Yoshitada’s day and were thus used forstylistic effect.59 In this period, the word hito was preferred to these (overly explicit?)
terms, since it was more ambiguous and could refer to either a man or a woman.

56

Let us now examine autumn poem no. 212:
Koshi hito no
Okite wakareshi
Ashita yori
Aki kinikeri to
Shiruku miteshi wo

Since this morningwhen my guest aroseand bid me farewell,I see it has arrived,
the autumn of our love57

The construction of this poem adheres much more closely to the canons of Heianperiod poetry. It deals with the theme of weariness in love (a traditional theme) and inorder to do so makes conventional use of the amphibology of the word aki, meaning
both “autumn” and “weariness”.

58

The poem’s gender is established through the situation described. As mentioned
earlier, convention stipulated that it was the man who visited the woman and had toleave before dawn.

59

To conclude this section on Yoshitada’s compositions, let us examine one final poem,
no. 222 (an autumn waka):
Mishi hito no
Kotodeshi koto wo
Tanomitsutsu
Aki woba yoso no
Mono to koso kike

60

Trusting in
the words spoken
by my beloved,
love’s autumn
cannot touch me.

As illustrated by the translation, the gender of this poem is open to interpretation: it
could be written from the point of view of a man or a woman, confident in theireverlasting love. The term mishi hito, literally “the person I saw”, means “the beloved”,
male or female. Since the situation described is not gendered, there is no way ofidentifying the sex of this waka’s narrator. Note once again the play on the double
meaning of the word aki, “autumn/weariness”.

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Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka)

Poems composed on behalf of someone else61

Let us now turn our attention to a mode of composition referred to in modern criticism
as daihitsu 代筆, “writing in the place of someone else”, or daisaku 代作, “work written
in the place of someone else”, and which consists in composing on behalf of a third
person. In the majority of cases a person (male or female) unable to compose poetry
adequately requests that an experienced poet (male or female) of their acquaintance doso in their place. This could involve a man composing a poem for another man to send
to a woman (or a man); or a woman writing a poem for a woman to send to a man (or awoman). In keeping with the theme of this paper, the examples I will examine here are“transvestite poems”, in other words, waka composed by a man for a woman to send toanother man (who must believe that the woman was the author), or the opposite:
poems written by a woman for a man to send to a woman (who must believe that hewas the author). Although the waka we are about to read are all love poems, a similar
strategy is conceivable for poems intended to thank someone for a gift or to reply to anorder from the emperor.60

62

The first pieces we will examine – a poem and its reply (the latter being the transvestitepoem) – appear in the Kokin wakashū (Love 3, nos. 617-618) and are preceded by aheadnote.61
Poem composed and sent to a lady serving in the house of Mr Narihira:
Mr [Fujiwara no] Toshiyuki 藤原敏行:
Tsuzezure no
Nagame ni masaru
Namidagawa
Sode nomi nurete
Ahu yoshi mo nashi

63

Unable to meet you,
I am lost in lonely thought,
my sleeves drenched with tears
abundant as the watersof a rain-swollen river.

On behalf of the lady he composed the following reply:
Mr [Ariwara no] Narihira 在原業平:
Asami koso
Sode ha hitsurame
Namidagawa
Mi sahe nagaru to
Kikaba tanomamu

Because it lacks depth,
it merely drenches your sleeve –yon river of tears.
Were your body to float off,
I might have faith in your words62

64

The gender of Toshiyuki’s composition (the first poem) is established through thepreceding headnote, or kotobagaki: we know that the poem is sent by a man to a woman.
However, an examination of the poem reveals that it could easily be the work of awoman. Nothing indicates a male author and the situation described could just as easily
concern a woman (and be expressed by a woman).

