About

Torquil Duthie is a professor in the Asian Languages & Cultures Department at UCLA. He holds a Ph.D. in premodern Japanese literature from Columbia University, completed in 2005, with a dissertation focused on poetry and kingship in ancient Japan. His educational background also includes a M.A. in classical Japanese literature from Hokkaidō University and a B.A. (Hons) in Japanese from SOAS, University of London. His research interests encompass early and classical Japanese poetry, mythical and historical writing in early Japan, narrative theory, and representations of empire. He has also studied seventeenth and eighteenth-century kokugaku ('national learning') and its relationship to modern and contemporary philology and theory. Duthie has authored significant publications, including the book 'Man’yōshū and the Imperial Imagination in Early Japan' and a translation of classical Japanese poetry into Spanish. His scholarly work explores the cultural and historical contexts of Japanese literary traditions, contributing to the understanding of Japan's literary and imperial history.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Art
• Literature
• History
• Anthropology
• Linguistics
• Philosophy
• Law
• Archaeology
• Classics

Selected publications

• Review: <i>Inscribed Objects and the Development of Literature in Early Japan</i>, by Joshua Frydman

  Journal of Japanese Studies · 2025-01-01

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• Preface

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2023

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
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• Waka Poetry as a Cosmopolitan Vernacular in Early Japan

  BRILL eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • History
  • Art

  Modern literary histories have associated the development of a Japanese vernacular with texts that were written in cursive kana style in the Heian period. This is a somewhat distorted view, given that most early forms of literate vernacular in Japan in fact developed as variant ways of reading and writing Literary Sinitic. What is true, however, is that a literary vernacular was from the beginning envisioned in ideal terms as a discrete textual world comparable to the cosmopolitan realm of Literary Sinitic. In this essay I argue that the foundation of this ideal vision of a vernacular literary realm was the poetry called uta (song), or waka (Japanese song): an exemplary form of written language versified according to Japanese prosodic patterns and posited as a vernacular equivalent to Sinitic poetry, or shi.

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• Ritualized Writing: Buddhist Practice and Scriptural Cultures in Ancient Japan by Bryan D. Lowe

  Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  Reviewed by: Ritualized Writing: Buddhist Practice and Scriptural Cultures in Ancient Japan by Bryan D. Lowe Torquil Duthie Ritualized Writing: Buddhist Practice and Scriptural Cultures in Ancient Japan by Bryan D. Lowe. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2017. Pp. xiv + 272. $68.00 cloth. In this fascinating and masterful book, Bryan Lowe combines an interest in doctrine with an emphasis on practice to explore "the ways key Buddhist concepts such as merit, ethics, friendship, and cosmology interact with social structures and cultural patterns" (p. 7). In the process, he makes a convincing argument that the ritualized reproduction of Buddhist texts played a central role in the creation of the world of ancient Japan in its varied cosmological, social, bureaucratic, ethical, and political aspects. Lowe defines "ritualized writing" as an activity that is set apart from everyday scribal tasks by means of ritual practices such as purifications and other ceremonies. He uses the term to refer both to the act of transcription and to the texts themselves—ritual prayers, sutras, and other forms of scripture. The concept is closely related to the Buddhist ideal of the book as a sacred object that asks to be venerated and promises rewards to those who do so. Lowe approaches ritual not simply as a form of symbolic action that functioned to maintain the social order but also as a dynamic activity that served to reconfigure local communities, reshape bureaucratic institutions, and reimagine concepts of the afterlife and of the state. One key contribution of the book is a powerful and sweeping critique of the state-Buddhism approach to the Nara period and of the contrasting reductive notion of popular Buddhism. As Lowe argues, the agency of religious and historical actors is not to be found in a binary tension between state control and popular resistance but rather within a framework of ritual practices, which served to create both commonalities and distinctions among individuals and to transform social and geographic communities. The book is painstakingly researched. Lowe is the only scholar working in English on the Shōsōin 正倉院 documents, an extraordinary collection of over ten thousand manuscripts dating from the Nara period. In addition to copies of sutras, the documents also include records related to tax collection, censuses, temple construction, and [End Page 253] even poetry. Lowe demonstrates considerable expertise and familiarity with this archive. He is also able to move comfortably and expertly back and forth among many other kinds of materials, including historical records and literary texts. At a theoretical level, Lowe's study makes a valuable contribution to rethinking the concepts of ritual and agency in ways that could be helpful far beyond the confines of the field of early Japan. Part 1 of the book, "Ritual Practices," explores the "cosmological and ethical underpinnings of transcribing scripture" (p. 19). In chapter 1, "Merit, Purity, and Ceremony," Lowe examines literary tales from Japan and the continent together with colophons appended to sutra manuscripts in order to discuss "three ways that East Asian Buddhists understood and practiced ritualized writing" (p. 30) as acts that created merit, required purification, and featured concluding ceremonies. This understanding of sutra copying as ethically fulfilling ritualized writing spread throughout East Asia and came to Japan in the form of narrative accounts and scriptural practices. Chapter 2, "Ritual Compositions," focuses on ganmon 願文 (prayer texts), a ritual and literary genre that functioned to dedicate merit. Ganmon were ritual texts insofar as they were performed in a ritual setting and employed formal ritualistic language and sacral symbolism. But ganmon were also literary creations in that they were governed by rules from classical Chinese poetics. In Lowe's account, ganmon are a wonderful illustration of the close relationship between literature and ritual: just as literary composition requires conceptions of ritual order to create its formal structures, so does ritual prayer require literary language in order to elevate it and thus set it apart from ordinary utterances. In part 2, "Organizations," Lowe examines the social groups and institutions that made ritualized writing possible. Chapter 3, "Writing Societies," focuses on the earliest datable sutra manuscript in Japan (686) "to explore the communities connected to ritualized writing in ancient Japan" (p. 83). In this...

