Abutsu-ni

Abutsu-ni

Abutsu-ni ( Japanese 阿 仏 尼 ; * around 1222, † 1283 ) was a Japanese poet of the Kamakura period .

Life

Nothing is known about the origin of abutsu. It is believed that she was the daughter or - more likely - adopted daughter of the provincial governor Taira no Norishige ( 平 度 繁 ). She came to the imperial court early - probably before her 20th birthday - as a servant of Princess Anka-mon'in (Kuniko), the granddaughter of Emperor Takakura and wife of Emperor Juntoku , of which her nickname Anka-mon'in Echizen , later Anka-mon'in Shijō and Anka-mon'in Uemon Suke witness.

During her time at court, she had an unfortunate affair with a presumably higher-ranking man, after or perhaps because of whom she left the court and which she reflected in the book Utatane ( う た た ね ; around 1238). She was a mother of three, when she in 1252 by the family of Fujiwara no Tameies was commissioned Murasaki Shikibu Genji Monogatari (d. I. 阿仏尼本源氏物語 , Abutsu Nibon Genji Monogatari copy). In the following year she became concubine of the poet Fujiwara no Tameie, who made her his main wife in 1265 after the birth of two sons. After the death of her husband, she became a Buddhist nun and called herself Abutsu-ni (English nun abutsu).

When a legal dispute broke out over whether the preservation of the manuscripts of Japanese literature according to Tameie was due to his eldest son from his first marriage or to the eldest of their mutual sons, Tamesuke , she set off on a trip to Kamakura in 1279 to present the case to the local military government . She reported about the trip in the diary Izayoi nikki ( 十六 夜 日記 ), which consists of 116 poems, including 68 of her own. She died - presumably in Kamakura - without receiving a government decision. Most recently, the office of preserving national literature was actually entrusted to their descendants who formed the Reizei family.

Tameie had already included three poems by Abutsu in the official Shokukokin Wakashu collection (1265), and another 45 appeared in other official collections. Fujiwara Nagakiyo published 1308-10 59 of her poems in the anthology Fubokusho . In the mid-14th century, one hundred poems appeared in the Anka-mon'in Shijō Hyakushu collection ( 安嘉 門 院 四条 百 首 ) and more than five hundred in the Anka-mon'in Shijō Gohyakushu collection ( 安嘉 門 院 四条 五百 首 ). In addition, three prose works by Abutsu have come down to us: an obituary for her husband Tameie, a briefing pamphlet for one of her daughters ( Menoto no fumi ( 乳母 の ふ bzw. ) or Niwa no oshie ) and a treatise on writing poems under the title Yoru no tsuru ( 夜 の 鶴 , The crane in the night, around 1280).

swell

• Chieko Irie Mulhern: "Japanese women writers: a bio-critical sourcebook" , Greenwood Publishing Group, 1994, ISBN 9780313254864 , pp. 3-8
• Louis Frédéric : Japan Encyclopedia . Harvard University Press, 2002, ISBN 0-674-00770-0 , pp. 5 (English, limited preview in the Google Book Search - French: Japon, dictionnaire et civilization . Translated by Käthe Roth).
• Helen Craig McCullough, "Classical Japanese Prose: An Anthology," Stanford University Press, 1991, ISBN 9780804719605 , pp. 289-90
• Medieval Japanese Writers (PDF; 691 kB) - Dictionary of Literary Biography (English)
• Other Woman's Voices - Abutsu ( Memento from January 26, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
• eNotes Abutsu