65

As for Narihira’s poem, it appears to be a snub. This method of rejecting a suitor bymaking fun of him features so frequently in classical poetry – particularly in the Kokin
wakashū – (in fact it is poetic convention) that Suzuki Hideo 鈴木日出男 sees it as oneof the characteristics of women’s poetry.63

66

The next poem was composed by Izumi Shikibu 和泉式部 (ca. 978- death unknown), an
immensely talented poet and contemporary of Murasaki Shikibu 紫式部 and Sei

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Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka)

Shōnagon 清小納言. Her work appears in the Goshūi wakashū 後拾遺和歌集, the Second
Collection of Gleanings, the fourth imperial anthology, completed in 1086 (Love 1,
no. 611):
Composed on behalf of a man writing to a certain person for the first time:
Obomeku na
Taretomo nakuteYohiyohi ni
Yume ni mieken
Ware zo sono hito

Don’t pretend!
You know not who, yet
Every night
He is in your dreams.
That man is I, of course!64

67

Once again, the first indication of the poem’s gender is given by the kotobagaki, whichstates that the poem is supposed to have been composed by a man. A second clue isprovided by the last line: ware zo sono hito “That man is I, of course!” Ware is a personalpronoun for the first-person singular (for both sexes), frequently used from the time of
the Man’yōshū onwards. By adding to this the exclamatory particle zo, Izumi lends her
poem a violent affirmation of the self that could be described as “virile” or “manly”.

68

Izumi Shikibu seems to have been particularly solicited by men to write their love
poems; Gotō Shōko 後藤祥子 cites some ten examples (and her list does not claim to be
exhaustive).65 Aside from the poem by Izumi Shikibu quoted here, the Goshūi wakashūcontains two further examples of “transvestite” love poems, written at the behest ofmen by Sagami 相模 (ca. 994-after 1061) and Ise no Taifu 伊勢大輔 (dates unknown),
two major women poets.66

69

Having come to the end of my analysis, conclusions must now be drawn. What firstemerges from my research is that the waka poetic genre is intrinsically sexuallyambivalent, even in the case of love poems (which make up the majority of the corpus I
studied). As we have seen, the vast majority of waka contain no internal elements tosuggest the gender of the piece. In addition to the limited vocabulary and strictly
codified images they employ, the main reason for this is of course the fundamentallyambivalent nature of the Japanese language, which has no grammatical gender(masculine/feminine). Moreover, the majority of words used in poetry to refer topeople (hito, “the beloved”; kimi, “you”; ware, “me”, for example) can be used for either
sex. Finally, the brevity of waka (thirty-one syllables) prohibits the use of keigo 敬語, thehonorific parts of speech which, in prose – and in the spoken language –, chiefly serve
to clarify the hierarchical relationship between speakers (and consequently, on
occasions, their sex). While in some cases the situation described (waiting, for example,
which places the poem in a female register) enables the gender of the poem to be
determined – albeit independently of the author’s biological sex – in most cases it isexternal information (the name of the poet and the headnotes explaining the context
in which the poem was composed) that enable us to identify the sex of the waka’s
author and the gender of the narrator (which, as we saw, can be different). The
fundamental role of these external elements in determining our reading andinterpretation of waka is thus clear; without them, the question of sexual identification
would often remain open.

70

The second lesson that can be drawn from the examples cited in this paper is that, inclassical Japan, male and female authors knowingly composed poems for which they
adopted the point of view of a person of the opposite sex. I am well aware that thepoems presented here do not constitute a major current in the poetic production of the

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Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka)

period. Nonetheless, these poems provide a striking illustration of the artist’s craft (andthe dissociation that must be made between the sex of the author and the gender of
their work). Men and women played with using the codes, images and situations
associated with the opposite sex. The result, to borrow the metaphor employed byLaurel Rasplica Rodd, is that anyone attempting to identify the sex of the author of awaka “is skating on very thin ice”.67 The researcher Kondō Miyuki 近藤みゆき has forsome years focused her research, which she clearly situates in a gender perspective, on
using IT tools to identify words and expressions used in waka exclusively by men or
women. Her studies tend to prove the existence of expressions that are exclusively
male, and others that are exclusively female. However, the result is not entirely
satisfactory as in each of her papers Kondō Miyuki limits herself to examining one
single piece of work. This enables her to assert, for example, that in the Kokin wakashū
the word ominaeshi 女郎花, “maiden flowers”, appears only in poems written by men. 68
However, while this may be correct for the anthology in question, one need only makea few enquiries to establish that the poet Ise, a contemporary of the Kokin wakashū
anthology, also used this flower in her poems.69 The issue becomes even more
complicated when Kondō turns her attention to the Genji monogatari. 70 While she is once
again able to identify expressions used in the novel’s poems that are particularly
masculine or feminine, the aim of this research seems to be for the most part futile,
since we know that all of these waka, whether attributed to a male or female character,were composed by a woman, Murasaki Shikibu.
71

