By drawing on established theories regarding kotodama (spirit of words), three scholars of premodern Japanese literature will demonstrate the critical role of bodily performance, upon which the lyrical and ritual aspects of narrative are built. Just like the body contains a tama (spirit) that can leave the corporeal shell to travel across time and space, so too do words that denote bodies. In this vein, Beth M. Carter’s paper, "Weeping, Wailing, and Writhing: Corporeal Performance of Mourning Ritual in 8th Century Sources," concludes that descriptions of seemingly unregulated and spontaneous corporeal acts of bereavement were actually essential components of a highly structured socio-political network of normative formulations to pacify spirits of the dead (and remained so for hundreds of years). This is followed by Malgorzata Citko-DuPlantis’s study, “The Ecstasy of Waiting: Rethinking the Poetic Trope of the ‘Waiting Woman.’” In this paper, Citko-DuPlantis reconsiders the representation of the waiting woman (matsu onna), which tends to be interpreted as a passive, forlone figure, by analyzing poetic depictions of women’s bodies before, during, and after sexual ecstasy in Japanese and other literary traditions, and qualifying the activity of waiting as “ritual pleasure.” Finally, in “Corporeal Ritual and the Performance of Love Suicide in Early Modern Japan,” Jyana S. Browne examines the reciprocal relationship between the practice and the performance of love suicide in Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s (1653-1724) corpus of love suicide plays. Through her analysis, Browne will show how these texts scripted affective experiences and religious meanings that traveled through the bodies of the practitioners, the performers, and the audience members.

In a vein similar to Catherine Bell's assertion that all textual depictions of ritual are performance, words contain the wishes and intentions of the body they describe, allowing for the spirit of the word to become reactivated upon each re-reading or re-performance. In the premodern Japanese context, as these papers show, the reactivation of the words manifests in the bodies of mourners, poets, lovers, and their audiences. In her study of medieval stories, Charlotte Eubanks (2011) has shown that “through extended devotional activity, the body becomes a sutra scroll around which the skin wraps itself like a silk brocade cover” (17). These papers explore how the spirits of the words in these prose, poetic, and dramatic texts are reactivated through reading and performance so that the body becomes the site and conduit of religious practice.

The session will open with the organizer’s five-minute introduction of the panel’s theme and presenters. Each speaker will give a 15-minute presentation. In order to remove potential terminological barriers in the audience, we will prepare a single-page handout that clearly summarizes key information, including the periodization, dates of the authors/poets/playwrights, and translations of recurrent keywords. The organizer will ensure that the audience and the speakers will have at least 15 minutes for further discussions and Q&As.