Authorizing the Shogunate: Ritual and Material Symbolism in the Literary Construction of Warrior Order by Vyjayanthi R. Selinger (review)

Vyjayanthi Selinger considers Heike monogatari (The Tale of the Heike) as a corpus of texts rather than concentrating on the Kakuichibon canonical variant, which has long been the go-to version in English thanks to the translations of Helen Craig McCullough and, more recently, Royall Tyler. Recent works by Elizabeth Oyler and Amy Franks have taken a similar approach. No less significant, Selinger joins a small but growing group of scholars who have moved beyond debates on the Heike’s composition, textual lineages, and historical accuracy and take full advantage of sophisticated tools of modern critical theory. Like Michael Watson, Selinger is very attentive to narratology; like David Bialock, she takes very seriously the Heike corpus’s ideological project.¹

Selinger’s ambitious and thought-provoking examination of the Heike corpus aims to shed light on an important but unwieldy subject: the historical construction and rhetorical legitimation of the warrior order. It does so (primarily) through sustained analysis of the longest and most chronicle-like of the corpus’s variant texts, Genpei jōsuiki (Chronicle of the rise and fall of the Taira and Minamoto families). Like most of the other Heike texts, both of the kataribon (“recited variants”) and yomihon (“read variants”) varieties, Genpei jōsuiki was completed in the fourteenth century, and fourteenth-century concerns inform its characterization of the twelfth-century incidents it depicts. Summarizing her approach throughout the book, Selinger aptly observes that “while we accept today that it is the present that shapes the past for ideological reasons, these accounts insist that we also consider the corollary idea—that the symbolic structure given to the past helps produce the historical present” (p. 171; emphasis in the original). This search for the past’s significance to the (unknown) authors’ present is what leads Selinger to Genpei jōsuiki in particular. It is here that the founder of the Kamakura shogunate, Minamoto no Yoritomo, who barely appears in the Kakuichibon variant, is most prominently featured.

Authorizing the Shogunate comprises six chapters (the first of which is an introduction, the last a brief epilogue). Each chapter is built on a series of linked readings of the Heike corpus. The themes and episodes analyzed are disparate, but Selinger concentrates on the moments that showcase Genpei jōsuiki’s distinctive traits and help elucidate the yomihon variants’ historical and political agenda. Thus chapter 2, “Fictions of Emergence: The Symbolic Regulation of Violence in the Battles of 1180,” examines the shogun-to-be’s appropriation of courtly rituals to both sanction and contain the violence of war. Claiming that prerogative, the author argues, was crucial to the text’s fourteenth-century authors, who were engaged in justifying warrior rule during the conflict between the Ashikaga and the Southern Court. The shogun’s ritual purity also serves, in the Heike corpus, to counter the association of the east with a defiled periphery. Selinger devotes much attention to the encounter in a bathhouse between the firebrand monk Mongaku and the young Yoritomo. The scene symbolically marks Yoritomo’s reentry into society, after a long exile, as a leader cleansed of association with his rebel forebears. The encounter culminates with Mongaku’s physiognomic reading of Yoritomo’s visage, which confirms him as a true scion of the Minamoto while revealing a combination of prudence and innate authority that his relatives and rivals lack.

If Selinger’s main arguments are sophisticated and insightful, her ancillary points are of great interest as well: during discussion of Yoritomo’s appropriation of Hōjōe, a ritual honoring life that gradually expanded to include a celebration of the court’s prerogative to regulate violence, the author details the transformation of Hachiman, the god most consistently linked with that ritual, into a god of war. This account nuances our understanding of the link between Hachiman and the Minamoto, enriching, for instance, our...