What I have tried to illustrate in this paper is that the biological sex of an author,
whether male or female, does not determine the gender of the work that he or she
writes. What is important is the position he or she adopts at the time of composition.
Where there is literary writing, there is creation and thus construction (even in themost realist or autobiographical of texts). If just one credit had to be given to genderstudies – sadly ignored by the literary studies I consulted (even those that claim to bepart of this current), it is to have finally separated biological sex from gender. Judith
Butler writes: “Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical
discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders”. 71 It seems
high time that we realised, whether certain essentialist feminists and their malecounterparts like it or not, that it is not the author’s biological sex that decides
whether a work is masculine or feminine, but rather the position adopted, the choicemade by the author at the time of creation (thus, examples exist in Japan and the Westof “male” works written by women, and “female” works written by men). 72 While thisclaim may seem radical, it is not. I need only point out, as Joan E. Ericson and Tomi
Suzuki have done, that the concept of “women’s literature” is a recent creation in Japan(dating from the beginning of the twentieth century) and that many women writers do
not identify with this vast category in which they find themselves “classified” simply
because of their biological sex.73 The extraordinary growth of literature written by
women during the Heian period is sometimes attributed to their using the vernacularwhile men composed in Chinese. As Laurel Rasplica Rodd, among others, has pointed
out, this is a caricatured view.74 I stressed earlier in this paper that literary Chinese was
the speciality of a handful of families, and that few men were capable of using it (on theother hand, women literary writers were able to read and sometimes even to write it).
Monogatari, nikki and waka are all literary genres in which men also wrote, 75 if women
were behind literary masterpieces such as the Genji Monogatari and Makura no sōshi 枕草子, The Pillow Book, to name but the most famous, it is because they were perfectly well-

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Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka)

educated and moved in circles characterised by intense cultural rivalry, in particularliterary. As underlined by Haruo Shirane, this irrefutable fact is reminiscent of
seventeenth-century France, an era in which Mme de Sévigné, Mme de la Fayette andMme de Scudéry all rubbed shoulders.76
72

Murasaki Shikibu, Sei Shōnagon, Izumi Shikibu and the other women writing literatureduring the Heian period were perfectly aware of belonging to an intellectual elite andof the power their talent conferred on them; they also knew that through their writing
they could to some extent transcend the battle of the sexes and affirm their identity.
This paper has shown that both men and women authors played with voices of the
opposite sex in their work; attributing a piece of literature to a particular sex can leadto surprises and no definition77 will ever do justice to the multiplicity of voices, bothmale and female, that abound in literature. Yet when all is said and done, the only thingthat matters is surely that we let them speak to us.

