Languages of Narrating and Bamboo-Cutter Pretexts

For the ancient Japanese, writing could not have been the familiar process it must have seemed to the ancient Chinese or seems to us today when, despite certain obstacles (e.g., writer's block), putting pen to paper or transferring letters from keyboard to computer screen is as intuitive and self-evident as eating or sleeping. As Raymond Williams has noted, "In modern industrial societies writing has been naturalized. It is then easy to assume that the process itself is straightforward, once the basic skills have been mastered in childhood. There is then only the question of what to write about."

In contrast to the Chinese mainland where a writing system mated to the phonological demands of a native, basically though not categorically monosyllabic language (i.e., one graph = one sound = referent-idea) developed over centuries, the Japanese, content without written language, found themselves confronting a civilization that began to impose itself not through military aggression but through the medium of written texts. Early attempts to adapt Chinese writing to the Japanese verbal ground must have presented seemingly insurmountable problems given the dissimilarity of the two languages. A writing system suited to the largely monosyllabic Chinese language would a priori be eminently unsuited to the agglutinative and inflecting, polysyllabic Japanese language. As contact between Japan and China (often via Korea and Korean immigrants) increased during the early centuries A.D., texts and other inscription-bearing objects (bronzes, mirrors, coins, and seals) began flowing into the islands. Scarcity of sources inhibits accurate reconstruction of the rise of scriptive activity, but judging from extant sources, Chinese writing seems to have entered Japan as early as the first century A.D. It was not, however, until the fourth or fifth century that Japanese began to write using Chinese graphs and, for the most part, the Chinese language—for the most part. The early specimens offer evidence that the Japanese at the very earliest stages were already disengaging phonetic from semantic values as they used Chinese graphs to transcribe native sounds, especially morphemes that constituted personal names and toponyms. Sometimes referred to as "Japanized (wa-ka) Chinese style (kambun)," the early practice probably did not extend much beyond transcription of personal and place names. When the first full-blown text as we know it appeared in 712, soon after the capital was moved to Heijo (Nara) in 710 (the Nara period dates from 710–84), the Japanese had been experimenting with writing for several centuries.

Chinese Writing and Japanese Discourse

Assuming its discursive space in diverse ways, the difficult-to-label Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) text immediately raises issues relevant to Japanese attitudes toward writing and the Chinese language. First of all, in contrast to the later Nihon shaki (Chronicles of Japan), Kojiki clearly purports to be a written transcription (selected and edited by O no Yasumaro at the command of Empress Gemmei) of an orally delivered (by Hieda no Are) discourse: "On the eighteenth day of the Ninth Month of the fourth year of Wad? a command was given to Yasumaro: 'You are to select, record, and present to the throne the old materials recited by Heida no Are'" (p. 23). Are was a young man renowned for his prodigious memory and vocal prowess: "One look and he could recite it aloud; one hearing and it was imprinted in his mind" (p. 22). He had earlier been commanded by Emperor Temmu to recite ("read aloud") selected old texts that recorded imperial genealogies and legendary and historical incidents so that a written transcription could be made for posterity. Empress Gemmei revived the project when it was halted with the emperor's death. Here we see an inextricable connection between writing and orality: on the one hand, the written does not, indeed cannot, come into existence without the oral—the oral authorizes the written; on the other hand, the written becomes a "permanent" document that proves the legitimacy of that which authorized it.

A point of controversy is the meaning of "read aloud" (yominaraFu). Some interpret it as signifying that Are somehow clarified the "meaning" of the texts as he recited them aloud. Others argue that, given his performative talents and the common practice of reciting Buddhist sutras, the phrase really meant that Are was commanded to recite the texts in a particular manner, using certain patterns of intonation, and that it was a particular oral rhythm (there must have existed other, competing ones) that Emperor Temmu wanted to valorize. To fix the previous discourses into a specific, orally deliverable mode was tantamount to seizing the essence of the texts. The one who performed the act or had it performed became the legitimate possessor and king of all discourses, that is to say, through a topographic metonymy, king of the country. Cognition of the world, channeled through phonic modulations, might have stopped well short of semantic closure, but political power, as it often does, effected another closure. For the Japanese, as we shall see, written discourse does not easily exist separately as a self-contained entity, but is always positioned vis-à-vis a multitude of "intertexts," whether linguistic stimulus (often, though not necessarily, oral), historical "model," genealogical imperative, narrator, and/or reader-listener. If we agree with the above argument that the text was meant to be intoned, we can conclude that for Kojiki, the written—at the same time that it accomplished the all-important goal of preserving a specific mode...