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• Alexander Vovin: Man'yōshū: Book 1. A New English Translation Containing the Original Text, Kana Transliteration, Romanization, Glossing and Commentary. xix, 192 pp. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017. €99. ISBN 978 9004 34576 8.

  Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies · 2018-02-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Alexander Vovin: Man'yōshū: Book 1. A New English Translation Containing the Original Text, Kana Transliteration, Romanization, Glossing and Commentary. xix, 192 pp. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017. €99. ISBN 978 9004 34576 8. - Volume 81 Issue 1

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• 柿本人麻呂「高市皇子挽歌」の歴史性

  Medical Entomology and Zoology · 2016-11-01

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• Yoshino and the Politics of Cultural Topography in Early Japan

  Monumenta Nipponica · 2015-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  oshino is portrayed in early Japanese texts as a place full of power, beauty, and magic. In the Nihon shoki (c. 720), Kojiki (c. 712), Man'ysh (c. eighth century), and Kaifs (c. 751), it appears as a symbolic center of imperial authority, as a poetic landscape of manifold mountains and clear rivers, and as a mysterious site associated with immortal beings (shinsen ). Although much work has been done on these various aspects of Yoshino from different disciplinary perspectives-historical, literary, and religious-little attention has been paid to the specific contexts in which Yoshino appears in each of these early texts, or to the relationship between Yoshino as a political symbol, as a numinous site, and as a literary topos. In this article I examine the portrayal of Yoshino in its various contexts in order to clarify the process through which it came to be represented as a significant place in the historical narratives and poetry anthologies of the eighth-century Japanese state. 1 Today the name "Yoshino" is primarily associated with Mt. Yoshino, well known as the most spectacular cherry-blossom-viewing area in Japan, and with the northern edge of the World Heritage Site that stretches from Mt. Yoshino to mine , through the modern district of Yoshino, which occupies the southern two-thirds of Nara prefecture, and down to the Kumano shrines in Wakayama. 2 Mt. Yoshino and its cherry blossoms have been famous since at least the mid-Heian period, and the temples and shrines in the area have multiple historical associations. In the Asuka and Nara periods, however, the region known as Yoshino was mostly limited 1 For scholarship on Yoshino, in Japanese, see

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• The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2015-07-31 · 27 citations

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  The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature provides, for the first time, a history of Japanese literature with comprehensive coverage of the premodern and modern eras in a single volume. The book is arranged topically in a series of short, accessible chapters for easy access and reference, giving insight into both canonical texts and many lesser known, popular genres, from centuries-old folk literature to the detective fiction of modern times. The various period introductions provide an overview of recurrent issues that span many decades, if not centuries. The book also places Japanese literature in a wider East Asian tradition of Sinitic writing and provides comprehensive coverage of women&amp;apos;s literature as well as new popular literary forms, including manga (comic books). An extensive bibliography of works in English enables readers to continue to explore this rich tradition through translations and secondary reading.

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• Songs of the Records and Chronicles

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2015-07-31

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• 8 The Tenmu Myth of Heavenly Descent

  2014-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter examines two poetic sequences on the death of Tenmu's two most prominent sons: Prince Kusakabe, who was Tenmu's chosen successor and son of his imperial consort Jitō, and Prince Takechi, who was Tenmu's military deputy in the Jinshin Rebellion, and later became Jitō's great minister. In each sequence the expression of mourning for the prince is prefaced by a mythical portrayal of Tenmu as the founder of the present political order. In Hitomaro's banka for Prince Hinami, Tenmu is depicted in mythical terms as a heavenly God who descends to earth to rule with a divine mandate. Hitomaro's banka for Prince Takechi also alludes to Tenmu descending from heaven to command his son Takechi, and describes the military victory in the Jinshin Rebellion as a mythically ordained event. The poetic mythology of Tenmu's heavenly descent complements other historical evidence about his reign.Keywords: divine mandate; Hitomaro's banka; Jinshin Rebellion; Prince Hinami; Prince Kusakabe; Prince Takechi; Tenmu

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Frequent coauthors

• Haruo Shirane

  5 shared

• David B. Lurie

  University of California, Los Angeles

  4 shared

• Wiebke Denecke

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  2 shared

• Joshua S. Mostow

  2 shared

• Brian Steininger

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2 shared

• Oona Paredes

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1 shared

• Daham Chung

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1 shared

• Bradley Davis

  Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités

  1 shared