Kenreimon-in Ukyō no Daibu

Who They Were

Kenreimon-in Ukyō no Daibu (建礼門院右京大夫, けんれいもんいんうきょうのだいぶ) was a Japanese noblewoman, court attendant and waka poet of the late Heian period. She was born in 1157, in the second year of the Hōgen era (保元), and her life spanned the violent transition from the age of the Heian court to the age of the warrior government at Kamakura.

She belonged to the small circle of women who served the imperial court at its ceremonial height and then watched that court destroyed in the Genpei War of the 1180s. Her poetry records both worlds: the elegance of the court and the loss of the men she had known there.

Her mother was a woman known as Yugiri (夕霧); her father was Fujiwara no Koreyuki (藤原伊行), a courtier and calligrapher. She married Taira no Sukemori (平資盛), a son of the Taira regent Taira no Kiyomori.

Life and Career

She entered palace service as a lady-in-waiting, and it is from that service that her name derives: she was attached to the household of Kenreimon-in (建礼門院), the daughter of Taira no Kiyomori who became the consort of Emperor Takakura and the mother of Emperor Antoku.

Her position placed her at the centre of the Taira family's fortunes. Her husband Taira no Sukemori was a Taira commander, and he died in 1185 at the Battle of Dan-no-ura, the sea battle that ended the Genpei War and destroyed Taira power. The defeat of the Taira also ended the world she had served in.

After the war she withdrew from court life. She became a Buddhist nun, and in that retirement she wrote down her recollections of the court and of the people she had lost. The resulting memoir is her best-known work, Yamaji no Tsuyu (山路の露, やまじのつゆ, "Dew on the Mountain Path"), a prose-and-poetry recollection of the Genpei years. Her personal poetry collection, the Kenreimon-in Ukyō no Daibu shū (建礼門院右京大夫集), gathers her waka.

Why They Matter

She is one of the few women of the late Heian court whose writing survives as a sustained personal record rather than as an anthology entry. Yamaji no Tsuyu is valued as an eyewitness account of the collapse of the Taira, written by someone who had been inside the family's orbit and who mourned its men as individuals rather than as political actors.

Her poetry is also a record of the emotional cost of the Genpei War on the women of the court. Where the war chronicles, such as the Heike Monogatari, narrate battles and the fates of commanders, her writing narrates grief, memory and religious retreat.

She is a late Heian poet, but her subject matter is the war that ended the Heian period. That makes her a bridge between the courtly literature of the Heian age and the elegiac, retrospective writing of the early Kamakura period.

The Name in Japanese

The full name is written 建礼門院右京大夫, read in kana as けんれいもんいんうきょうのだいぶ, and romanised as Kenreimon-in Ukyō no Daibu.

The name is not a personal name in the modern sense. It is a service name: it identifies the household she served and the office she held within it. Breaking it down:

• 建 — read ken here. It means "to build" or "to establish."
• 礼 — read rei here. It means "propriety," "ritual" or "ceremony."
• 門 — read mon here. It means "gate."
• 院 — read in here. It means "cloister" or "retired sovereign's palace," and by extension the household of an imperial lady.

Together, 建礼門院 (Kenreimon-in) is the honorific title of the imperial lady she served. The title refers to a gate of the palace, the Kenreimon, and it was granted to Taira no Tokuko, the consort of Emperor Takakura, when she took Buddhist vows after the fall of her family.

• 右 — read u here. It means "right," as opposed to left.
• 京 — read kyō here. It means "capital."
• 大夫 — read daibu here. It is an old court rank, roughly "chief" or "senior official."

右京大夫 (Ukyō no Daibu) is an office title, that of the administrator of the Right Capital Office, the bureau that governed the western half of the capital city. Court women were often given such titles as a form of honorific address, and the title then became the name by which they were known in literary records. The particle の (no) links the office to the person.

So the whole name means, in effect, "the Right Capital Administrator of the Kenreimon-in's household." Her birth name is not preserved in this form; she is known to history by her service title.

Legacy

Her two surviving works, Yamaji no Tsuyu and the Kenreimon-in Ukyō no Daibu shū, keep her name in the standard histories of Japanese court literature. The memoir is the more important of the two, because it preserves a woman's eyewitness memory of the Genpei War and of the Taira men who died in it.

She is grouped with the other women writers of the late Heian court whose personal collections and memoirs form a distinct body of literature. Her particular contribution is the record of a court servant who outlived the family she served and wrote down what she remembered of it.