[In the following excerpt, Carter provides a biographical sketch of Abutsu and assesses her overall literary importance.]

As is the case with so many women of her time, the precise background of the court lady now known as the Nun Abutsu is obscure. Documents indicate that she was raised by one Taira no Norishige, a low-ranking courtier of the provincial governor class. We also know that she served in her teens as a lady-in-waiting to Ex-Empress (an honorary title) Ankamon'in, whence she herself received the lay name Ankamon'in no Shijō. After being rejected by a lover, she retired from society for a time. Thereafter she seems to have accompanied Norishige to the provinces for a brief period.

Her importance in literary history began sometime around 1253, when she became a wife to Fujiwara no Tameie, son of Teika and chief heir of the Mikohidari house. For the next twenty-two years, until Tameie's death in 1275, she was in most ways his closest confidante, and one of the sons she bore him in his last years—Tamesuke—was one of the great joys of his life. An astute and careful protector, Ankamon'in no Shijō convinced Tameie to leave her son estate rights and poetic documents that would assure him a place in the scheme of things after Tameie's own death, thus creating a situation that would lead to major conflicts with Tameuji, heir of the Mikohidari house.

After Tameie's death, Ankamon'in no Shijō took holy orders as the Nun Abutsu, albeit remaining very much involved in the world all the same. When Tameuji's challenge of Tameie's will met with success among his imperial patrons in Kyōto, she personally made the long trip to Kamakura to seek redress from the military government. Her diary of that journey, entitled Izayoi nikki (Diary of the Waning Moon), is considered a minor court classic.¹ Four of the poems quoted below are taken from its pages.

Abutsu died, probably in Kamakura, before ever hearing the verdict in her son's case, which turned out to be a positive one, handed down in 1289.² But she left her son a strong legacy all the same. Not a great poet, she is nonetheless an important figure in poetic history, rightly recognized as the founder of the Reizei house. In her one critical work, entitled Yoru no tsuru (Night Crane), she emphasized the need for refinement of feeling and depiction of nature as it is (ari no mama), two ideas that were to guide her descendants for generations to come.³

Notes

1. For a translation of this work, see Reischauer and Yamagiwa 1951.

2. A Kyōto court reversed this decision in 1291, forcing Tamesuke to file a countersuit that returned to him his rights only after he was fifty years old. See Brower 1981: 450.

3. See NKT 3:407.

Works Cited

Brower, Robert H. 1981. “The Reizei Family Documents.” Monumenta Nipponica 36(4):445-461.

Reischauer, Edwin O. and Joseph K. Yamagiwa. 1951. Translations from Early Japanese Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.