Imagining Exile in Heian Japan: Banishment in Law, Literature, and Cult by Jonathan Stockdale (review)

Imagining Exile in Heian Japan: Banishment in Law, Literature, and Cult. By Jonathan Stockdale. University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2015. x, 179 pages. $42.00.

I was pleased when I first saw an announcement of Jonathan Stockdale’s study. Since the title stated its focus on exile in Heian Japan, I guessed it ought to have something new to say about Sugawara no Michizane, the most famous of Heian exiles and the subject of my own, now aging, book. When I finally did get to see Imagining Exile in Heian Japan, I discovered that indeed it has a chapter on Michizane, which seems just about right: enough to add to our knowledge of the subject, not enough to drive my book out of print. Particularly in the study of Japan’s earlier periods, English-language scholarship is not abundant, and so the pioneering first book on a subject is likely to remain the last word on the subject for decades. As the author of one such book, I confess to benefiting from this phenomenon, for it means that my volume has stayed in print for many years and I receive an occasional, extremely small, royalty check. Having finished reading Stockdale’s work, however, I realized that my thoughts on English-language scholarship may, like my book, be somewhat out of date. In developing his argument, Stockdale is able to draw on an impressively wide range of studies, mostly in English and including quite a few recent works that I am embarrassed to admit had escaped my attention. My only excuse is that I am retired and no longer obliged to keep up on research that is not directly related to my own. The number of relevant studies results in a book quite different from one Stockdale might have written on the same subject in the recent past. While I am in a confessional mode, I should note that Stockdale’s taste in scholarship is different from mine, as I discovered when I read his preface. There, he notes that he was inspired by the work of the late scholars Michele Marra and Richard Okada. When Okada’s Figures of Resistance first appeared, now a quarter of a century ago, I did try to read it but soon gave up. I decided that, if I wanted to spend time struggling with a text that is difficult to understand, working on my primary sources would be more useful. Although Stockdale may admire works I choose to put aside, let me assure readers who share my taste in scholarship that his prose is generally accessible, even to those of us who find documents easier (and more interesting) than Jacques Derrida’s writing.

Stockdale’s book is short (123 pages of text) but covers a lot of ground. Its title correctly indicates its focus on the Heian period, but in fact its coverage is broader. It starts before the Nara period, carries its story up to the Meiji Restoration, and includes useful insights into modern Japanese scholarship. It is divided into six chapters, starting with an introduction that focuses on general theoretical issues, followed by four chapters, each a “case study” of a distinct topic: the deity Susano-o, exile in Taketori monogatari and Genji monogatari, Sugawara no Michizane and his deification as Tenjin, and the legal framework of exile. As Stockdale puts it, these chapters “examine the imagination of exile in myth, literature, cult, and law of the Japanese court” (p. 3). The concluding chapter adds material about Emperor Sutoku’s exile and brings together these various topics. Stockdale’s introduction is the most theoretically oriented chapter. Although I readily admit to a lack of enthusiasm for theorizing, I found much of the introduction valuable in offering ways to look at exile. Particularly interesting are his thoughts regarding centers and their margins. He notes that in early Japan, status was apt to be determined by proximity to the center—the emperor—and so exile was a particularly potent form of punishment. He then points out that the meaning assigned to...