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KONDŌ Miyuki, “Otoko to onna no ‘kotoba’ no yukue, jendā kara mita Genji monogatari no waka”,
Genji kenkyū no. 9, Tokyo, Kanrin shobō, 2004.
MITAMURA Masako, “Janru, daihitsu, seitenkai”, in Nihon kindai bungaku no. 51, May 1994.
MIYAKK Lynne K., “The Tosa Diary: In the Interstices of Gender and Criticism”, in Paul Gordon
Schallow, Janet A.Walker (ed.), The Woman’s Hand, Gender and Theory in Japanese Women’s Writing,Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1996.
MOSTOW Joshua S., “Mother Tongue and Father Script. The Relationship of Sei Shōnagon andMurasaki Shikibu to Their Fathers and Chinese Letters”, in Rebecca L. Copeland, Esperanza
Ramirez-Christensen (eds), The Father-Daughter Plot: Japanese Literary Women and the Law of the
Father, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 2001.
PIGEOT Jacqueline, « Littérature et image au Japon », in Grand Atlas des Littératures, Paris,
Encyclopaedia Universalis, 1990.
PIGEOT Jacqueline, Michiyuki-bun, poétique de l’itinéraire dans la littérature du Japon ancien,
Paris, Maisonneuve et Larose, 1982.
RASPLICA RODD Laurel, “‘Moving and Without Strength’: Is there a Woman’s Voice in Waka?”, in
Janice Brown, Sonja Arntzen (eds), Across Time and Genre: Reading and Writing Women’s Texts,
Conference Proceedings, University of Alberta, 2002.
REIN Raud, “The Lover’s subject: Its Construction and Relativisation in the Waka Poetry of the
Heian Period”, in Eiji Sekine (ed.), Love and Sexuality in Japanese Literature, Proceedings of the Midwest
Association of Japanese Literary Studies, vol. 5, 1999.
SARRA Edith, Fictions of Femininity, Literary Inventions of Gender in Japanese Court Women’s Memoirs,
Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999.
SCHALOW Paul Gordon, WALKER, Janet A. (eds), The Woman’s Hand, Gender and Theory in Japanese
Women’s Writing, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1996.
SHIRANE Haruo, “Sekai bungaku ni okeru Genji monogatari – jendā, janru, bungakushi”, in Genjimonogatari kenkyū no. 6, Tokyo, Kanrin shobō, 2001.

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Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka)

SUZUKI Hideo, “Onna uta no honsei”, in Kodai waka shiron, Tokyo, Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1990.
SUZUKI Tomi, “Gender and Genre: Modern Literary Histories and Women’s Diary Literature”, inHaruo Shirane, Tomi Suzuki (eds), Inventing the Classics, Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese
Literature, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2000.
TABUCHI Kumiko, “Utaawase no kōzō – nyōbō kajin no ichi”, in Kanechiku Nobuyuki, Tabuchi
Kumiko (eds), Waka wo rekishi kara yomu, Tokyo, Kasama shoin, 2002.
TAMURA Ryūichi, “Shinkokin-jidai to onna uta”, in Gotoba-in to sono shūhen, Tokyo, Kasama shoin,
1998 (originally published in Gobun no. 82, March 1991).
VIEILLARD-BARON Michel, Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241) et la notion d’excellence en poésie, Théorie etpratique de la composition dans le Japon classique, Paris, Collège de France/ Institut des Hautes
Études Japonaises, 2001.
VIEILLARD-BARON Michel, « Les métamorphoses du mot : la citation de vers chinois comme sujet decomposition de poèmes japonais, waka », in Extrême-Orient Extrême-Occident n o 17 (Le travail de lacitation en Chine et au Japon), Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1995.
WATANABE Yumiko, “‘Onna no uta’ to iu hihyōgo”, in Kokubungaku kenkyū no. 139, March 2003.
WATANABE Yumiko, “‘Onna no utayomi’ no sonzaikeitai – Yakumo misho ni saguru”, Meigetsuki
kenkyū no. 7, 2002.
YAMAZAKI Masakatsu, “Utaawase no hihyōgo toshite no ‘onna no uta’”, in Kodai chūsei kokubungaku
no. 14, December 2000.
YOSHIKAWA Eiji, “Kokinshū izen no byōbuuta”, in Byōbuuta to utaawase, “Wakabungaku ronshū”
series, no. 5, Tokyo, Kazama shobō 1994.

