Abstract
The somewhat synesthetic title of this paper may sound odd at first glance. Afterall, rhyme is a feature of a poem or other literary text that we typically imagine should manifest itself audibly. Likewise,“echoes” that intertextually bind one poem to another—and here I have in mind the repetition of specific diction, syntax, structure, and other formal features—should be apparent when the text is vocalized. This chapter, however, considers a body of poetic texts where such rhymes and echoes are unquestionably present, indeed central to the very composition and reception of the text, and are not necessarily realized vocally, or at least not realized in dominant performative modes of vocalization. The texts I have in mind are Sinitic poems composed in early modern Japan,works that are now called kanshi 漢詩. This term kanshi is now ubiquitous in both academic and popular usage, in Japan as well as abroad. But I should note at the outset that I invoke this term merely for expedience. To begin with, the term kanshi is misleading, indicating different bodies of poetry in Japanese and Anglo-phone scholarship. When Anglophone scholars write of kanshi, they often mean Chinese poems by Japanese composers. But in Japanese usage,kanshi in fact refers to Literary Sinitic poetry as a whole, regardless of authorial nationality (so in the Japanese usage of the term, both famous Chinese poets like Du Fu 杜甫(712–770)and Li Bai 李白(701–762),as well as famous Japanese poets like Ishikawa Jōzan 石川丈山(1583–1672) and Arai Hakuseki 新井白石(1657–1725), were all authors of kanshi). What is more, beyond this gap between present-day Anglophone and Japanese usage, the term kanshi is also anachronistic, since none of the poets I discuss in this chapter would have used the term kanshi to describe what they wrote. To Sinitic poets in early modern Japan, the poems they created were simply shi: the same term by which they were known to other members of the Sinosphere. Neither the Japanese term shi詩 nor kanshi, the term that replaced it, distinguishes between Sinitic verses composed by Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and others. Indeed, one of the main points of this chapter lies in this very terminological equivalence: that Japanese composers of Sinitic verse saw themselves as takingpart in an enterprise that they shared with their counterparts in China and elsewhere. To be sure, there are important variations in how Sinitic verse was enjoyed and performed throughout East Asia, but this basic identity is fundamental to understanding the practice.