The Continent as Object of Knowledge
171
rors
. Most obviously, there is the geographic remove between writer and
subject matter. While India is, to paraphrase Shigenori’s informant, too
far away to speak of, China is also framed as a place that people leave to
go elsewhere—that is, Japan. The significance of this distance (the de-
marcation of a boundary between China and Japan) can also be seen in
the preliminaries to the above exchange when Shigenori observes: “One
was quite a great priest. His speech was impossible to decipher. The other,
who was [his] disciple, did the honors of passing on the master’s words,
translating them, and so on.”
96
China is “foreign,” an incomprehensible
other without the proper mediator.
Although Shigenori uses deferential language toward the monks, the
work’s attitude toward the Chinese present reflects an unspoken power
relationship. Specifically, the narrator’s lack of facility with the con-
temporary spoken idiom in no way compromises his ability to provide a
history of China to his readers: it is not just the “words” of the monk,
but also texts, that are cited. While these ostensibly fall within the monk’s
narrative, it is difficult to see them as anything other than a display of a
text-based knowledge of China. In other words, to the extent that one
can read the narrator as a stand-in for Shigenori, direct access to con-
temporary China or Chinese is superfluous for someone in his position—
namely, an authority on or translator of things Chinese. One might go a
step further and infer that it is contemporary China as such that is ren-
dered largely irrelevant by such a move: the “China” worth knowing about
is temporally contained. China is not only foreign, it is also the past. Such
an interpretation is justified by the lines with which Shigenori’s narrator
closes the preface: “Since I have heard that there is a practice whereby
one takes the
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