Lecture
The Myriad Avatars of Izumi Shikibu in Medieval Japan
- Rajyashree Pandey (Goldsmiths, University of London)
- Date
- Wednesday 13 November 2024
- Time
- Series
- Leiden Lecture Series in Japanese Studies
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 0.30
The “facts” that would allow us to construct a coherent biographical account of Izumi Shikibu’s life are flimsy at best and tell us little about the actual events and conditions that shaped it. It is through her poetic compositions, a diary Izumi Shikibu nikki attributed (not without contention) to her, and the accounts of her contemporaries in which she briefly makes an appearance that some scholars have tried to create a picture of the “real” Izumi Shikibu. My talk begins by discussing some of the methodological questions raised by this approach and turns to the works of medieval writers, proselytizers, and exegetes, which I argue, offer a different perspective on how one might understand the relationship between author and text. Rather than seeking to recover Izumi’s authentic voice, these works blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, and explore the different ways in which her life and work could be creatively reconfigured, to make possible a series of improvisations that created multiple avatars under the sign of ‘Izumi Shikibu.’
About the speaker
Rajyashree Pandey is Professor Emerita of Japanese Studies in the Politics and International Relations department of Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of Writing and Renunciation in Medieval Japan: The Works of the Poet-Priest Kamo no Chõmei (Michigan University, Japanese Monograph Series,1998) and Perfumed Sleeves and Tangled Hair: Body, Woman, and Desire in Medieval Japanese Narratives (University of Hawaii Press, 2016). She has also published articles in a wide range of journals from Monumenta Nipponica to Postcolonial Studies on medieval Japanese literature and Buddhism, gender, sexuality, and Japanese popular culture. She is currently working on a monograph on the significance of excrement in medieval Japanese narratives.