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

Elizabeth Oyler's Swords, Oaths, and Prophetic Visions is a notable addition to the growing body of scholarship on war and warriors in medieval Japan. Oyler's study draws productively on this earlier research, especially that of the late Jeffrey Mass, but also brings the fresh perspective of a literature scholar into a dialogue that has been conducted largely among historians. Methodologically, the author makes creative use of performance theory and Western scholarship on orality and literacy in order to deepen our understanding of the complex ways in which medieval Japan imagined the historical trauma of the Genpei War (1180–85).

The focus of Oyler's study is medieval narrative and performance traditions centered on Minamoto Yoritomo, and their role in shaping a vision of Minamoto history in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. The study also devotes two chapters to Yoritomo's allies and rivals, Kiso Yoshinaka and Yoshitsune. Readers familiar with the most popular variant of The Tale of the Heike, the recited variant known as the Kakuichi Heike (translated into English by Helen McCullough), will recall that its focus is kept steadily on the rise and fall of the Heike. Although Yoshinaka and Yoshitsune briefly take center stage in the second half, their individual stories trace out the same arc of rise and fall that organizes the larger narrative. The Kakuichi Heike is resolutely about the losers in the Genpei War, hence its curiously elliptical treatment of Yoritomo, who remains by and large a peripheral figure in the narrative. Notwithstanding an aura of refined sensitivity, it is Yoritomo's ruthless elimination of the Heike remnants and his rivals that defines him in the Kakuichi Heike.

Oyler's study sets out to explore the contradiction of this "shadowy, secondary character" in medieval literature, who is at once a "ruthless murderer of both enemies and kin" and "founder of a political order epitomized by a just system of laws" (pp. 30–31). To flesh out her account, she draws on several lesser-known Heike variants and a variety of texts that either grew out of or interacted with Heike narratives. These include Azuma kagami, which Oyler characterizes as a "pseudo-history"; Soga monogatari (The tale of the Soga brothers); Gikeiki (The chronicle of Yoshitsune); and episodes from late medieval kōwakamai (ballad drama). In tracing a cluster of interrelated motifs through these and other texts—dream prophecy and exile, the writing and presentation of formal documents, and the inheritance and naming of heirloom swords—the author delineates the contours of an evolving and at times contradictory Minamoto history. One of her conclusions is that there was a noticeable tendency to "sanitize" the history of Yoritomo's murderous ascent to power by downplaying Minamoto rivalries. An idealized vision of the rule of law instituted by Kamakura's founder was thereby read back into the very origins of Yoritomo's consolidation of power.

Were Oyler's study to consist solely of this evolution in the depiction of Yoritomo in the medieval historical imagination, it would be a valuable contribution to the available scholarship on warrior tales. But it is underpinned by a second argument, introduced in the first chapter, that breaks new ground in presenting a performative model for understanding medieval history. This argument begins with a strong critique of previous Heike scholarship, especially the longstanding tendency to divide all Heike variants into two broad categories of texts, the kataribonkei (recited lineage) and yomihonkei (read lineage):

This paradigm has been profoundly influential in all subsequent scholarly engagements with the Heike, and it has further influenced the way medieval performance "literatures" (with the important exception of nō) have been treated. It is also the framework upon which other bifurcations are hung and simplified. The most common of these pairings include: Chinese versus Japanese writing, writing versus speaking, documentary versus lyrical style, and high versus low literature.

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