YOSHIDA KENKŌ

(Urabe Kaneyoshi)

(ca. 1283–ca. 1352)

Urabe Kanayoshi, known generally by his Buddhist name of Yoshida Kenkō, was a poet and essayist who lived during a turbulent era of Japanese history. He seems to have served the imperial court but withdrew at some point from public life to write hisTsurezuregusa(Essays in Idleness), a text that continues to be perused with pleasure by Japanese readers even after 700 years. Kenkō was born into an influential family that for many years had been connected with the Shinto shrine of Yoshida in Kyoto. His father was an official at the imperial court. Yoshida himself served the emperor Go-Nijō, who reigned from 1301 to 1308. Sometime after the emperor’s death, probably about 1313, he became a priest, spending about two years at the Buddhist temple on Mount Hiei, but afterward returning to Kyoto. He became known as a poet of what was called the Nijō school, a conservative, unimaginative group of poets following a pattern established a century before.Yoshida’s reputation as a poet seems to have been much greater in his own time than subsequently. Still, he seems to have taken part in regular poetic gatherings in the capital even during the troubled times when emperors and shoguns were competing for power and when civil war threatened. In 1331, the figurehead emperor Go-Daigo led a revolt against the real power in the country, the warrior Hōjō family, but was defeated and sent into exile. In 1333 Go-Daigo returned and overthrew the Hōjōs, establishing what became known as the Kemmu Restoration, but in 1336 was driven once more into exile. Yoshida, with no personal ambitions himself, seems to have been able to survive in the capital no matter who was in control. There is even a story about his writing love letters for the powerful Kō no Moronao (d. 1351), one of the shoguns in power after the Emperor Go-Daigo’s final banishment. Some, however, believe that Yoshida left the court sometime around the Kemmu Restoration and became a wandering monk; still others believe he was a recluse.Certainly Yoshida was in a position to observe the ambition and the corruption of the nobility of his day, and he is able to put some of these observations into his masterpiece, theEssays in Idleness. This text is most often dated between 1330 and 1333, though that is not certain. It is a compilation of 243 miscellaneous fragments on a wide variety of topics, arranged in an apparently random manner, although some scholars have argued that Yoshida’s arrangement is based on some associative plan, sometimes grouped around a similar moral theme, sometimes around a particular figure. It was a genre known in Japanese letters aszuihitsu, a term that means literally “following the writing brush,” implying that the writer casually set down a variety of observations, anecdotes, reflections, maxims and meditations with no logical plan. InEssays in Idleness, these fragments are often contradictory. Sometimes they are irreverent or controversial, as when Yoshida declares that human behavior, not the stars, determines our destiny. Yoshida reinforces the impression of randomness by his brief prologue, in which he claims to have jotted down every “trivial” thing that occurred to him. These trivial matters included pronouncements on taste and etiquette, as well as observations about women, birds, flowers, the moon, the afterlife, and both martial and culinary arts. The closest parallel in extant Japanese literature is probably the much earlierPillow Bookof SEI SHōNAGON, the 11th-century lady in waiting of the HEIAN court.

Yoshida’s text has been recognized over the years as the first rather definitive statement of Japanese aesthetics and taste. Yoshida extols the aesthetic ideals of simplicity and of suggestion, two of the most important aspects of Japanese poetry from its beginning and clearly apparent in the dominant TANKA verse form. He also mentions irregularity or asymmetry as an aesthetic virtue preferred by the Japanese over the more classical virtues of symmetry or parallelism. For Yoshida, and for Japanese taste in general, absolute uniformity is less desirable or interesting than something that is incomplete or imperfect. This is related to the emphasis on suggestiveness, but is related, as well, to the most important aspect of beauty for Yoshida: transience.

Traditionally part of the Buddhist outlook, the impermanence and mutability of the world and human life was even more palpable to Yoshida given the political circumstances of his world. Reading theEssays in Idleness, one cannot avoid the overriding impression of transience, of decay, of the presence of death and the incomplete nature of human life. But Yoshida does not bewail this condition; rather he sees in it the ultimate source of aesthetic beauty. Things are valuable and they are beautiful because of their very impermanence. Such is the nature of the human experience. To expect anything else is to chase an illusion. Yoshida became something of a legend through the popularity of hisEssays in Idleness, and as a result a number of other works were attributed to him, none with any real evidence. One legend about him was that, after he had left the court and resided in a rustic cottage, he got into the habit of jotting down ideas as they occurred to him on scraps of paper that he then stuck on the walls of his house.According to this story, a later poet gathered the scraps from Yoshida’s cottage walls and randomly compiled them into a book. Such a story is almost certainly apocryphal, but it does suggest the random feeling created by thezuihitsugenre. Still, the text of Yoshida’s great work is not so random that it lacks an overriding theme: The most precious and beautiful thing in human life, Yoshida tells us, is uncertainty.

■ Chance, Linda H.Formless in Form: Kenko, “Tsurezuregusa”and the Rhetoric of Japanese Fragmentary Prose. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997.

■ Keene, Donald.Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century. Vol. 1 ofA History of Japanese Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

■ ———,trans.Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967.

■ Miner, Earl, Hiroko Odagiri, and Robert E Morrell.The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985.