NOTES
1. Man’yōshū, vol. 1, Kojima Noriyuki et al . (ed.), “Nihon kotenbungaku zenshū” series,
Shōgakukan, 1971, 9th edn 1979, p. 305.
2. Man’yōshū, vol. 1, Satake Akihiro et al. (ed.), “Shin-Nihon kotenbungaku taikei” series, Iwanami
shoten, 1999, p. 331. I am grateful to my friend Yoshino Kazuko for having brought this poem tomy attention.
3. I am told that in some Japanese bookshops, where previously only women’s literature, joryū
bungaku, was singled out (with its own special area) – with no signage used for men’s literature –,one can now see the label “men’s novels”, danryū shōsetsu, above shelving containing books
written by male authors. This phenomenon, which is the result of feminist demands, remains
extremely marginal and does nothing to resolve the fundamental problem, namely: is it
pertinent to separate books according to the biological sex of their author?
4. Georges-Claude Guilbert, C’est pour un garçon ou pour une fille ? La dictature du genre (Is it for a
Girl or a Boy? The Dictatorship of Gender), Autrement, 2004, p. 35.
5. Judith Butler’s most significant work is Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,
Routledge, 1990, republished in 1999, which was recently translated into French by Cynthia Kraus
as Trouble dans le genre, pour un féminisme de la subversion, Éditions La Découverte, 2005.
6. More precisely, Judith Butler stresses that biological sex, gender and sexual orientation are
three different things, and that it is precisely when gender and sexual orientation clash thatgender trouble arises.

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Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka)

7. To quote Judith Butler (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, newedition 2006, p. 6): “[…] whatever biological intractability sex appears to have, gender isculturally constructed: hence gender is neither the causal result of sex nor as seemingly fixed assex.”
8. Hommes, femmes, la construction de la différence (Men and Women: Constructing Difference), Le
Pommier, 2005, p. 29.
9. In fact, her famous phrase, “One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one” (« On ne naîtpas femme, on le deviant », Le Deuxième sexe, vol. 2, Gallimard 1949, reprint, « Folio » collection,
1976, p. 13) is often held up as an illustration of the constructionist theory; see for example J.
Butler, Trouble dans le genre, op. cit., p. 59 (Gender Trouble, op. cit., p. 11).
10. Georges-Claude Guilbert, op. cit., p. 36.
11. The bibliography of Judith Butler’s most recent work to be published in French, Défaire legenre (Undoing Gender) (Paris, Editions Amsterdam, 2006), contains a few publications by Françoise
Héritier but the anthropologist is completely absent from the index. Those books by Françoise
Héritier that are relevant to my research can be found in the bibliography at the end of thispaper.
12. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, new edition 2006, pp. XV-XVI: “[…] performativity is not a
singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization in
the context of a body, understood, in part, as a culturally sustainable temporal duration.” Butler
continues further on in the text: “The view that gender is performative sought to show that what
we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts,
posited through the gendered stylization of the body. In this way, it showed that what we take tobe an ‘internal’ feature of ourselves is one that we anticipate and produce through certain bodily
acts, at an extreme, an hallucinatory effect of naturalized gestures.”13. Francine Hérail, La Cour du Japon à l’époque de Heian aux Xe et XIe siècles (The Japanese Court of
the Heian Period in the 10th and 11th Centuries), Hachette, « La Vie Quotidienne » collection,
1995, p. 9.
14. Sanjō no Machi was the name by which Ki no Seishi was known.
15. Unless otherwise stated, all information on folding screen poems is taken from the Byōbu uta
entry in the Waka Daijiten (Dictionary of Japanese Poetry, Meiji Shoin, 1986, p. 849), written by
Katanō Tatsurō. For more information on folding screen poetry see, in French: Jacqueline Pigeot,
Michiyuki-bun (pp. 93-103 and passim) and « Littérature et image au Japon » (Literature and Imagein Japan), in Grand Atlas des Littératures (Grand Atlas of Literatures), p. 168-169.
16. Several theories have been put forward to explain the decline of this mode of composition:
fires at the palace, a reduction in the number of official celebrations and the epidemics thatravaged the capital between 995 and 998 may all have played a part. See Kawamura Yōko,“Michinaga, Yorimichi jidai no byōbuuta”, p. 109, who cites the hypotheses put forward by
Katano Tatsurō.
17. Comments on the Shūishō, a private anthology no doubt compiled by Fujiwara no Kintō inaround 996-999 and which would serve as the basis for the Shūi Wakashū “Collection of
Gleanings”, the third imperial anthology compiled by Emperor Kazan himself and most likely
completed in around 1005.
18. Shūishō chū, “Nihon Kagaku Taikei (Bekkan 4)” series, p. 387.
19. Her own poetry collection, the Ise Shū, contains 482 waka (including pieces written by people
around her).
20. A full French language translation of this poem can be found in Paul Demiéville (ed.),Anthologie de la poésie chinoise classique (Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry), Poésie /Gallimard
collection, 1962, p. 313-320. An English translation can be found in Dore J. Levy, Chinese Narrative
Poetry: The Late Han Through T’ang Dynasties, Duke University Press, 1988, pp. 129-133.

