SOURCE: Strong, Sarah M. “The Making of a Femme Fatale: Ono no Komachi in the Early Medieval Commentaries.” Monumenta Nipponica 49, no. 4 (winter 1994): 391-412.

[In the following excerpt, Strong elucidates the reputation—in Japanese medieval writings, including the Tales of Ise—of the poet Ono no Komachi as a heartless beauty.]

Komachi was steeped in the ways of love.
Men wrote her billets doux, so many love letters,
Countless as raindrops falling from a summer sky.
But she sent no reply, not even an idle word.

Sotoba Komachi.¹

With their compressed lyricism and the bold simplicity of their visual images, the medieval noh plays have made a lasting impression on the imagination of Japan and, indeed, the world. The noh version of a particular famous character is often the one that has mattered most over the centuries, supplying the defining characteristics and preoccupations by which that character has been understood and known. This is certainly the case with the figure of the ninth-century woman poet Ono no Komachi. The five plays featuring her in the active noh repertoire vividly present the salient motifs for which she has subsequently been known: her poetic talent, her seductive beauty in her youth, her haughty cruelty toward men, and the karmic consequences of that cruelty, an old age of hardship and pain.

Until quite recently, scholars both in Japan and the West have assumed that the medieval noh playwrights based their interpretation of figures from the past on direct reading of the classical corpus. Most twentieth-century scholars have taken for granted that, by turning to the texts cited by the playwrights, well-known classics such as Genji Monogatari or Ise Monogatari, we have access to the same sources that informed the influential plays. Any discrepancies between the testimony of the earlier texts and the substance of the noh plays could be accounted for by the rich imaginations of the playwrights.

In Komachi's case, the classical bedrock to which scholars might refer for the sources that inspired her portrayal in the noh has proven remarkably thin and scanty. We have no knowledge of the life of a historical Ono no Komachi. The earliest reference to her is found in Kokinshū, compiled in the first years of the tenth century as the first imperially commissioned poetic anthology.² Eighteen of its approximately one thousand poems are designated as composed by one ‘Ono no Komachi’. Three of these poems are prefaced by brief headnotes, and Komachi is also commented upon in Kokinshū's Japanese and Chinese prefaces.

But the field of noh studies is changing. Over the past twenty-five years, textual scholars such as Katagiri Yōichi have done much to make the early medieval commentaries on the Heian classics available in printed editions.³ The newly available materials have helped noh scholars, most notably Itō Masayoshi, to extend our notion of the nature and thrust of the reception of the Heian classics by medieval dramatists.⁴ Among Western scholars, Janet Goff has led the way in exploring the role of commentarial literature and plot synopses in noh's allusions to the Genji.⁵ The work of these scholars suggests that the playwrights did not necessarily read the Heian classics directly and that they were highly influenced by the ideas and modes of interpretation they found in the early medieval commentaries.⁶

In the case of Komachi, the work of these scholars both presents us with, and directs us to, an investigation of the early medieval commentaries. As noted above, Komachi as a character encompasses a number of interrelated motifs. To consider each of these would involve a project of unwieldly size and risk blunting the excitement of particular discoveries in an overwhelming crush of details. Accordingly, the present study takes up one particular motif for study: Komachi's reputation as an irresistible but heartless beauty.

All five of the Komachi plays in the active repertoire portray her as being exceptionally beautiful in her youth, but the episode that implicates her most deeply as a femme fatale is the story of the hundred nights of courtship recounted particularly in Kayoi Komachi and Sotoba Komachi. In both of these plays, Komachi is courted by a fourth-rank Junior Captain (shii no shōshō). Sotoba Komachi further identifies him by the name or place name Fukakusa and presents him as but one of a multitude of frustrated suitors. In both plays Komachi has set the captain an exacting test, promising that she will meet with him if he goes to her place for one hundred consecutive nights, recording each trip by making a notch on her carriage bench. The captain manages to fulfill the request for ninety-nine nights, but fails to appear for the final consummating hundredth night. Sotoba Komachi explains that he did not come because he had died from excess of longing. In both plays the spirit of the captain is filled with resentment against the cold-hearted Komachi.⁷

Komachi's reputation as a heartless beauty is today so well established that it may come as a surprise to learn that in most Kokinshū material there is little that would serve to indict her on grounds of cruelty. Indeed, while the eighteen poems attributed to her display a near-unfailing virtuosity in the use of poetic conventions and diction, they indicate a poetic personality or persona with a wide range of voice and posture.⁸ The poems present a variety that belies their scant number; their author is by turns loyal, patient, discouraged, amused, and passionate.

