Japanese Oral Tradition
Sybil A. Thornton
In Japan, the term "oral traditions" covers not only those songs, proverbs, and folktales usually considered the domain of anthropology and folklore studies, but also orally delivered or performed narratives, or katarimono, among them epics (gunki monogatari). Epics, especially the Heike monogatari (Tale of the Taira House; fourteenth c.), are still performed: epics are still read out loud or chanted to an audience using a manuscript or printed text as a libretto (as kôdan); there are at least three different existing traditions of the blind and sighted chanting Heike to the accompaniment of a lute (heikyoku). With these three existing traditions and over one hundred textual variants of the Heike alone, scholarly discussion is informed by a series of dyads—capital/provincial, guild/non-guild, elite/ non-elite, reading/performance, learned/popular, text/variant, text/music, literature/religion, and blind/sighted. Studies in the "oral" focus either on historical research into medieval guild and non-guild performers, or on fieldwork with contemporary performers in different heikyoku traditions.
Under these conditions, there is very little left of a pure "oral
tradition" to speak of, where narratives are composed, transmitted, and
preserved only in performance. However, oral tradition does survive in
manuscripts (or block-printed texts) in terms of "traditional narrative,"
where narrative strategies are based on oral composition and formulaic
diction. Although the orality of Japanese epics is now a given, it
is difficult to calculate just how much of an effect the Parry-Lord
oral-formulaic theory has had on Japanese scholarship, which has tended
to concentrate on establishing manuscript genealogies or mining the texts
for evidence of the religious practices and practitioners that might
indicate who contributed to the texts or who used them. On the other
hand, the effect of the oral-formulaic theory on western English-language
scholarship is clear enough. In heikyoku studies, musicologists
have noted the similarities of types of variation in text performance
and variation in manuscript texts, the similarity of the variation of
musical patterns and variations in diction, and the social contexts of
the development of highly individualized traditions of
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performance. In studies of the Heike and other epics, historians
and literature specialists have identified themes and type-scenes in
texts, noted the importance of such type-scenes and themes over diction
(or even chirographic codes) in categorizing texts as oral-derived or
not, and challenged the idea of the strict oral-written dichotomy. What
is particularly interesting is the way that textual, historical, and
musical studies have been brought together, because of the focus on the
Heike monogatari, which should lead to a clearer understanding
of the development of this narrative cycle and of other epic cycles as
well. What I would like to see is closer work with scholars working in
European languages.
Sybil A. Thornton , Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University, has published extensively on medieval Jishû (a Japanese Buddhist order), the epic, and Japanese cinema.
© by Sybil Anne Thornton.
References
Blacker 1984
Carmen Blacker. "The Exiled Warrior and the Hidden
Village." Folklore, 95:139-50.
Butler 1966
Kenneth Dean Butler. "The Textual Evolution of the Heike
monogatari." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 26:5-51.
Kitagawa and Tsuchida Hiroshi Kitagawa and Bruce T. Tsuchida,
trans. Tale of the
1975
Heike. 2 vols. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press.
Rutledge 1993
Eric Rutledge. "Orality and Textual Variation in the
Heike monogatari: Part One, The Phrase and its Formulaic Nature." In
Heike biwa: katari to ongaku [Heike Lute: Narrative and
Music]. Ed. by Kamisangô Yûkô. Kusakabe-shi:
Hitsuji Shôbô. pp. 360-40 [sic].
Thornton 2000
Sybil Thornton. "Kônodai senki:
Traditional Narrative and Warrior Ideology in Sixteenth-Century
Japan." OralTradition, 15:306-77.
