Adam Bednarczyk

Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń

Performativity of Medieval Japanese Travel Diaries in the Light of Geopoetics

Medieval Japanese travel diaries and memoirs should be placed on the border between literature and non-fiction. More or less extensive and subjective travel accounts are interwoven with poems that are usually coupled with descriptions of places. This kind of composition of almost all works in the genre in question creates a unique textual space, in which one is faced with, for instance, the phenomenon of epigonization of previous literary imaginations of places and their redescriptions. In these texts, real and/or imagined places are juxtaposed with their poetic representations. In my presentation, referring to the concept of geopoetics, as conceived by E. Rybicka (2014), I argue that the epigonization of places mentioned in Japanese travel journals written between the 13th and 16th centuries was one of the manifestations of the performativity of this literary genre. What is meant by references to known places (utamakura) in diaries are actions that actively influenced geographic space in tangible and intangible terms. They not only influenced the construction of Japan’s local literary geography, but created (and in some cases are still creating) the actual cultural heritage of these places, as I will discuss on the example of a specific place described in several travel diaries