Of the eighteen poems it was one in particular that provided the seed or catalyst for Komachi's reputation for heartlessness, a reputation that in turn led to her being cast in the role of femme fatale in the story of the one hundred nights. This is Kokinshū, 623, and the present study will trace the genesis of both that reputation and that role on the basis of the history of the reception of this poem. This course was but one choice from what was originally an open set of possibilities. The literary critics of the early medieval period read Komachi the woman poet of Kokinshū with conviction and also with a great deal of selectivity. The fact that they saw in her a particular feminine type had to do with the nature of their reading more than any intrinsic qualities of the original Komachi poems. It is important to note that, as far as we can determine, the early medieval critics of Kokinshū and its related texts were, almost without exception, male.⁹ This difference in gender matters in that it offers a way of accounting for the particular nature of the reading that was made. Thus it is an additional goal of this study to examine the nature of the reading of Komachi in the early medieval commentaries in light of the difference in gender between the poet and her critics. This question is of consequence not only to our understanding of the genesis of the Komachi legend, but also to our understanding of the reception of women writers of the Heian period in general, almost all of whom were read and commented upon by male scholars of the succeeding age. The example of Komachi suggests that early medieval critical process involved a compromising of diversity, a compressing of the multivalent suggestiveness of women's texts into specific, rigid, and ultimately influential interpretations. These interpretations objectified both the women authors and their meanings so that the two entities (author and text) were melded together into a readily graspable, sharply defined female image.

Kokinshū, 623, which proved so influential to Komachi's future portrayal as a heartless woman, appears in the third volume of love poems as follows:

[Topic unknown] Ono no Komachi
                                        mirume naki
                              waga mi o ura to
                                        shiraneba ya
                              karenade ama no
                              ashi tayuku kuru(10)
          Is it because
He is unaware this inlet
          Has no seaweed
That the fisherman tires his feet
With ceaseless visits to my shore?

According to the conventions, or, perhaps more accurately, the poetic code of the poet's time, the phrase mirume naki (literally, ‘no seaweed’) includes the meaning, ‘no occasion to meet as man and woman’. Thus it is clear that contemporaries could have read the poem as a message of discouragement on Komachi's part addressed to someone in the role of suitor whom she refers to as a fisherman, someone who makes a living by the sea.

The possibilities of according the poem an emotionally cool reading are at one and the same time increased and questioned by Komachi's inclusion of the syntactically disruptive and ultimately puzzling phrase waga mi o (literally, ‘my body’ or ‘my life’) in the second line. This phrase forces the reader in a way characteristic of Komachi's complex Kokinshū poetry to bring the surface events of the poem into close association with the poet's personal circumstances. But it is unclear exactly what association Komachi wishes the reader to make. The waga mi o phrase concludes with the word ura, which must now take on a second meaning in addition to its surface meaning of a bay or inlet. There has been considerable debate over the centuries regarding the sense of this second ura, but two suggestions have generally been offered: (1) The verb uramu means ‘to resent’ and is the way a person feels, both angry and hurt, when he/she has been turned down by another, and (2) the adjective ushi,¹¹ a key word in the aristocratic Heian vocabulary and used at times when events and circumstances make a person miserable.

Even with these meanings in hand, however, the poem's personal statement remains ambiguous, and scholars today still debate whether Komachi is sighing with regret over the suitor's failure to recognize her chagrin,¹² or whether she is indeed ridiculing a man for failing to register resentment at her own hard-heartedness.¹³

Komachi's poem is preceded in the anthology by a poem by Ariwara Narihira. Kokinshū itself makes no explicit connection between the two poems, but the nearly contemporary collection of poem tales, Ise Monogatari, created a narrative setting for both poems in its Episode 25:

Once there was a man. He sent this to a woman, who did not say she would not meet with him but who all the same …

          aki no no ni
sasa wakeshi asa no
          sode yori mo
awade nuru yo zo
hijimasarikeri
          The mornings I push through
The bamboo grass in the autumn fields,
          My sleeves are drenched.
But how much more so
On the nights we do not meet.

