“Hearkening to the ‘Voice’ of Teika: Authors and Readers of Poetry Treatise Forgeries in Medieval Japan”, 2024-06-17 ():
This essay takes up the Maigetsushō, a forged text on theories of waka poetry attributed to Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241), a poet regarded as representative of medieval Japan.
A number of factors can be considered evidence that this text was a forgery. The text emerged during a time of fierce quarreling amongst Teika’s descendants who had divided themselves into various factions. What was a matter of extraordinary importance for these factions was claim of ownership of Teika’s actual writings on waka poetics.
Despite the competing factions’ desires to keep secret from each other the precious teachings gained from this text, the Maigetsushō transcended the circumstances of its creation and went on to become widely circulated. That it was composed in an epistolary style can be understood as the reason for its survival. I posit that the epistolary form effected in the reader a sense that they were listening to Teika’s ‘voice’.
Furthermore, I argue that the text’s author had no intentions to craft a forgery per se; rather, the forger believed with conviction that Teika would have spoken these words had he still been alive in their time.