The Molten Notebook

The Tales of Ise is a collection of brief poems from 10th-century Japan and the scenes, largely from love affairs, that might have inspired them.

Many of the poems had already appeared in a great imperial collection, the Kokinshu. Here they’re paired with a sentence or passage’s worth of back story, as though later writers imagined the stories behind their favorite poems.

Perhaps the tales taught courtiers the art of romance or the proper inspirations for poetry. We meet a man who writes to his first love years later. Others claim they will return, pitch woo at high-ranking ladies, or simply listen to crickets on sleepless nights and think up poems.

The back stories serve mainly as velvet background for the jewel-like poems, as translator Helen McCullough puts it. They would remain a staple for the educated Japanese reader for some eight centuries to come.

If I call the translator’s introduction the best part of the Tales of Ise, it’s not to put the tales themselves to shame. They can be tough, though, on audiences who can’t appreciate the elaborate wordplay and double meanings on which much of their reputation depends.

McCullough describes the literary devices with a colloquial clarity in her introduction and explains their use in selected poems. Her example of a punning pivot word: Goldilocks saying, “I have seen a bearly credible sight.”

Her paraphrased and alternate translations reveal the secondary meanings that give these poems dimension. Without these insights, some poems can seem rather flat in English:

Ours has proved a relationship
In which it was futile
To put one’s faith in vows (148)

As McCullough writes, “As a work of literature …Tales of Ise is less able than The Tale of Genji to stand on its own in a foreign environment.”

Among the pleasures of the tales, however, is their refreshing directness. One courtier has the guts to ask another, “What is the point of your poem?” A worldly narrator observes that the man and woman who swear their loyalty in poetry are probably cheating on each other.

Perhaps most interesting to the general reader is the sense that poetry makes things happen. The characters in these tales use poetry to keep lovers from leaving, win access to a lady’s chambers, and even save a life.

The Tales became a classic to be mined for famous allusions or subjects to render in art. The hero of the Tale of Genji, for example, resembles a ladykiller poet who appears in the Tales of Ise and perhaps wrote several of its poems, the real-life Ariwara no Narihira (825-880 CE).

While historical and literary context are crucial, the sentiment of the poems remains instantly accessible.

I cannot believe that you
Are far away,
For I can never forget you,
And thus your face
Is always before me. (46)