The woman, who had a coquettish nature, replied:

          mirume naki
waga mo o ura to
          shiraneba ya
karenade ama no
ashi tayuku kuru(14)
          Is it because
He is unaware this inlet
          Has no seaweed (no chance to meet)
That the fisherman tires his feet
With ceaseless visits to my shore?

The ellipsis at the end of the first headnote in my translation is admittedly awkward, but it is intended to reflect the ambiguity of the original prose. Even today scholars are divided as to whether the headnote indicates that (1) the woman refuses to give a clear invitation to the man, but all the same seems willing, or (2) she does not reject him outright, but all the same seeks to avoid him.¹⁵

As Richard Bowring has pointed out in his study of the Ise, ambiguity in a text can give rise to an ultimately creative feeling of anxiety that forces the reader to work hard to provide a meaning that makes sense.¹⁶ The prose setting for Episode 25 does little to clear up the ambiguity of Komachi's original poem and adds some fresh questions of its own. Are we, for example, to assume that the couple used to meet in the past, but are no longer seeing each other? Have the man and woman never met before? Does this exchange bring whatever relationship they have to an end? Or does the man persist in his courtship? The text appears as though it were just slightly out of focus; with just one more reading, or a bit of explanatory information, we feel, the narrative would resolve itself into clarity.

THE EARLY MEDIEVAL COMMENTARIES

The two principal commentaries on the Ise in the Kamakura period are Waka Chikenshū¹⁷ and Ise Monogatari Shō.¹⁸ The two works are related, but differ in many particulars.

As Bowring has pointed out, it was the business of the commentaries to search for a principle of coherence,¹⁹ and the Kunaichō Waka Chikenshū wastes no time resolving uncertainties and bringing the fuzzy edges of the evasive Ise poems and narratives into sharp focus. Concerning the man's poem in Episode 25, it tells us:

This poem was written when Narihira was in love with Komachi and went to her night after night. But while she said she would meet with him, she nevertheless treated him with cold indifference and the situation continued in that way.²⁰

This tradition of identifying Narihira as the anonymous ‘man’ of the Ise was well established before the Kamakura period. In this particular episode, the parallel identification of Komachi as the woman poet in the exchange makes satisfying sense since she was after all already recognized as the author of the original Kokinshū poem.

With the advantage of hindsight, we can see in the commentary the beginnings of Komachi's role as a rejecter of men. She is not above board in her dealings with Narihira, for she does not say to him clearly, ‘I will not see you.’ It is not unreasonable to assume that she strings him along on purpose for the pleasure of seeing him suffer because of her. Narihira, for his part, takes up the Fukakusa role, going to her ‘night after night’ as the situation continues in deadlock.²¹ The commentary's rephrasing of Komachi's response poem confirms this perception of her as a rejecting woman and of Narihira as a foolishly persistent suitor:

Although he has come visiting time and again, we have never met. Does he not resent me for this? Still, he visits me again and again without letting up, unmindful of the weariness of his feet.²²

By focusing exclusively on the poetry, rather than on the prose, of Episode 25, the Kunaichō Waka Chikenshū passes over without comment an identification that is nonetheless present in a passive way and crucial to Komachi's development as a legendary figure. The Ise introduces Komachi's poem with the words irokonomi naru onna, kaeshi, which I have translated as, ‘The woman, who had a coquettish nature, replied.’ The term irokonomi merits a fuller explanation.

