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

JAPANESE SONGS OF HIGH PURPOSE 127example, after he had tried and promptly abandoned the idea of studyingnavigation, Takasugi Shinsaku found himself back in Hagi, workingat the domain school and casting about for a future course in life. Heimagined himself to be a man whose talents and sheer earnestness wentunderappreciated. In the following quatrain, he alludes to two contrastingresponses to such a predicament:繁 文 爲 累 古 猶 今今 古 誰 能 識 道 深采 菊 采 薇 眞 的 意人 間 萬 事 只 斯 心偶 成Extemporaneous compositionIn dense thickets of text piled up from ancienttimes to the present,Who now, or then, has penetrated the depths ofthe Way?Plucking chrysanthemums or fiddleheadferns—herein lies the true meaning;Many are the things in this world, but all thatmatters is this.40The references in the third line are to famed eremites of Chinese antiquity.The phrase “plucking chrysanthemums” alludes to the reclusivepoet Tao Yuanming (365–427), who resigned his post as the magistrateof Pengze in 405, during the final years of the Eastern Jin, and declinedfurther official service.41 The second reference in this line is to thebrothers Bo Yi and Shu Qi, quasi-mythic figures of the remote past,who chose to starve themselves rather than serve a regime they believedcorrupt. When paired alongside Tao Yuanming’s positive embrace ofreclusion, the brothers’ radical self-abnegation appears para digmaticof an alternative solution to the problem of remaining true to one’sprinciples: that of extreme self-sacrifice.42 Takasugi’s poem thus shows40Takasugi Shinsaku zenshū, ed. Hori Tetsusaburō 堀 哲 三 郎 , p. 388.41The reference is to a famous couplet in the fifth of Tao Yuanming’s series “Yin jiuershi shou” 飲 酒 二 十 首 : “Picking chrysanthemums by the eastern hedge / I catch sightof the distant southern hills” 采 菊 東 籬 下 悠 然 見 南 山 ; see James Robert Hightower,trans., The Poetry of T‘ao Ch‘ien (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 130.42Alan Berkowitz calls Bo Yi and Shu Qi “extreme exemplars” of a type he terms the“paragon of extraordinary conduct”: those who shun service because of their fundamentalnature. Such figures, argues Berkowitz, thus stand in contrast to Confucian heroes,who tend to make ad hoc evaluations of the propriety of service at a given juncture; see hisPatterns of Disengagement: The Practice and Portrayal of Reclusion in Early Medieval China(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 39–44.