Oe no Masafusa and the Practice and Heian Autobiography

Professor Ury died on 25 April last year before she could complete her revisions of this article. She had hoped to publish it as a companion piece to my own article, 'Oe no Masafusa and the Spirit of Michizane', which appeared in the autumn issue of MN last year, as we had worked together closely when preparing these papers for presentation at the conference of the European Association for Japanese Studies in Copenhagen, August 1994. She left a polished and annotated version of her translation of Bonen no Ki, the work that was the focus of her talk, and among her papers were many comments by Burton Watson concerning this and other translations of works by Oe no Masafusa. Professor Ury surely would have wanted to acknowledge his help. The introductory essay is a revised version of the talk she gave at Copenhagen. It required more editorial attention. Originally, it included a section attempting to glean something of Masafusa's personality from a comparison of how he treated Sugawara no Michizane and Fujiwara no Akihira in other writings. Fascinating though her observations were at the conference, that section of her presentation survives only as the barest of outlines and has been excised. What remains is essentially as Professor Ury wrote it, including scattered references to Michizane, now rendered somewhat forlorn. Although the original lacked citations, I believe that I have tracked down the sources that Professor Ury used. Had I been able to offer her editorial suggestions, I would have encouraged Professor Ury to expand on the comparisons with Western autobiographies that she makes in the concluding paragraphs of her essay. Confucianism was a key element in Masafusa's intellectual world, and Confucianism prized adherence to ancient practices. One might speculate that the goal of his autobiography was to demonstrate how well he fit the established pattern rather than to illustrate his distinctive qualities, and perhaps this is a key difference between traditional East Asian and modern Western ideas regarding autobiography or even individuality itself. Although Professor Ury probably would have shared my reluctance to make such grand generalizations without careful qualification, I believe that this was the larger point she wanted to