Within the text of the Ise itself, the term irokonomi is used of women characters who have, or are suspected of having, more than one romantic liaison.²³ Thus, in Episode 42, we find a man exchanging vows ‘with a lady he knew to be something of a flirt’ (irokonomi to shiru onna), but whom he found ‘most attractive despite her reputation’. The man's poem significantly expresses anxiety about who might be visiting the woman when he himself is unable to make the trip.²⁴ Likewise, in Episode 37, a man sends a poem to a ‘rather flirtatious lady’ (irokonomi narikeru onna) whom he does ‘not quite trust’, a poem in which he charges her with changeable affections and worries that she is sleeping with another.²⁵ While the term irokonomi later took on an explicitly erotic connotation in Japanese literature, indicating a man or woman who savored the delights of physical love, in using the word with regard to women, the Ise and the Kamakura commentaries seem above all concerned with questions of fidelity and inconstancy of affection. As has been pointed out, the Ise's depiction of the coquette (irokonomi naru onna) is made wholly from a man's point of view.²⁶

By identifying Komachi as the female character in Episode 25, the Kunaichō Waka Chikenshū in fact labels her unequivocally as a coquette, that is, a woman with inconstant emotions and more than one lover. Her identification as irokonomi is important not only because it tells us something significant about her as a character, but also because the word was treated as a sort of cipher indicating Komachi's presence in any episode where irokonomi is used in reference to a female character. Thus, all the episodes in the Ise that refer to a woman character as irokonomi (and even those in which the woman is not explicitly described as such, but has more than one lover) were strongly linked to Komachi. In its comments on Episode 25, the Shimabara Bunko Waka Chikenshū makes the terms of the interpretive process clear:

In all the instances in Ise Monogatari where a definite identification of the female character can be made, the ones referred to as irokonomi are Komachi.²⁷

In elaborating upon Komachi's coquettish nature, the Kamakura commentaries are above all interested in stressing the large number of her suitors. Episode 43 of the Ise tells of a woman who was loved by Prince Kaya, but was also visited by two other men. It was undoubtedly the presence of so many suitors and the accusation of infidelity in the poems of the episode that prompted the Kunaichō Waka Chikenshū commentator(s) to identify the woman in the tale as Komachi. Having made the identification, the commentary goes on to present a tortured gloss on the word iori, meaning a hut or cottage, in order to drive home the nature of the accusation Komachi faces:

‘Too many cottages’ (ioriamata) means she is shunned because there are too many people (men) visiting her. When the characters, meaning ‘many people’, are written at the beginning of a word, they are read as iori. That is why the poet wrote ioriamata when she wished to express the idea of ‘too many men’.

The accuracy of the etymology presented here is highly questionable, but the commentary's intent serves to underline the standard interpretation of the poem being glossed.

For an additional example of the commentaries' tendency to emphasize the number of Komachi's suitors, consider the Ise Monogatari Shō's handling of Episode 108. The episode appears to present a poetic exchange between an aggrieved woman and an unfaithful but unapologetic man. The commentary, however, glosses the exchange as a lover's quarrel between Narihira and Komachi, and reveals the hidden barb of accusation in Narihira's poem:

‘In the paddy field where every night the frogs cry in excessive numbers’ means that, even though she [Komachi] claims to be weeping, she has so many men that he [Narihira] cannot tell for whose sake her sleeves are damp with tears.²⁸

Kamakura commentaries on the Ise are also eager to emphasize the rapidity with which Komachi's attention can be diverted from one man to the next. Ise Monogatari Shō's commentary on Episode 83, for example, gives a poem originally addressed to Prince Koretaka a radically new interpretation as Narihira's worried note to his wife (tsuma) Komachi, expressing his doubts that she will remain faithful to him in his absence ‘even for a single night’.²⁹

Such promiscuity (or at least the suspicion of it) on the part of a woman was deemed displeasing to male characters who sought Komachi's exclusive attention. The Ise and its commentaries make it clear that the normal response to someone who is faced with an irokonomi partner is a feeling of resentment.³⁰ The commentaries also are careful to drive home the lesson that the price a coquette pays for her promiscuous ways is eventual misery and decrepitude. This second point is made clear in, for example, the Ise Monogatari Shō's extensive gloss on Episode 62, in which the long history of Komachi's decline in the world is chronicled and the tradition that she ‘became exhausted by amorous ways and wasted away to a pathetic state’ is examined in detail.³¹

