JJRS > Volume 51 Issue 1 Echoes of the Pure Land: The Sonic Imaginary of Utsuho Monogatari

Whatley, Katherine G. T.

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In the tenth-century Japanese vernacular tale Utsuho monogatari, an envoy to China named Toshikage is shipwrecked in the exotic land of Hashikoku. He encounters ascetics and Buddhist deities who transmit koto performance techniques and gift him with magical instruments before his return to Japan. Hashikoku is depicted as a place at the edge of this world close to Sukhāvatī, Amitābha’s Pure Land of Ultimate Bliss, and thus near sacredness itself. Toshikage’s quest for music guides him to the edge of human knowledge, where music and religion can be directly experienced from devas. This liminal place is deeply Buddhist and filled with koto music. Using evidence from both a koto housed in Shōsōin and a series of illustrations from woodblock-printed books and handscrolls covering the first chapter of Utsuho from the sixteenth through early nineteenth centuries, I examine the textual and visual symbolism of the koto itself. I argue that the instrument represents a conduit through which other places and realms can be experienced. These illustrated editions also act as a kind of visual reception history and show how Hashikoku, a place of sonic imaginary and closeness to the Buddhist realm, continued to have symbolic reverberations for nearly a millennium.