3550 Trousdale Parkway, Los Angeles, CA 90089

In early modern Japan (1603-1868), many imperial princesses were sent to live out their lives in special Buddhist convents. There, they created a unique culture that combined the secular values of the court and the religious values of Buddhism. One of the cultural activities they engaged in was composing Sinitic poetry (kanshi), which was traditionally written for and by men. The Sinitic poetry composed by imperial princess nuns has been largely overlooked within the field of Japanese Sinitic poetry studies. My research aims to fill that gap by providing an in-depth analysis of the Sinitic poetry of Taisei Shōan (1668-1712).  

 

Taisei Shōan, a daughter of Emperor Gosai (1638-1685), was a Rinzai Zen nun who served as the abbess of Donkein, an imperial convent in Kyoto. She was a prolific and skilled writer of Sinitic Poetry. In this talk, I will share her life story and analyze her Sinitic Poetry. I will discuss how she was active across imperial, Buddhist, and intellectual circles during her lifetime. I will also analyze how Taisei drew on the literary traditions of Zen Buddhism, Japanese waka poetry, and Chinese poetry and identify specific images and phrases in her poems to uncover the links to these literary traditions. This historical and literary analysis of the life and poetry of Taisei reveals how gender, class, religion, and language were intricately intersected in Sinitic poetry by this understudied yet significant Japanese female poet. 

 

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Bio
Nobuko Horikawa is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Japanese in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Seattle University. She teaches courses in Japanese language, culture, and literature. She received a Ph.D. in Classical Japanese Literature at the University of Washington in 2023. Her research focuses on Sinitic prose and poetry in Japan (kanshibun), Zen Buddhist literature, and women’s literature in early modern Japan. In her dissertation, she translated the Sinitic poetry composed by a Japanese Zen nun, Taisei Shōan (1668-1712). She is currently working on turning her dissertation into a book.  

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