Roaming With Clouds and Water

Empires seize land, resources, people, and knowledge. They shape or break local cultures and attempt to turn the results to their own use. They fight war after war. At some point in this process, many empires turn a version of their own language into an accessible, portable imperial language. They teach it widely, require it in business and government, and often attach a hierarchy of value to it; one way for a supposed barbarian or uncouth provincial to become worthwhile is to master the imperial language. But unavoidably—happily, in fact—the power of language can exceed and escape the power of empire. Because imperial languages move to a place where the empire isn’t, or because the empire rips itself apart and dies, these imperial languages in many places are masterless and available. These languages have power, and various classes of people can read and understand them, but nobody manages what the languages mean or how they must be used. This is why we hear Latin in American horror movies—it has been borrowed into traditions of folk magic—and in global scientific nomenclature. None of these uses were goals of the legions of Rome; they’re what everybody else did with the linguistic tools the Romans left behind. You may have seen T-shirts manufactured in southern China in playful, chaotic, gloriously incorrect English (a good website for this is shanzhailyric.info): it’s the same deal. Millions of Chinese people have learned some English for mostly instrumental purposes, and they use it for whatever they think is interesting and fun, rather than from a sense of British or American primacy.

The idea of an imperial language with no empire behind it is useful to tell the story of kanshi, Japanese poetry written in Chinese characters and following Chinese rules of rhyme and meter. Although never colonized or seized by China, the Japanese began reading and writing Chinese characters well before 500 CE; all subsequent Japanese writing was derived from those characters, and even contemporary Japanese phonetic systems (hiragana and katakana) are written using adaptations of Chinese characters. The language system that Chinese characters carried was uniquely adapted to empire: it’s not anchored to a fixed tradition of pronunciation, and so the people of each place in which the written language is used can pronounce the characters in their own way. Literary Chinese also had a strong pedagogical tradition, with canonical texts often accompanied by explications and commentaries, and a penchant for self-expression through teaching. (The Analects of Confucius are made up substantially of lessons Confucius teaches his disciples.) And so Chinese characters, and the literature and art associated with them, spread across East Asia, first across parts of what we now call China (which has its own set of mutually unintelligible regional languages), and then as far as Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. Chinese characters exist in so many populations, in so many different ways, that contemporary scholars try not to use national terminology for them: instead of “classical Chinese,” they prefer “literary Sinitic.” In early modern Japan, literature in literary Sinitic operated in a kind of gray space. It did not strike readers as foreign, necessarily, but neither was it central to systems of power as in Chinese dynasties. One could not easily enter government service in Japan by writing Chinese poems, and Chinese-style imperial examinations had not been meaningful sources of authority for many years. This freed people who wrote kanshi to bend it to their own designs.

In The Same Moon Shines on All (Columbia University Press, 2024), a new book about kanshi poets Yanagawa Seigan (1789–1858) and his wife Kōran (1804–1879), scholar Matthew Fraleigh and translator Jonathan Chaves walk readers into the world of Sinitic verse in the late Tokugawa period. Seigan and Kōran traveled widely across Japan, created a large and influential school for kanshi in Edo, and engaged in a shadow career of royalist, proto-nationalist political agitation that saw each of them persecuted by the Tokugawa military government. The Tokugawa shogunate had ruled since 1603, sidelining the emperor’s authority, and American and European aggression had made it hard for the shogunate to stick to their policy of closure to foreign powers. At the same time, the advent of new technology and ideas challenged the class stratification of Tokugawa society. Seigan and Kōran came to support the Meiji Emperor, which meant advocating for military modernization, industrialization, and active struggle against foreign powers. This put them in direct conflict with the Tokugawa government, but after the Meiji Restoration brought the emperor back into power in 1868 and ended Tokugawa rule, Seigan and Kōran were celebrated as cultural and political heroes.

For Fraleigh and Chaves, Seigan is the genius at the heart of the book. He was born Inazu Nagasumi to petty gentry living in the countryside northeast of Kyoto. Orphaned as a child, he ceded his status as heir to his family’s land, renamed himself Yanagawa Seigan in the fashion of a Sinitic poet, and set off to Edo for study. As a young man, he famously squandered his inheritance on a courtesan and returned home humiliated, shaving his head like a Buddhist monk and begging for mercy from his extended family. This incident later became part of his own romantic narrative, as in this 1843 poem:

    A gaunt air, bones jutting out, like a mendicant priest 
Roaming with clouds and water, a single staff at his side. 
No wonder he still has a whiff of powder and rouge, 
For he once begged for food from a sing-song girl.

