The meaning of death in Kenkō Yoshida's Tsurezuregusa [Essays in idleness]

This article discusses the meaning of death in Kenkō Yoshida's Tsurezuregusa [Essays in idleness], completed around 1330 at the end of the Kamakura Period (1185–1333). Kenkō, who was a Buddhist monk and hermit, naturally construed the concept of death in terms of the impermanence of the world. Taking Lakoffian conceptual metaphor theory, in which death is understood as an abstract category, as a jumping-off point, I contrast the Buddhist conception of death with different conceptualizations of metaphor and metonymy by contemporary scholars to locate the notion of “death” in the medieval linguistic context. I claim that while death in Essays in idleness is more frequently considered non-literal, it is not interpretable metaphorically. This hints at an alternative, namely, that Kenkō's concept of death is created metonymically. Impermanence as a literary aesthetic thus crystallizes in the form of death as a syntagmatic metonym.