The commentaries' dire view of Komachi's fate need hardly surprise us. Akiyama Ken has pointed out how our interpretation of the figure of the male hero of the Ise (the ‘man of old’) would change if we viewed the different episodes as a connected story rather than as discrete narrative moments. Read as the sequential adventures of a single character, all the emotional freshness of the Ise tales evaporates, and the hero becomes a ‘frighteningly immoral Casanova’, a figure that could hardly hold out for a moment in the face of female resentment and social condemnation.³² By identifying all the female characters who exhibit a tendency toward inconstant affections as one and the same woman, that is, Komachi, the Kamakura commentaries prompt much the same wrenching rereading of character.³³ In becoming a single character, the alluring coquette of each episode is transformed into a caricature of female lust and instability. Such extreme behavior was naturally presented in conjunction with cautionary anecdotes reminding readers of what lay in store for such a woman.

Reading the early medieval commentaries on the Ise, one is struck by their inventiveness. Their seemingly unconstrained manipulation of language and textual coincidence makes it seem as though almost anything could be claimed of any one person or poem. In addition, the identification of Komachi as an irokonomi naru onna appears arbitrary, the consequence of a simple accident of textual circumstances. But other literary coincidences equally suggestive and rich in narrative possibilities were left to rest unexploited by the same commentators. In other words, a deliberate process of selection was at work in the commentary's shaping of Komachi's character. We can learn almost as much about Komachi by paying attention to what the commentators do not say about her as we can in noting what they do.

One seemingly rich opportunity that the commentaries all chose not to exploit was the presence of Komachi's Kokinshū, 1,104, in Episode 115 of the Ise. On its surface the poem is a strikingly passionate cry of pain, but we should note that the cry involves some entertaining wordplay that hides two place names, Okinoi and Miyakoshima, in the text.

          oki no ite
mi o yaku yori mo
          kanashiki wa
miyako shimabe no
wakare narikeri(34)
          More heart-wrenching than
To sear my body with live coals
          Against my flesh,
Bidding farewell on Miyakoshima's shore
As you part for the capital.

In Episode 115 of the Ise, the poem is preceded by the following story:

Once a man and a woman lived together in the province of Michinoku. The man told the woman that he was about to depart for the capital. The news was heart-wrenching for the woman, but she thought that they should at least have a proper farewell party, and so at Okinoite Miyakoshima she gave him wine to drink and composed this song.

There is much about this little story that is relevant to the complex of legends about Komachi. Her name, for example, is intimately linked with the northern province of Michinoku and there are many stories showing her dying there in poverty in her old age.³⁵ But what we see here that is foreign to Komachi of the legends is the character of the grieving woman who is being left behind. The woman in Episode 115 is cut to the quick by the news of the man's imminent departure, but she does not chide him; rather, she musters the necessary courage and courtesy to give him a proper send-off. This is not, as we may well imagine, behavior typical of the conventional coquette. In sharp contrast to the frustrated suitor of Episode 25, the woman's partner can only feel flattered by her attentions. She is the one to suffer, not he, and we can speculate whether he feels anything more than a pang of patronizing tenderness when the moment of parting comes.

It was just such concern over inappropriate characterization that led the Ise commentators to dissociate Komachi from Episode 115. Both versions of the Waka Chikenshū acknowledge that Komachi is the author of the original oki no ite poem, but they assert that Lady Ise, d. 939, composed the words of the story and added it to the Ise collection. Ise Monogatari Shō goes further and makes the astonishing declaration that the poem is not from Kokinshū at all but from the older Man'yōshū, and that is was composed by one Sakimaru Dainagon.³⁶ The same commentary follows an esoteric tradition in Kamakura Ise commentary in situating the events of the story in places near the capital. In contrast to outward appearances, we are told that the setting of the episode is actually Ōhara near present-day Kyoto rather than the remote Michinoku. This commentary also casts the man in the tale as Narihira and the woman as the Nijō Empress, who then recites Sakimaru Dainagon's poem. Komachi is nowhere in sight. My argument here is admittedly ex silentio, but in a tradition that placed such emphasis on the authority of Kokinshū as a canonical text, the minimizing of Komachi's role in the poem's authorship is noteworthy. It is possible that, as an established irokonomi female character, the early medieval commentators of the Ise felt that she simply did not belong in so tender and touching a tale.

