Kamo no Chomei was born into a family of Shinto
priests in Kyoto, Japan, during the late Heian period
(794–1192). In the 1170s and 1180s, political
power shifted from the court at Kyoto to the newly
established shogunate (military government) in
Kamakura. During Kamo’s youth, inept and inefficient
governance in the capital resulted in the mismanagement
of various natural disasters that
struck Kyoto. Kamo lived through a huge fire, a
tornado, an earthquake, and lingering famine and
pestilence that the government could not seem to
eradicate. The famine of 1181 killed more than
42,300 people in just two months, and Kamo was
an astute and horrified observer of these disasters
and their effects.As he remarks in his essay Hojoki,
“I have seen not a few strange happenings.”
As a poet, Kamo showed talent at a young age
and eventually was named to the Imperial Poetry
Bureau by the retired emperor. The bureau was
made up of Japan’s leading poets, and Kamo
quickly found his place among them. Eventually,
however, disgusted with life in the city and exhausted
by the overwhelming disasters, he moved
into the wooded mountains, where he set up a new
life in a small, isolated hut. There, at age 60, he produced
his masterpiece, an essay account of the
events of his youth and his subsequent retreat to
isolation. In poetic detail, he describes his solitary
life, writing that “the hut in which I shall spend the
last remaining years of my dew-like existence, is like
the shelter that some hunter might build for a
night’s lodging in the hills, or like the cocoon some
old silkworm might spin.” The work, called Hojoki
(An Account of My Hut), is recognized as a masterpiece
of the Japanese essay tradition and is one of
the earliest examples of literature as conscience.
In Hojoki, Kamo describes the horrific sights and
smells of famine in detail, tells of the other disasters
he lived through, and then extols the virtues of solitude
and isolation. He finds the serenity of his life
favorable to the turbulence of city life, preferring his
quiet days of chores and walks to the human misery
he encountered in the past. At the end of the
work, however, he questions his own sanity, wondering
whether he has not grown too attached to
detachment in the world he has cultivated.
Kamo also wrote the Heike Monogatari, a story
of the rise and fall of the Heike clan of Japan, which
was the most dramatic such political epic in the history
of the empire. In the story, the chaos brought
on by the Heike clan’s decline is the background to
Kamo no Chomei’s fraught life. His sentiment is
genuine as he describes the clan’s tragic end; defeated
by the Minomoto clan, the leaders of the
Heike throw themselves into the sea to drown.
By confronting the horrors of his past while
cultivating a contented yet reclusive life, Kamo no
Chomei addresses the universal human concerns
of suffering, moral reflection, and recovery.
English Versions of Works by
Kamo no Chomei
Hojoki: Visions of a Torn World. Translated by Yasuhiko
Morigushi and David Jenkins. Berkeley,
Calif.: Stone Bridge Press, 1996.
The Ten-Foot-Square Hut and Tales of the Heike.
Translated by A. L. Sadler. Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1970.
A Work about Kamo no Chomei
Pandey, Rajyashree.Writing and Renunciation in Medieval
Japan: The Works of the Poet-Priest Kamo
no Chomei. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Center for Japanese Studies, 1997.