午夜剧场

I love the music of old performers. There are quite a few commercialized broadcast recordings available. They are monaural and mixed with noise, but for example, Knappertsbusch's Parsifal is released over and over again by various record labels. Even when touted as the latest remaster, most are disappointing, but occasionally, when an official sound source is unearthed from a broadcasting station's warehouse, it plays with a sound as clear as if the fog had lifted. It would be comical to praise the poor sound quality of a bootleg as "divine and ethereal," and it becomes even more troublesome if it turns out to be a performance by someone else entirely.

And so, we come to Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness). Because it is a famous work, the author Kenko is also very well known. Born into the Urabe clan of lower-ranking court nobles, he went into seclusion because the Emperor he served as a chamberlain died young, and he faced the misfortune of not fitting into the era of the rising samurai class. He longed for the dynastic culture of the past, loathed novelty, and wrote essays with pessimistic and archaistic content—this is how the "character" of Tsurezuregusa is often explained.

However, Kenko's biography was actually fabricated in later generations based on Tsurezuregusa itself. I have already clarified this in "Kenko Hoshi: The Truth Not Recorded in Tsurezuregusa" (Chuko Shinsho, 2017) and other works. In short, our knowledge of the historical context of the late Kamakura period to the early Northern and Southern Courts period—when Kenko lived and Tsurezuregusa was written—had not been updated. While enshrining Tsurezuregusa as a classic among classics, we failed to see through the biography as a fraud and continued to discuss the "character" of the work. The negative impact of the researcher population being biased toward only famous works is serious.

Still, some might think that a work can exist independently of its author or era. Therefore, this book is an attempt to step back into Kenko's time and re-read Tsurezuregusa for high school and university students. I have included both famous passages found in textbooks and minor ones. I did not forcibly tear off the mask that Kenko tried to hide behind. The reading presented here should not diminish the charm of the work. Fortunately, I have received feedback from several readers saying they had an "aha!" moment. I believe it is like finally listening to a performance that was highly acclaimed but somehow incomprehensible, played back through a high-quality source, and realizing, "Ah, so this is what it was actually supposed to sound like."

Takeo Ogawa

Chikuma Primer Shinsho

192 pages, 800 yen (excluding tax)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.