Notes

1. Yokomichi Mario & Omote Akira, ed., Yōkyokushū, 1, nkbt [Nihon Koten Bungaku Toikei] 40, Iwanami, 1963, p. 87.

2. To the material of Kokinshū we can add four poems and their headnotes in Gosenshū, 951, a handful of stories that either were or came to be associated with Komachi's name in the tenth-century collections of poem-tales, Ise Monogatari and Yamato Monogatari, as well as Komachishū, a curious assortment of about one hundred poems attributed to Komachi and believed to date from the late tenth century. These materials, together with the long poem plus preface written in Chinese and known as Tamatsukuri Komachi Sōsuisho, believed to date from the mid-Heian period, constitute the earliest expression in literature of Komachi's life as a legendary figure.

3. Katagiri's contribution includes his editions of texts in Ise Monogatari no Kenkyū [imk], Meiji Shoin, 1969, and Chūsei Kokinshū Chūshakusho Kaidai [ck], Akao Shōbundō, Kyoto, 1971-1986.

4. The fruits of Itō's scholarship in this area are seen in the surprising scope and freshness of his annotation to noh plays in his Yōkyokushū, Kanshō Nihon Koten Bungaku, Shinchōsha, 3 volumes, 1983-1988.

5. Janet Goff, Noh Drama and ‘The Tale of Genji’, Princeton U.P., 1991.

6. By ‘early medieval’, I mean the time from the breakdown of Fujiwara dominance of court politics to the establishment of a new rule of both politics and taste under the Ashikaga shoguns, approximately equivalent to the Kamakura period, 1185-1333.

7. See Yokomichi & Omote, pp. 75-88. In Sotoba Komachi, the resentment is sufficient to cause the aged Komachi to be possessed by the Captain's raging spirit.

8. For example, a scholar has recently argued that Komachi's three poems on dreams that open Kokinshū's second volume of love poems, are actually written from a male point of view following the conventions of poems on the beginnings of erotic longings, a form deemed specifically appropriate to men. Gotō Shōko, ‘Joryū ni yoru Otoko Uta’, in Sekine Keiko Hakushi Shōgakai, ed., Heian Bungaku Ronshū, Kazama, 1992, pp. 299-324. Elsewhere we see Komachi expressing conventional regrets at the shortness of the night; even long autumn nights seem brief and do not afford sufficient time with the beloved (Kokinshū, 635). Also, in Kokinshū, 797, it is Komachi and not a frustrated suitor who laments the fickleness of human affection.

9. It is difficult to prove male exclusivity in a genre that in many instances did not assign particular authorship to texts. According to Ozawa Masao, the public debate of poetry at court was considered a male prerogative and this was influential to the subsequent development of poetry scholarship. Ozawa Masao ‘Utarongi’, in Nihon Koten Bungaku daijiten, Iwanami, 1983, 1, p. 296. Mumyōzōshi, the early medieval commentary on prose and poetry, should be noted here as the exception that proves the rule. The text is generally considered to have been written by a woman (Shunzei's daughter is believed to be the most likely author), but it is strikingly unique, distinctly different in both style and critical stance from the denju texts of the medieval poetic schools.

10. Saeki Umetomo, ed., Kokin Wakashū, nkbt 8, Iwanami, 1958, p. 225.

11. Ushi is generally glossed as being in its stem form u followed by the stative suffix -ra.

12. Katagiri Yōichi, Ono no Komachi Tsuiseki, Kasama, 1975, p. 101.

13. Kubota Utsubo, Kokin Wakashū Hyōshaku, Tōkyōdō, 1971, p. 118. As though this uncertainty over waga mi no ura were not confusion enough, the original mirume naki metaphor has also proved difficult over time. As early as the medieval period, a commentary interprets the term to mean not ‘no occasion to meet’ but ‘of poor appearance’, that is, someone not worth looking at. This interpretation became popular in the Edo period when the commentaries show a miserable Komachi exasperated by a persistent, would-be suitor who has not yet realized that she is, in the blunt words of the commentator, ugly. Kagawa Kageki, Kokin Wakashū Seigi, Benseisha, 1978, p. 86.

