Nijō

Japanese writer and poet

• Born: 1258
• Birthplace: Heian-Kyō (now Kyoto), Japan
• Died: After 1306
• Place of death: Unknown

Nijō, a court lady, excelled in poetry and in playing the biwa, a stringed musical instrument. She became a Buddhist nun and traveled throughout the country, writing poetry and meeting many government and religious leaders. Toward the end of her life, she wrote a memoir that is one of the most remarkable literary works of Japan’s medieval era.

Life’s Work

The first three of the five parts of the memoir written by Nijō, {I}Towazugatari{/I} (wr. c. 1306; The Confessions of Lady Nijō, 1973) narrate her life at court. The description of her difficult and ultimately indefensible position at the palace as the abdicated emperor’s companion is one of the most revealing autobiographical accounts of love from early Japan. The final two parts of her memoir describe her travels, which were extensive for her time, when travel was both demanding and perilous. Nijō loved daringly, took Buddhism seriously, and traveled far more widely than was usual for a woman. She was a woman of energy, intelligence, and insight. She has been called the female Saigyō after one of the most famous and loved of all Japanese poets, Priest Saigyō, because of her deep commitment to Buddhism, her poetic ability, and her extensive journeys.

Early Life

Nijō (nee joh) was born in a dynamic, if uncertain, time of political intrigue, increasing commerce, and new ideas. In the late 1100’, the imperial government had been overrun by military families. Thereafter, Japan operated with dual governments, an imperial one in Kyoto and a military one some distance away, in Kamakura. Also at this time, many new Buddhist movements were flourishing in Japan.

Nijō’s parents had a close relationship with Emperor Go-Fukakusa (r. 1246-1260), whose reign ended while he was still a teenager, when he was forced to abdicate in deference to his younger brother, Emperor Kameyama (r. 1260-1274), whom his father preferred. He maintained considerable power, however, in his retirement through a well-established system of abdicated, or cloistered, emperors preserving entrenched centers of political power and wealth. Nijō’s mother had provided, scholars believe, the special service of introducing Go-Fukakusa to sexual relations before he took his primary wife. Her family, the Shijō branch of the Fujiwara, were politically influential and were also known as literati and poets. Nijō’s mother died in the summer of 1259, the year following Nijō’s birth.

Nijō’s father, a relatively well-connected member of the influential Koga family that was also known for its poets and scholars of poetry, was clearly devoted to his daughter. He looked carefully after her future until his early death in 1272. Because of his influence and the special relationship Nijō’s mother had to Go-Fukakusa, Nijō was invited at the age of four by Go-Fukakusa to live at the palace. She was registered by her father as the adopted daughter of a grand minister (a legal relationship something like a godfather). This status kept open the possibility that someday she might become an imperial consort or perhaps an empress. It was a reasonable hope, except that her father passed away the same year Go-Fukakusa took her, with her father’s consent, as a companion. This new relationship was initiated without the thirteen-year-old being forewarned. In the memoir, Nijō writes of listening bitterly as her father offered breakfast to the emperor on the morning after the emperor has been allowed into her bedchamber for the first time. She thinks, though exactly of which man it is not clear, “I never wish to see him again; I yearn for it to be yesterday.”

The last date in Nijō’s memoir is 1306. It was probably written soon after that, based on notes taken over the years. In her memoir, therefore, she recalls her life from the perspective of an aristocratic woman in her fifties who left the imperial court to become a Buddhist nun. What is known of her derives almost entirely from her fictionalized memoir. One can imagine that she continued her extensive religious travels and perhaps participated in a limited number of poetry events; unfortunately, there are no historical records pertaining to the years postdating 1306 that could substantiate such speculation.

Though later she was driven coldly from court at the jealous request of Go-Fukakusa’s primary wife and though Nijō’s conversion to Buddhism strikes the reader as sincere, her relationship with Go-Fukakusa is the memoir’s organizing framework. It is difficult to doubt that she loved him when reading of her attendance at his funeral (from afar as she is no longer an official part of the imperial court) and how she ran after the funeral procession shoeless until she no longer could keep up with it.

