The Sinitic poetry of Fujiwara Seika and his place in the history of early modern kanbun literature

Abstract

Fujiwara Seika (藤原惺窩, 1561–1619) has often attracted scholarly attention as one of the founders of Neo-Confucianism in Japan. Yet his substantial literary oeuvre, which includes works in both literary Sinitic (Jp. kanbun 漢文) and Japanese, remains largely unexplored. Just like most of his educated contemporaries, Seika was well-versed in kanbun composition and left us with a considerable number of Sinitic poems (Jp. 漢詩 kanshi), but the few modern scholars who have commented on his verse have been quite critical in their evaluation of his poetic prowess. According to such scholars, Seika’s kanshi suffer from several serious defects, including a derivative and uninventive diction, a lack of individuality, and an inability to fruitfully engage with indigenous poetic material.This study turns to a selection of Fujiwara Seika’s Sinitic poems to cast doubt on such claims. It begins by surveying scholarly opinion on Seika’s verse, proceeds to analyze his kanshi poetics by focusing on diction, tone, and the use of Japanese poetic material, and concludes with a brief discussion of Seika’s ideal of “living verse” (Jp. 活句 kakku). The study argues that, far from being a “bad” poet, Seika was capable of producing innovative, personal, and eclectic verse at a stage in the development of kanbun literature often described as one of blandness, literary mimicry, and slavish imitation of Chinese precedent. In so doing, this study challenges conventional scholarly narratives of Fujiwara Seika’s—and, by extension, other early Tokugawa poets’—place in the history of Japanese belles-lettres and points to the importance of treating the kanbun corpus as an academic subject no less serious than the vernacular tradition.