Maritime Ryukyu, 1050–1650 by Gregory Smits (review)

Abstract

Published by the Harvard-Yenching Institute HJAS 80.2 (2020): 561–567 extant works” (p. 379). Gripping comments such as this one demands the reader’s full power of analysis while reading Owen’s work. If I have any criticism of Owen’s book, it would be his claim that Liu Yong’s ci was not read as “literature,” for it was merely “performance” (p. 87). Furthermore, Owen believes that Liu Yong was someone who “knew the phrases of the love game” and knew how to perform “love” (pp. 73, 75). But surely Owen cannot deny that Huang Chang, who compared Liu Yong to the sage poet Du Fu, would never have thought that Liu Yong was merely performing as a male lover. As Owen mentions, Huang Chang might have read a version of the Yuezhang ji that was quite different from the one we have come to know. Also, even if Liu Yong regularly wrote songs for singing girls to perform, it does not mean that his songs were not a true expression of his feelings. Owen even acknowledges that Liu Yong expressed “his own emotions as directly as women singers had been made to do in Dunhuang songs and in his own songs” and that “such directness spilled over into the way he represented other things, including landscapes” (p. 270). As such, the strength of Owen’s book comes not from a linear argument but rather from his wisdom in making judgment and hypothesis while confronting the lack of certainty regarding our knowledge of early lyric collections. Owen does a brilliant job in this respect.