It is more difficult to say exactly, however, what the nature of their relationship was. Go-Fukakusa, at least as depicted in the memoir, clearly had a cruel streak. On the first two nights with Nijō, he allows her to refuse his amorous advances, but on the third night, he forces himself on her, tearing her clothes. In 1274, when Nijō is just sixteen, he tells her to “prove her love” by helping him seduce another woman. Three years later, he forces her to sleep with Kanehira, powerful regent to the boy-emperor of the time (Go-Uda, r. 1274-1287), grand minister, and man of about fifty. Go-Fukakusa is described as listening from the next room. His brother and rival Kameyama also requests that Nijō be allowed to sleep between them. Go-Fukakusa refuses this, but Kameyama is able to take Nijō away while Go-Fukakusa slumbers.

In this manner, the memoir vividly provides details of the complex mixture of romantic disappointment, disparagement, passion, and attachment that was the twenty-three-year relationship between Go-Fukakusa and Nijō. This relationship begins when he arrives unannounced in her bedroom and proceeds to her father’s dying words that she should consider herself disowned if she ever leaves Go-Fukakusa, to the infant death of their only child, to Go-Fukakusa’s bending to the will of his wife and ordering Nijō’s service at court terminated, to their furtive meetings after this, and to her peering into his death room. It is a stunning portrayal of one couple’s complicated and not always easy to understand love; for example, the reader is surprised by her sudden declaration of longing for Go-Fukakusa the morning after he roughly makes her his lover.

Go-Fukakusa was not the only man Nijō loved. Interwoven with his dominating presence are two others code-named “Snowy Dawn” and “Predawn Moon.” The first, scholars have determined, was Saionji Sanekane, whose family for about two generations had exercised profound influence on the imperial court. By Sanekane’s time, this influence had extended to the military government in Kamakura. Sanekane was a key figure in striking a balance between the rival retired emperors Go-Fukakusa and Kameyama in their bid before the military government for the designation of crown prince between their children. Sanekane’s two daughters would become consorts to Kameyama and Go-Fukakusa’s son, Emperor Fushimi (r. 1287-1298). It is with Sanekane, who moved dangerously between major political factions, that Nijō entangled her fate, even from the early days of her relationship with Go-Fukakusa at age thirteen. They parented a girl in 1274, but the birth was necessarily secret and the child given up for adoption, with Sanekane separating child from mother the moment the umbilical cord was cut.

“Predawn Moon” was probably Priest-Prince Shōjo, abbot of Ninna Temple and half-brother of Go-Fukakusa. Nijō had two boys by him; heart-wrenchingly, the second child was born after his death in 1281.

Amid these lovers both sought out by and pressed on her Nijō struggles, attempting to negotiate with the limited resources allowed her the unpredictable waters of the politics of governmental and imperial women’s quarters. At one point when Go-Fukakusa and Shōjo are talking easily with one another and she flees the room, only to run into Sanekane in the hallway, who complains that she has no time for him, she writes despairingly, “I had no place left for myself.” That became a reality in 1283, when, at the age of twenty-five, she was forced from court. The order was delivered by letter via her grandfather and simply stated that she was to leave the palace permanently that night. That evening, she served Go-Fukakusa briefly one last time, with his only remark being, “And how is it? Will you be leaving tonight?”

When the reader begins the fourth part of her memoir, Nijō is already a nun. There is no description of any momentous decision to take tonsure; it is a given, as her father once said, that if she is to lose Go-Fukakusa, this will be the moral choice. In fact, however, one senses the preeminence of Buddhism even during the long and detailed chapters describing her life at court. Lay life, as she depicts it, is fundamentally a life of endless anxiety. The memoir speaks less of a conversion to Buddhism than an evaluation of her personal fate through the lens of Buddhist values. She humbly and quite frankly notes how she again and again is motivated and compromised by romantic desire and, just as unreservedly, reveals her only partial adherence to Buddhist wisdom.

Religious feelings of guilt, devotion, and compassion run deep in her story, especially in her pilgrimage years. Guilt guides her thoughts, for example, when she tries to hide from her dying father the fact that she is pregnant, because, according to Buddhist teaching, if her father learned that he could soon enjoy a grandchild, his spirit might be unwilling to let go of worldly attachments, something that would not further his spiritual well-being. She wonders, too, if the death of her son by Go-Fukakusa the same year she gives birth to a daughter by Sanekane is caused by the adulterous nature of that relationship.

