A central feature of traditional Japanese poetry (waka) is the use
of utamakura -- a category of poetic words, many of which are
place-names or the names of features associated with them -- to
cultivate allusion and intertextuality between individual poems and
within the tradition. In this book Edward Kamens analyzes a wide
selection of poems to show how utamakura came to wield special
powers within Japanese poetry. He reveals how poets in generation
after generation returned, either in person or in imagination, to
these places and to poems about them to encounter again the forms,
styles, and techniques of their forebears, and to discover ways to
create new poems of their own.
Kamens focuses especially on one figure, "the buried tree",
which refers to fossilized wood associated in particular with an
utamakura site, the Natori River, and is mentioned in poems that
first appear in anthologies in the early tenth century. The figure
surfaces again at many points in the history of traditional
Japanese poetry, as do the buried trees themselves in the shallow
waters that otherwise conceal them. After explaining and discussing
the literary history of the concept of utamakura, Kamens traces the
allusive and intertextual development of the figure of the buried
tree and the use of the place-name Natorigawa in waka poetry
through the late nineteenth century. He investigates the relation
between utamakura and the collecting of fetishes and curios
associated with utamakura sites by waka connoisseurs. And he
analyzes in detail the use of utamakura and their pictorial
representations in a political and religious program in an
architectural setting -- the Saishoshitennoin program of 1207.
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