Poetical Illness : The Rhythm of Kakyo-hyosiki(<Special Issue>Representations of "Illness" in Ancient Times)

Abstract

In Kakyo-hyosiki, the earliest text of poetics compiled by Fujiwara-no-Hamanari, a strange concept of "poetical illness" is explained in detail. At a glance it seems to metaphorically refer to something like the weak constitution of a literary person, but it doesn't. Instead it is a poetical theory based on the correspondence between spirit and illness in ancient medical knowledge with the application to it the logic of sound and spirit developed in Chinese poetics of the Rokucho Period. In this system of correspondence, a poem is the medium through which a human being can get in touch with the other world.