Rereading Tsurezuregusa
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Takeo Ogawa
Faculty of Letters ProfessorTakeo Ogawa
Faculty of Letters Professor
2020/12/12
I like the music of old performers. There are quite a few commercialized broadcast recordings. Although they are monaural and mixed with noise, works like Knappertsbusch's Parsifal, for example, are released repeatedly by various record companies. Even when touted as the latest remaster, most are disappointing, but occasionally, when an official sound source is unearthed from a broadcasting station's warehouse, it sounds as if the fog has lifted. It would be ridiculous to praise the poor sound quality of a bootleg as "divinely ethereal," and it becomes even more troublesome if it turns out to be a performance by someone else entirely.
And so, we come to Tsurezuregusa. Because it is a famous work, the author Kenko is also very well known. Born into the Urabe clan of low-ranking court nobles, he retired from the world due to the misfortune of the early death of the emperor he served as an imperial archivist, as well as his incompatibility with the era of the rising warrior class. He longed for the court culture of the past, loathed novelty, and wrote essays with pessimistic and archaistic content—this is how the "character" of Tsurezuregusa is often explained.
However, Kenko's biography was actually a later fabrication based on Tsurezuregusa itself. I have already clarified this in "Kenko Hoshi: The Truth Not Recorded in Tsurezuregusa" (Chuko Shinsho, 2017) and other works. In short, knowledge regarding the historical context of the late Kamakura period to the early Nanboku-cho period, when Kenko lived and Tsurezuregusa was written, had not been updated. While enshrining Tsurezuregusa as a classic among classics, people failed to see through the fraudulent biography and were discussing the "character" of the work based on it. The negative impact of the researcher population being biased toward only famous works is serious.
Still, some might think that a work can exist independently of its author or era. Therefore, this book is an attempt to step back into Kenko's time and reread Tsurezuregusa for high school and university students. I have included both famous passages found in textbooks and more obscure ones. I haven't necessarily tried to forcibly strip away any mask Kenko might have tried to hide behind. The interpretation presented here should not diminish the charm of the work. Fortunately, I have received feedback from several readers saying they had an "aha!" moment. I believe it is like listening to a performance that was highly acclaimed but somehow didn't quite click, played back through a high-quality sound source, and finally realizing, "Ah, so this is what it actually sounded like."
*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.