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Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka)

21. It may in fact have been a pair of folding screens, with each screen illustrating one of the two
characters. See Ise shū zenshaku, op. cit., p. 142.
22. See Genji Monogatari (“Shinchō Nihon koten shūsei” series, vol. 1, p. 26): “Lately he had been
spending all his time examining illustrations of ‘The Song of Unending Sorrow’ commissioned byEmperor Uda, with poems by Ise and Tsurayuki; and other poems as well, in native speech or in
Chinese, as long as they were on that theme, which was the constant topic of his
conversation.” (Translation by Royall Tyler, The Tale of Genji, Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition,
2003, p. 10) The poems of Ki no Tsurayuki, if they ever existed, have not survived.
23. I have reproduced the numbering used in my reference edition, Ise shū zenshaku. Translation
by Joseph T. Sorensen, Optical Allusions. Screens, Paintings, and Poetry in Classical Japan (ca. 800-200),
Brill Academic Publishers, 2012, p. 131.
24. Dore J. Levy, Chinese Narrative Poetry, op. cit. p. 131.
25. Joseph T. Sorensen, Optical Allusions, op. cit, p. 131.
26. Dore J. Levy, Chinese Narrative Poetry, op. cit., p. 132.
27. Translation by Joshua S. Mostow, “Mother Tongue and Father Script”, in Copeland, R. L., andRamirez-Christensen, E. (eds), The Father-Daughter Plot: Japanese Literary Women and the Law of the
Father, University of Hawai’i Press, 2001, p. 122.
28. Dore J. Levy, Chinese Narrative Poetry, op. cit., p. 131. Note that the “hibiscus” of the translation
has been systematically corrected to “lotus”.
29. Ibid., p. 131.
30. Ibid., p. 129.
31. Ibid., p. 132.
32. Joseph T. Sorensen, Optical Allusions, op. cit, p. 132.
33. Dore J. Levy, Chinese Narrative Poetry, op. cit. p. 131.
34. Joseph T. Sorensen, Optical Allusions, op. cit, p. 132.
35. This expression appears in anecdote 66 of the Ise monogatari / Tales of Ise.
36. Dore J. Levy, Chinese Narrative Poetry, op. cit. p. 132.
37. Joseph T. Sorensen, Optical Allusions, op. cit, p. 133.
38. Dore J. Levy, Chinese Narrative Poetry, op. cit. p. 133.
39. Ibid., p. 133.
40. Ibid., p. 133
41. Joseph T. Sorensen, Optical Allusions, op. cit, p. 133.
42. Dore J. Levy, Chinese Narrative Poetry, op. cit. p. 133.
43. Ibid., p. 133.
44. Ibid., p. 133.
45. On this mode of composition see my paper: « Les métamorphoses du mot : la citation de verschinois comme sujet de composition de poèmes japonais, waka » (Metamorphoses of the Word:
Citing Chinese Verse as the Subject of Japanese Poems, waka), in Extrême-Orient Extrême Occident,
no 17 (Le travail de la citation en Chine et au Japon [How Citation Works in China and Japan]),
1995.
46. Joshua S. Mostow, in his essay “Mother Tongue and Father Script”, cites the main examples(relating to Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shōnagon in particular) attesting that certain literary
women had knowledge of Chinese. Also noteworthy is Aoyanagi Takashi’s essay “Joryū rōei kō”,
which provides further proof of the recitation of Chinese poems by women.
47. Joshua S. Mostow (op. cit. p. 121) cites the example of a poem composed in Chinese by the
Kamo Priestess Princess Uchiko (807-847) on the occasion of a visit by her father, Emperor Saga.
Mostow also notes (p. 123) that the naishi, female functionaries serving in the imperial court,
whose responsibilities included receiving and conveying the emperor’s orders, did so using
written Chinese. However, it appears that in reality important orders were written in Chinese bya (male) member of the Chancellery (kurōdo), created at the beginning of the Heian period; theCipango - French Journal of Japanese Studies, 2 | 201322

Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka)naishi no doubt only wrote edicts that specifically concerned female staff (lists of nominations,for example) and it is impossible to ascertain their actual skill in writing Chinese with any
certainty; whatever the case may be, they were capable of reading it. I would like to thankFrancine Hérail for providing me with this information.
48. As was the case of the Sugawara and Ōe families, for example.
49. The last recorded contest in the Shinpen Kokka Taikan (vol. 5, Kadokawa shoten, 1987) dates
back to Kakitsu 3 (1443).
50. For this topic (and poem) I have used the interpretation proposed by Kubota Jun in his
edition of the book: Kenreimon-in Ukyō no Daibu shū, Towazugatari, “Shinpen Nihon koten bungaku
zenshū” series, no. 47, Shōgakukan, 1999, poem no. 26, p. 27.
51. Such a scene is featured in the chapter Ukifune in Genji Monogatari; see for example Arthur
Waley (translation), The Tale of Genji, Tuttle Publishing, 2010, pp. 1010-1058.
52. Phillip Tudor Harries, The Poetic Memoirs of Lady Daibu, Stanford University Press, 1980, p. 93.
53. Joshua S. Mostow, Pictures of the Heart: The Hyakunin Isshu in Word and Image, University of
Hawai’i Press, 1996, p. 427
54. For more information on this poem see my book Fujiwara no Teika et la notion d’excellence en
poésie (Fujiwara no Teika and the Notion of Excellence in Poetry), pp. 359-364, as well as Gotō
Shōko’s essay, “Josō suru Teika”.
55. Roppykaban utaawase, op. cit., p. 397.
56. On the use of the term “onna uta” (woman’s poem) in poetry criticism, see Watanabe Yumiko,“‘Onna no uta’ to iu hihyōgo”, in Kokubungaku kenkyū, no. 139, March 2003, as well as Yamazaki
Masakatsu, “Utaawase no hihyōgo toshite no ‘onna no uta’”, in Kodai chūsei kokubungaku, no. 14,
December 2000, and Fujimoto Kazue, “Kokin-kanajō ‘onna no uta’ o megutte”, in Sekine Yoshikohakase shōga-kai (ed.), Heian bungaku ronshū, Kazama shobō, 1992.
57. For this anthology I have used the edition compiled and annotated by Kansaku Kōichi and
Shimada Ryōji, Sone Yoshitada shū zenshaku, Kasama shoin, 1975.
58. In my edition the poems are numbered as no. 96, 144, 165, 207, 212, 221, 222, 234, 246, 272,
276, and 329.
59. In the poems in my corpus Yoshitada uses sena twice and seko eight times.
60. See, for example, Kokin wakashū no. 17, a poem composed by Ki no Tomonori for someone who
was to attend a palace celebration.
61. These poems also appear in the Ise monogatari / Tales of Ise (anecdote no. 107).
62. Translations by Helen Craig McCullough, Brocade by Night: “Kokin Wakashū” and the Court Stylein Japanese Classical Poetry, Stanford University Press, 1985, pp. 207-208.
63. See his paper “Onna uta no honsei”, p. 54.
64. Translation by Thomas McAuley, 2001. Waka for Japan 2001 [online], [Accessed
15 October 2012].
65. See Gotō Shōko, “Joryū ni yoru otoko uta”, pp. 309-310.
66. Poems 643 and 670, quoted by Gotō Shōko, op. cit., p. 310.
67. Laurel Rasplica Rodd, “‘Moving and Without Strength’: Is there a Woman’s Voice in Waka?”,p. 17.
68. Kondō Miyuki, “Kokinshū no ‘kotoba’ no kata, gengo hyōshō to jendā”, p. 26.
69. See the poem (no. 51) she composed for the Teijiin ominaeshi awase, the maiden flower contest,
published in the appendix of the Kokin wakashū, Ozawa Masao (ed.), “Nihon kotenbungaku
zenshū” series, Shōgakukan, 1971, p. 477.
70. See her paper: “Otoko to onna no ‘kotoba’ no yukue, jendā kara mita Genji monogatari nowaka”, Genji kenkyū no. 9, Kanrin shobō, 2004.
71. Gender Trouble, op. cit., p. 9.
72. Just as I finish my paper, a fascinating book by Mireille Huchon has been published: Louise
Labé, une créature de papier, Droz, 2006. Huchon demonstrates with prodigious scholarship that the

