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  • Image, Text and Audience: The Taishokan Narrative in Visual Representations of the Early Modern Period in Japan
  • Melinda Takeuchi (bio)
Image, Text and Audience: The Taishokan Narrative in Visual Representations of the Early Modern Period in Japan. By Melanie Trede. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, 2003. 380 pages. $55.95.

Melanie Trede's new book centers on a story that reads like a George Lucas blockbuster: the theft of a talismanic jewel by the trickery of evil nonhumans; a secret journey to their remote, heavily guarded palace to retrieve it; mega-battles featuring all manner of outlandish weaponry; heroes and villains performing supernatural feats; journeys to exotic settings; sex, gratuitous violence, and dismemberment; passion between a highborn man and a lowborn woman; femmes fatales who morph into evil monsters; and a succession of superwomen heroes. But this is not Hollywood: it is the Muromachi-period tale Taishokan (The great woven crown), set in the seventh century. It narrates the origins of the Fujiwara family through the recounting of miracles demonstrating that without doubt this family has the blessings of the gods. In a trajectory common to many traditional tales, its plot underwent numerous permutations as it absorbed elements from and found its way into genres as varied as the eighth-century Nihon shoki, Buddhist literature, nō, kyōgen, jōruri, kabuki, popular fiction, and kōwakamai ballad dramas. It is the text and illustrations based on this last literary form, kōwakamai, that Melanie Trede selects as the focus of her book, based on her doctoral dissertation (University of Heidelberg, 1999).

To take the measure of a work, first peruse its documentary apparatus. Appendix 4, "Selected bibliography," runs to nearly 50 pages, with 663 entries—massive for a mere 230 pages of text. Formidable also is the [End Page 199] number of intertextual notes plus footnotes, the latter alone totaling 361. Much of the bibliography leads to Japanese sources and includes quite a few German items. Many references point to theoretical models, such as Svetlana Alpers's "Is Art History?" (Daedalus, Vol. 106 [1977]). Aside from four previous articles by Trede treating illustrations of the Taishokan narrative, there is little else on the immediate subject. The bibliography thus demonstrates that the author is staking out uncharted territory and plans to interrogate it with theoretical sophistication derived from informed reading in other fields.

Three other appendices bear equal testimony to relentless thorough-ness. Appendix 1, "Catalogue of Taishokan pictures," lists every hanging scroll, folding screen, handscroll, fan, illuminated manuscript, and illustrated printed book (including adaptations based on jōruri, kyōgen, and kabuki versions) with motifs related to this work that Trede was able to locate, along with selected ukiyo-e prints and some three-dimensional objects. Each entry includes information on location, provenance, and publication, plus commentary. As we travel vicariously through collections from New York to Montana, from Sendai to Kyushu, through Copenhagen, London, Paris, Prague, Brussels, Dublin, and Israel, we feel that no corner of the world was left unexcavated, no old auction catalogue left unconsulted. This appendix proves that even though the theme is relatively obscure today (Japanese literature specialists I queried had never heard of it), it was considerably more popular in early modern Japan than has been heretofore appreciated. Trede claims (p. 20) that the 70 examples she cites represent only a fraction of the extant works. These continue to surface with surprising regularity. Now that she has furnished the iconographical program, the pace of identification will undoubtedly accelerate.

Appendix 2, "Tables of represented scenes," charts and comments on patterns of inclusion or omission of 15 major (and other subsidiary) scenes used in combination to illustrate the story in various formats. This narratological aid is particularly germane to the discussion of how selected elements combine distinctively to inflect meaning. Trede cautions that such tables cannot, however, represent degree of visual emphasis (like scale or coloring).

Appendix 3, "Chronology," contains an exhaustive—and exhausting—table listing every reference to, including every documented performance of, Taishokan-related material between the early fourteenth century and the second half of the nineteenth. Trede lists nearly 50 primary sources from which the information was culled, such as Oyudono...

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