Her devotion to Buddhism is evident in her arduous pilgrimages, copying of scriptures, and many prayers. It is no more poignantly illustrated, though, than her decision to make an offering to Buddha of the last remaining, cherished possessions given to her by her now deceased parents, an offering on behalf of Go-Fukakusa’s soul and, of course, that of her mother and father. The gradual development of her compassion can be seen best, perhaps, in how she describes those whom she meets on her travels and her interest in their personal troubles. Traveling broadens her world and the circle of people about whom she takes times to think.

Nijō’s poetry was widely anthologized, and she performed the biwa (a stringed instrument) with critical acclaim at many formal occasions. A pair of poems from near the end of her memoir are representative of the conflict she experienced between her increasing devotion to Buddhism and her continued mourning for the men whom she cherished. When she made an offering of the last possession of Go-Fukakusa’s that she owned, an embroidered robe he had given her and on which they had no doubt slept and which she continued to use, she wrote:

It is such an anguish,thinking that from today I will see it no more this keepsake, this bedrobe, well worn.

She follows this poem immediately, without explanation, with another that evokes the memory of the also deceased “Predawn Moon,” perhaps her most cherished lover:

Awakened, and at pillowside lingers the predawn moon’s rays.The river’s rush accompanies my wail of tears.

And this, too, is followed, again without transition, of her hearing that another, though less welcome, lover, Emperor Kameyama, had passed away. In Nijō’s delicately narrated memoir, the appeal and suffering associated with romantic love, on one hand, and values of Buddhist compassion with its transcendent view beyond lay life, on the other, are complexly interwoven.

Significance

Nijō’s romantic involvement with the two competing abdicated emperors and the politician who was key in determining which of the imperial lines would find favor with the ruling military government surely colored the character and ultimate shape of that brotherly rivalry. However, because her only child by Go-Fukakusa died in infancy, her impact on the political situation was limited to private affairs of which little is known.

Nijō’s memoir is a rich historical resource and is often quoted by the court history Masukagami (1368-1375; The Clear Mirror: A Chronicle of the Japanese Court During the Kamakura Period, 1185-1333; 1998). However, its influence on self-reflective literature is greatest. In her day, that genre was the quasifictional autobiography and was written primarily by aristocratic women. Later, the self-reflective protagonist approach would reappear in full form in the post-World War II genre of I novels (shishōsetsu), a tradition with enormous impact on modern Japanese fiction.

The rediscovery in 1940 of Towazugatari is one of the great events of modern Japanese literary scholarship because of the memoir’s descriptive richness of medieval Japan and superior literary qualities.

Bibliography

Childs, Margaret H. “The Value of Vulnerability: Sexual Coercion and the Nature of Love in Japanese Court Literature.” The Journal of Asian Studies 58, no. 4 (November, 1999): 1059-1079. Discusses strategies female fictional characters deployed for resisting and influencing male romantic interest.

The Clear Mirror: A Chronicle of the Japanese Court During the Kamakura Period, 1185-1333. Translated by George W. Perkins. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998. A full translation of the preeminent historical narrative written shortly after the death of Nijō. Describes in detail the imperial court of which she was a part.

McCullough, Helen Craig, comp. and ed. Classical Japanese Prose: An Anthology. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990. Includes a partial translation of Towazugatari, other early Japanese women’s memoirs, and other relevant literary texts.

Mass, Jeffrey P., ed. The Origins of Japan’s Medieval World: Courtiers, Clerics, Warriors, and Peasants in the Fourteenth Century. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997. Essays exploring with great credibility the history of the century in which Nijō lived; its research is based on a wide variety of documents of the time.

Nijō. The Confessions of Lady Nijō. Translated by Karen Brazell. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1973. A complete translation, with introduction, of Towazugatari.

Stevenson, Barbara, and Cynthia Ho, eds. Crossing the Bridge: Comparative Essays on Medieval European and Heian Japanese Women Writers. New York: Palgrave, 2000. A collection of essays that compares the lives and literary approaches of leading women writers in classical and medieval Europe and Japan.