14. Sakakura Atsuyoshi et al., ed., Taketori Monogatari, Ise Monogatari, Yamato Monogatari, nkbt 9, Iwanami, 1957, pp. 128-29. An alternative translation is given in Helen Craig McCullough, tr., Tales of Ise: Lyrical Episodes from Tenth-Century Japan, University of Tokyo Press, 1968, p. 91.

15. See the annotation in Fukui Teisuke, ed., Ise Monogatari, nkbz 8, Shōgakukan, 1972, pp. 159-60.

16. Richard Bowring, ‘The Ise Monogatari: A Short Cultural History’, in hjas 52:2, 1992, p. 405.

17. Katagiri Yōichi presents this work in two textual versions. One is based on the text owned by the Kunaichō, the other on the text owned by Shimabara Bunko.

18. imk 2, pp. 95-400.

19. Bowring, pp. 405 & 428.

20. imk 2, p. 164.

21. Narihira enjoyed a special status in the Reizei family tradition as its deified founder, and the school appears loath to place him in a position of clear humiliation vis-à-vis Komachi. The Reizei family commentary, Ise Monogatari Shō, is able to defend Narihira's prestige through a gloss that has Komachi ‘busy with service at court’ (a service that presumably included intimate attendance on an emperor or prince) and thus unable to meet Narihira. imk 2, p. 336.

22. imk 2, p. 164.

23. The term is also used of women who leave their men, presumably because their interest has either cooled or been thwarted, and so they are interested in finding another lover. Yamamoto Tokurō discusses runaway women in Ise Monogatari in ‘Ise Monogatari no Akujo’, in Koizumi Osamu & Mimura Terunori, ed., Onna to Ai to Bungaku, Sekai Shisō, Kyoto, 1993, pp. 40-48.

24. Sakakura, nkbt 9, p. 136. The quoted passages are from McCullough, p. 99.

25. Sakakura, nkbt 9, pp. 132-33. The quoted passages are from McCullough, p. 95.

26. Yamamoto, p. 39.

27. imk 2, p. 248.

28. imk 2, p. 390.

29. imk 2, pp. 375-76.

30. See, for example, the Kunaichō Waka Chikenshū's description of the third man's feelings in the gloss of Episode 43 (imk 2, p. 168). But as an exceptional character, Narihira is sometimes presented as immune to such normal emotions.

31. imk 2, pp. 356-57. The legend of Komachi's painful old age is well docummented in the Ise commentaries. But this aspect of her story leads us into a consideration of a large body of material, most especially the mid-Heian text, Tamatsukuri Komachi Sōsuisho, which is not of immediate relevance to the story of the one hundred nights.

32. Akiyama Ken, ‘Chūko: Bungaku ni Arawareta Kōshoku Seikatsu’, in Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to Kanshō, June 1961, pp. 37-38.

33. It can of course be argued that the identification of the man of old as Narihira in so many episodes has much the same effect of rendering that figure too into an outrageous Casanova. In Narihira's case, however, the commentaries adopt various strategies to discourage readers from taking too critical a view of the hero. One of the most dramatic of these strategies is the apotheosizing of Narihira to the status of a kami.

34. Sakakura, nkbt 9, p. 177. The hidden place names are given as a headnote to the Kokinshū poem. The last two lines are ambiguous and without the accompanying prose of the Ise to guide the reading, the poem could be construed in many ways. Kokinshū interpretation often has the man leaving from the capital bound for a remote island shore. This verse is among the ‘inked-out poems’ (sumikeshi no uta) in Fujiwara Teika's edition of Kokinshū. Saeki, nkbt 8, pp. 330-31.

35. The most famous of these is the legend of the skull, in which Komachi, who has died by the roadside in the remote north of the country and is nothing more than a sun-bleached skull, identifies herself to passers-by by reciting a poem. See, for example, Katagiri, Tsuiseki, pp. 113-26.

36. imk 2, p. 394. I have not found Sakimaru (or Sakimaro) in any historical sources. Bishamondō-bon Kokinshū Chū relates the story of Sakimaru in Michinoku and gives his name as Tanohe no Sakimaru with no mention of his being a dainagon. Mikan Kokubun Kochūshaku Taikei, Teikoku Shuppanbu, 1935, 4, p. 126.