Donald Didn't Like Jozan

I have a bone to pick with Donald Keene. Before I do, allow me the following disclaimer. I have the utmost respect for Donald Keene. Not only has he done more for the promotion of Japanese literature in the English-speaking world than anyone else in history, he also published my favourite translation of Matsuo Basho's classic, Oku no Hosomichi, The Narrow Road to the Far North. Now, back to my disagreement.

In 1976, Keene published a comprehensive survey of Japanese literature produced during the Tokugawa era called World Within Walls. It introduced me and countless others to writers and poets that we may have never heard of had we been left to our own devices. He even included a few pages about my man, Ishikawa Jozan. Grateful for whatever scraps of information I could gather about Jozan, it was easier to overlook the faint praise with which Keene damned him that first time I read it.

That might have been the end of it had I not received an interesting inquiry from a visitor to my website during the summer. The visitor was seeking assistance with identifying a quotation of Jozan's which he had written down years before. The quotation rang a bell, but the source didn't come immediately to mind. After a couple hours, I remembered Keene's World Within Walls.

To my good fortune, the book did contain the quotation and I was able to answer the visitor's question. My contentment didn't last long however, once I read the following statement from Keene:

"There was more than a touch of dilettante to Jozan. His poetry is dotted with self-contented and excessively self-congratulatory references to his withdrawal from the strife and ambitions of the world."

The degree to which a fan of Jozan's would be rankled by Keene's characterization of him would vary according to the individual. For example, Alex Kerr, in his book Lost Japan, actually celebrates Jozan's dilettantism. J. Thomas Rimer, in Shisendo: Hall of the Poetry Immortals, framed Jozan's 'withdrawal from the strife and ambitions of the world' as "a powerful ideological statement" (12), one of the few available to an intellectual dissatisfied with the political situation in seventeenth century Japan. If the significance of Ishikawa's quasi-hermitism varies from critic to critic, Keene's complaint about Ishikawa's poetry being 'dotted with self-contented and excessively self-congratulatory references' seems more easily refutable for being based on an unfairly small sample of Ishikawa's poetry.

If anything, Jozan was more prone to self-castigation than self-congratulation. Consider these excerpts (all translated by Burton Watson):

Double Ninth Rain: “I’m poor as Yüan-Ming, but no match for him in poetry”

Impromptu in a secluded lodging: “though I’ve written poetry until I am an old man/I have yet to astonish the gods”

Impromptu: “My poem finished, I consult the old books/ hardly daring to hope that it’s free of faults.”

Airing Sentiments: “Talentless, lacking in any virtuous endeavour/ recklessly I turn out chapters of uncouth verse.”

Instances of self-contentment do occur, but when those poems are contextualized in the full body of Jozan's work, Keene's statement carries less weight. In Keene's defence, he was writing such a broad survey that inevitably the work of each writer could not be explored with the same degree of depth, leading to the dismissive comments like the one quoted above. The problem with this kind of shorthand--especially from an authority such as Keene--is that it discourages readers from examining a writer's output for themselves and forming their own opinions of the work.

For an appreciation of Ishikawa's poetry, please see the companion piece on my website, where I examine his poetry in more detail and hopefully prove that Keene gave him short shrift.