Songs of the Righteous Spirit: “Men of High Purpose” and Their ...

122 MATTHEW FRALEIGHMany readers of these surveys by Shimaoka and Naramoto wereborn in the postwar era, when proficiency in literary Chinese played anever-dwindling role in the primary and secondary school curriculum.To a substantial portion of them, the all-kanji exterior of the kanshimay have seemed forbidding, and the texts themselves impenetrablewithout the additional mediation of a kundoku gloss. But, beyond suchvalid concerns about improving the texts’ accessibility, Shimaoka’s andNaramoto’s treatments reveal an ambivalence regarding the questionof whether texts written in Chinese by Japanese authors fully qualifyas Japanese literature. Such doubts are manifest even in works on theshishi by scholars active in the prewar period, whose readership wouldhave been more readily equipped to understand literary Chinese, albeitwith the aid of kundoku. In the introduction to his 1942 history of shishiliterature, for example, Takano Tatsuyuki felt obliged to defend hisview that Chinese compositions by shishi poets constituted a topicworthy of consideration, observing that, in spite of the popularity andemotional appeal of shishi poetry,literary historians have thus far regarded it as outside of their scope; at best,treatment has been limited to a passing reference to those shishi who werealso active as Japanese language poets. I regard the Chinese poetry andprose composed by our countrymen as national literature, and believe thatit must be considered; from this standpoint, I cannot turn a blind eye to it.30As Takano’s apologia suggests, the doubts about the legitimacy of Japanesekanshibun and its place in the canon are largely the product of adiscourse of “national literature,” which was consolidated in the latenineteenth century and produced a new awareness of kanshibun asforeign.Although Naramoto Tatsuya does not specifically explain his decisionto render the poems only in kundoku, his comments on SaigōTakamori’s poetry shed some light on what is at stake here. In his discussionof the kanshi on the shattering jewel, Naramoto incidentally notesthat “Ōkubo Toshimichi never left any such poems. And that is whatdistinguishes Saigō from Ōkubo.”31 As Charles Yates has discussed, thedefinitive characterological contrast that is said to exist between boy-30Takano, Shishi bungaku, p. 4.31Naramoto, Ishin no uta, p. 82.