In the early part of the Japanese Middle Ages, called the Insei Era, Shukaku-Hoshinno of Ninnaji Temple, an ex-nobleman who went into the Buddhist priesthood, completed the booklet titled Konbyoshi-no-Kozoshi, in which he collected linguistic samples of the suffix "shidai" to demonstrate their potential use in Buddhist rituals. The suffix "shidai" was originally adopted in Oe-no-Masafusa's Goke-Shidai as a new form of description for the protocol at the Imperial Court. His experiment brought an epoch-making innovation to Japanese writing in general. From this point of view, it is possible to regard Konbyoshi-no-Kozoshi as a response at the religious level to this great change in the history of Japanese rhetorics. Indeed, the impact of the new suffix is omnipresent in this age. For example, it is at the same period that in the fields of "waka" (an old style of poem in Japan) and music, rhetorical mastership of "shidai" becomes indispensable for artistic accomplishment. Moreover, the suffix plays as important a role in literature as in rituals. Japanese literature, as is known, originated from narrative, and it is suggestive that the suffix or its etymological equivalents like "tsugi-tsugi" or "tsuide" (in passing) frequently appear in narratives and folklore. My argument in this essay is thus to show how literature is founded upon "shidai".
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