Honest engagement with elite culture in Edo, or with Buddhist practice, could have resulted in stability and respect for Seigan, but instead he chose the kōko, the world of rivers and lakes, the world of the margins. He studied under one of the earliest generations of Sinitic poets to make their living through a combination of publication and teaching and helped edit his first poetry anthology in 1811. Anthologizing was important to Seigan: Sinitic poets are heavily allusive, deeply interested in history, and sometimes think through aesthetic categories by their association with past masters. In the following poem, Seigan compares himself to the Tang poet Jia Dao (779-843), also called Wuben, as he revisits a temple where he long ago etched a poem into the wall:

     I brush lichens off the wall 
           to read through my old poem: 
The black-ink of the words, all chipped, 
           pockmarked by globs of dust. 
In a former life, I must have been 
           Wuben, the poet-monk, 
And came here to present the Buddha 
           with a new poem of mine.

Imitation here is reincarnation, and Seigan delicately points out not only that he is bringing back Tang poetry (which was, at the time, less fashionable in Japan than Song Dynasty verse), but that he is continually reinventing himself, as distant from his younger self as his younger self was from Wuben.

Seigan’s career finally took off after his marriage to his 17-year-old second cousin and student Kōran, with whom he crisscrossed eastern and western Japan during a four-year journey. Consistently poor, but welcomed by a variety of literati and artists committed to literary Sinitic, the couple began to draw social and aesthetic connections between the ruling shogunate’s capital at Edo (now Tokyo) and the emperor’s capital at Kyoto. Their journey was difficult and provoked some of Seigan’s most famous verse, including this one, in which he sees a pair of bedraggled camels imported from afar for the crowd to ogle and feels pity for himself and his travel partner:

    Now I too, wife in hand, 
           travel to heaven’s end, 
Having accomplished nothing at all, 
           temple hairs turning gray. 
Today, as I see you aging 
           on your own endless road, 
I come to realize: in this world, 
           there are two who share my fate! 
You may “know the winds,” and “sense drinking spots” — 
           But what use is that now? 
Alas, male camel, Ah, female camel: 
           what can be done for you?

“Wife in hand” is an accurate rendering of the tone by which Seigan refers to Kōran, who is everywhere in accounts of the journey and whose presence—for it would have been possible for Seigan to leave her in his hometown, as he had done in the past—seems to have greatly charmed the many elite poets and hobbyists who received them. The great historian and poet Rai San’yō is characteristic in this regard, writing a poem matching Kōran’s rhymes that ends “How enviable you are, sharing the lamplight in your inn, / Husband working on his poems, wife mending the clothes.” The respect shown to a poet by using her rhyme scheme as a model is tempered here with a sentimental preference to see Kōran as a servant with no poems of her own to write.

Kōran did write poems, however, and she became an equally talented and respected painter. The premodern Sinitic tradition offered only an inconsistent or marginal place for women, but those rules do not seem to wholly dominate Tokugawa Japan. By the end of Kōran’s career, women’s kanshi was widespread, and women were seen as important parts of the new Meiji culture. In the last quarter of The Moon Also Shines, Kōran’s comparatively small oeuvre (somewhere around 400 poems, compared to more than 3,000 for Seigan, with many lost in both cases) is revealed to possess much of what makes Sinitic poetry great: a mix of classic, timeless balance and close observation of the imminent and transient. I particularly like the opening couplet of “Spring Clearing at a Lakeside Village,” which I’ll retranslate slightly to emphasize the form of the original:

    The afternoon scenery contains the morning scenery; 
The mountain mist carries the lake mist. 
午景含朝景；
山煙帶水煙

In the original Sinitic, this couplet is fully parallel: each line has five words, 1) a modifier, 2) a noun, 3) a verb, 4) a modifier, and 5) the same noun as in 2).  This form is even more constrained, in some ways, than most five-character Chinese verse: that repetition between 2) and 5) is extra, a little bit of heightened intensity above what the form requires. Underneath all that symmetry and euphony (the poem also rhymes, and its tonal categories are in a pleasing, regulated form), there lies a philosophical experience about the boundarilessness of life, the way that time resists division just as fog resists categorization. Further beneath, though, is a sensual experience that has provoked all the above: the morning melting into afternoon, the lake exhaling and the cool hills inhaling. All of this takes place in just ten characters. In the rest of the poem, Kōran restlessly moves on from this scene of rest and contentment, worriedly assessing the scene as a place for her and Seigan to settle down. The lakeside house is pretty, she seems to conclude, but it’s not located on quite enough land to ensure they’ll be comfortable as they age.