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Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka)Œuvres of Louise Labé were merely a “brilliant hoax” devised by a group of male authors –including the famous poet Maurice Scève – linked to the printer Jean de Tourmes. AlthoughLouise Labé did exist, it was men who wrote the poems attributed to her and which until thenhad been considered masterpieces of feminine poetry!
73. See the interesting papers by Joan E. Ericson “The Origins of the Concept of ‘Women’s
Literature’”, and Tomi Suzuki “Gender and Genre: Modern Literary Histories and Women’s Diary
Literature”.
74. Laurel Rasplica Rodd, “‘Moving and Without Strength’: Is there a Woman’s Voice in Waka?”,
op. cit., p. 9.
75. Béatrice Didier (L’Écriture-femme [Women’s Writing], p. 39) writes: “It must not be forgottenthat the segregation of the sexes was a system of oppression, that in the beginning the Japaneseemployed, for example, a dual system of different writing styles and literary genres for men andwomen, not so much to affirm some glorious particularity but to curb female creation.” My paper
has shown – I hope! – that this view is misguided.
76. Haruo Shirane, “Sekai bungaku ni okeru Genji monogatari – jendā, janru, bungakushi”, op. cit.,p. 32.
77. Béatrice Didier (L’Écriture-femme, op. cit., p. 37) explains: “Women’s writing is one of the
Inside: the inside of the body, the inside of the home. It is a writing of returning to this Inside, of
nostalgia for the mother and for the sea.” This definition, which is perfectly applicable to Proust,
immediately excludes Sei Shōnagon.

RÉSUMÉS
L’objectif de cet article est de soulever la question du genre et de l’identité sexuelle dans lalittérature classique japonaise, à travers l’exemple de la poésie waka et en particulier à travers
l’analyse de poèmes d’Ise et de Fujiwara no Teika. Il montre qu’aucune définition ne peut rendre
justice de la multiplicité des voix, masculine ou féminine, que recèle la littérature.
The aim of this article is to raise the issue of gender and sexual identity in classic Japanese
literature, through the example of waka poetry and in particular through the analysis of poemsby Ise and Fujiwara no Teika. It shows that no definition can do justice to the multiplicity ofvoices, both male and female, that abound in literature.

INDEX
Index chronologique : Heian period, Kamakura period
Mots-clés : étude du genre, voix genrée, identité sexuelle, littérature japonaise classique, poésie
waka, Dame Ise (875-938), Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241)
Keywords : gender studies, gender voices, sexual identity, Japanese classic literature, Lady Ise(875-938), waka poetry, Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241)

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Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka)

AUTEURMICHEL VIEILLARD-BARON
Centre d’études japonaises, Inalco

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