Keikokushū reconsidered: The negotiation of Kidendō literary culture in early Heian Japan

Owing perhaps to the mutilated form in which it survives, with only six volumes remaining of its original twenty, the literary anthology Keikokushū (Collection for Binding the Realm, 827) has received rela- tively little scholarly attention. The aim of this paper is to elucidate the structure of this work by placing it in the context of the institu- tionalization of sovereign-centered poetry banquets and the reorgan- ization of the kidendō (Way of Annals and Biographies) at the Bureau of High Education (daigakuryō). This process took place during the first three decades of the ninth century, thus culminating at the time Abstracts 305 Abstracts 289 the anthology was being compiled. I argue that Keikokushū represents a negotiation among a number of interconnected elements. Specifical- ly, the textual genres that traditionally lacked a stable position within the kidendō institutional activity in literary Sinitic (for example, shi poetry and fu rhapsodies) acquired in the anthology a hierarchy that was synchronized with both the new de facto trajectory of kidendō ed- ucation and the outlets for literary composition provided by institu- tionalized poetry banquets. By presenting specific literary genres such as poetry and prefaces as the ideal field of activity for kidendō graduates, the compilers of Keikokushū sought to mark out the in- creasing interconnectedness of the two.