Seigan and Kōran solved, at least for a while, the question of their daily bread by founding the Gyokuchi Ginsha (the "Jade Pond Poetry Society"), which became the largest Sinitic poetry society in the Tokugawa period, with over a thousand members at its height. Seigan taught classes, Kōran painted and wrote (her first collection of poetry was printed in 1841), and they collected around them a diverse group of writers, painters, thinkers, nobles, economic elites, and wanderers, all organized not as subjects of the shogunate or players in politics and economics but as a social and aesthetic community. When the great changes of the early 19th century arrived, it was this community that radicalized the couple. The Japanese—and Sinitic poets in particular—watched with a kind of horror as British imperialism subjugated and constrained the ancient Chinese empire during the opium wars. In the early 1840s, influenced by the Confucian scholar Sakuma Shōzan, Seigan and Kōran became activists, writing illegal poetry in opposition to the Tokugawa government’s policies, especially their refusal to import foreign technologies and their disinterest in maritime defense. Few of these poems could be openly published while Tokugawa censorship was in place, but the size of the Gyokuchi Ginsha meant that the poems circulated widely and had real impact. One of the most straightforward political poems in Same Moon is by Kōran:

     I hear it said that to the west, 
           the dust of war arises; 
Where are the ministers with claws and teeth 
           in this our government? 
Full of feeling, I weep my tears: 
           please don’t mock at me! 
The ruler of the English now 
           is a woman too.

This poem epitomizes the incredible flexibility of Sinitic poetry in or out of the Japanese context. Kōran asserts a connection between Japan and China (here just “to the west”) that is strengthened by the use of Sinitic verse; anticipating her dismissal as a woman, though, she reaches not for the Chinese tradition but for the recently enthroned Queen Victoria. In doing so, she achieves what she and Seigan championed in the face of the foreign threat: selective imitation, considered internalization of new ideas from abroad. Queen Victoria was not important because she was British, but useful to support Kōran’s repeated insistence on more liberty and respect for women. Kōran uses the Chinese tradition in the same way, moving fluidly in one of her most famous poems between a quite traditional posture of praising the humble fisherman (“sages Shangfu and Yan Ling themselves were fishermen / Fishermen, oh! fishermen! May such men be preserved”), and describing the immense joy she feels at being allowed, alongside other women, to wade into the water and take part herself (“Fine and slender, women’s hands / can also gather fish, / Though splashing waters, ruined, soaked, / our robes of red silk!”). The poem’s novelty is built from imitation: it looks like tradition, but in practice it is willful, generative, and—in the case of Kōran and Seigan—future-thinking. There’s no wonder that the Tokugawa government nearly arrested Seigan (he died of cholera before they could find him) and imprisoned Kōran for six months: this was a heady political moment, and the pair had brought a depth of feeling and formal legibility to new ideas and demands on government.

Reading only the English translations in The Same Moon Shines on All could flatten the texture of the poems’ creation and make their great erudition invisible. It is hard for an English-only reader to see how their Japanese counterparts annotated Chinese texts or appreciate the “bound translations” of Chinese poetry that kanshi poets used: in these translations, awkward Japanese versions of Chinese poems were created to convey more clearly the structure and balance of the originals. There is a substantial difference between writing Sinitic poetry for the emperor at the Chinese capital of Chang’an and writing it from a Tokugawa prison 1,500 miles away. But reading the poems in their context allows us to accept that we, too, are part of the endless wandering of Sinitic poetry, interpreting it from a new place with our own needs and our own ethics. Just as Seigan and Kōran refused to be bound by elements of the Chinese tradition that did not please them, so are we allowed to pick up its rich, masterless tradition in selective ways. And we see, in the peregrinations of the Chinese character, a future for (and the futurity of) the present day’s global English, which will hopefully never be a language for everybody, but might yet become a language for anybody.