Series | Ca’ Foscari Japanese Studies
Edited book | Images from the Past: Intertextuality in Japanese Premodern Literature
Chapter | Riverside Mansion Mythologies
Riverside Mansion Mythologies
Retextualising the Past in Poetic Commentary
Abstract
This essay explores one reading of Roland Barthes’ notion of myth and intertextuality as a potential approach to understand how what I call the Riverside Mansion myth may be a model for the creation of cultural memory in late classical and medieval Japan. I argue that medieval commentaries (so-called kochūshaku) to Kokin wakashū and Ise monogatari constitute a method of creation of a Barthesian myth. The case study is Kawara-no-in (Riverside Mansion), a historical estate created by the ninth-century statesman Minamoto no Tōru (822-895), which became famous, among other things, for its supposed recreation of Shiogama, a place in northern Japan. Specifically, this essay considers as a so-called ‘base-text’ not the classic texts but the image of Riverside Mansion, and looks at elaborations in medieval commentaries of the concrete features of Tōru’s reconstruction as creative forms of creating an understanding of the cultural role and meaning of Riverside Mansion.
Submitted: Dec. 13, 2021 | Accepted: Feb. 6, 2022 | Published Aug. 30, 2022 | Language: en
Keywords Kawara-no-in • Metatextuality • Roland Barthes • Commentaries • Ise monogatari • Mythologies • Kokin wakashū
Copyright © 2022 Ivo Smits. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-608-4/001
