Swords, Oaths, and Prophetic Visions: Authoring Warrior Rule in Medieval Japan

Notes

159 Notes Chapter 1: The Heike monogatari and Narrating the Genpei War 1. In English, see George Sansom, A History of Japan to 1334 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), pp. 264–338. 2. Asakawa Kan’ichi, Documents of Iriki (Tokyo: Society for the Promotion of Science, 1955), provides one early example. 3. William LaFleur’s introduction to The Karma of Words (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983) outlines his conceptualization of a Buddhist worldview as a frame for medievality; for him, the medieval period begins when a consciousness of the decline of the Buddhist law emerges, locating it in the midHeian period; the Genpei War thus marks not the beginning of the period, but rather an important manifestation of its full ¶ourishing. 4. See, for example, Jeffrey P. Mass, ed., The Origins of Japan’s Medieval Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 5. Sanctioned histories enjoyed a prominent place in Heian period historiography , as exempli¤ed by the idea of the Rikkokushi (Six national histories). The Rikkokushi were all composed during the Nara (710–794) and Heian periods, and consist of the following: the Nihon shoki (Records of Japan, also Nihongi), in thirty books plus (not extant) genealogies covering mythical time to the early eighth century ; the Shoku Nihongi (Nihongi, continued), in forty parts, covering 697–707; the Nihon kôki (Later records of Japan), in forty parts, covering 824–833; the Shoku Nihon kôki (Later records of Japan, continued), in twenty parts, covering 833–850; the Nihon Montoku tennô jitsuroku (Actual records of Sovereign Montoku of Japan), in ten parts, covering 850–858; and the Nihon sandai jitsuroku (Actual records of three reigns in Japan), in ¤fty parts, covering 858–887. All were written in kanbun and were contemporary to the eras they describe. They are collected in Saeki Ariyoshi , ed. Zôhô Rikkokushi (Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 1940–1941). 6. The mobility of texts and performance genres is addressed by Barbara Ruch in “Medieval Jongleurs and the Making of a National Literature,” in John W. Hall and Takeshi Toyoda, eds., Japan in the Muromachi Age (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 279–309, and “The Other Side of Culture 160 in Medieval Japan,” in Yamamura Kôzô, ed., Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 3 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 500–543. 7. There are three complete English translations of the Heike monogatari: Arthur Sadler, “The Heike Monogatari,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan 46.2 (1918): 1–278 and 49.1 (1921): 1–354; Hiroshi Kitagawa and Bruce T. Tsuchida, The Tale of the Heike (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1975); and Helen Craig McCullough , The Tale of the Heike (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). Additionally , portions can be found in A. L. Sadler, The Ten Foot Square Hut and Tales of the Heike: Being two thirteenth-century Japanese classics, the “Hojoki” and selections from “The Heike Monogatari” (Sydney: Angus & Robertson Limited, 1928). All citations in this study are from McCullough’s translation unless otherwise noted. 8. The precise number of variants differs depending on the criteria used to de¤ne an individual line. In one recent study, Heike monogatari wo yomu: seiritsu no nazo wo saguru (Tokyo: Izumi shoin, 2000), p. 4, Hayakawa Kôichi identi¤es eighty. Each line is represented by a number of individual manuscripts , many of which exhibit small peculiarities. 9. The expression chûsei, a translation of the European term “medieval,” was ¤rst applied to the Japanese milieu during the Meiji period, and its dates of initiation and disintegration, not to mention its applicability at all, have been debated ever since. See Thomas Keirstead, “The Gendering and Regendering of Medieval Japan,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, English Supplement no. 9 (1995), p. 79. Throughout this study, I consider Japan’s “medieval age” to span the Kamakura through Sengoku periods, or roughly the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries . Medievality in Japan, even more than in the West, is a contentious term, one that has been applied to periods as early as the Heian and as late as the Tokugawa (1603–1868), depending on the concerns of the speci¤c study. This book, too, views the medieval period through a fairly focused lens: the period epitomized by widespread dissemination of narratives about the recent historical past. Most of the works considered here emerged and circulated broadly from the late Kamakura through early Muromachi periods. This segment of medieval culture, I contend, is fundamental to our understanding...