Eccentric Spaces, Hidden Histories: Narrative, Ritual, and Royal Authority from The Chronicles of Japan to The Tale of the Heike (review)

The sophisticated application of contemporary critical theory to the study of premodern Japanese literary and historical texts is something of a rarity in English-language scholarship, especially when it is combined with a masterful apprehension of difficult primary and secondary sources written in a variety of periods and compositional styles. However, David Bialock’s Eccentric Spaces, Hidden Histories is one such work: a book of extraordinary breadth and depth, which, most reductively described, seeks to explore the various theoretical constructions, symbolic representations, and heteroglossic articulations of royal authority in Japan in the Nara, Heian, and Kamakura periods. While the book is rarely “easy”—it presupposes on the part of the reader a deep familiarity with both modern critical theory and premodern Japanese and Chinese historical, literary, philosophical, and linguistic traditions—it is a groundbreaking work of enormous insight and erudition, flawed only, perhaps, by its tendency toward excessive abstraction and a generally loose thematic focus.

As Bialock explains, his study attempts three things:

to cast light on a body of knowledge and ritual praxis related to Daoist and yin-yang ideas that has remained relatively hidden from view in Englishlanguage scholarship on Japan; to complicate our ways of speaking about the relationship between space and narrative in their cultural, ritual, and political manifestations; and to locate both sets of problems in a literary and historical trajectory that extends to the world of Heike and other medieval texts.

(p. 319)

In its main part, the book comprises eight chapters divided into three untitled sections (parts 1, 2, and 3). Part 1 considers an assemblage of texts from the Nara and early Heian periods, including Kojiki, Nihon shoki, Man’yōshū, and Kaifūsō, “with the aim of recovering some of the yin-yang and Daoist ideas that contributed to the symbolic representation of royal authority” (p. 111). Part 2, made up of chapters 4 and 5, constitutes more of the same, with increased attention to issues of historical narrativity, polyvocality, and sacred and nomadic speech (drawing upon Gilles Deleuze in his articulations of the “nomos”), as well as an extended consideration, in chapter 5, of the late eleventh-century Ōkagami. Part 3, comprising chapters 6, 7, and 8, invokes the work of Henri Lefebvre in order to explore “various aspects of late Heian and early medieval space, focusing on the interplay between centered, peripheral, and heterotopic space” (p. 13), particularly as those centers and “heterotopias,” to borrow Lefebvre’s (and Bialock’s) term, are manifested in the Kakuichibon, Engyōbon, Genpei jōsuiki, and other variants of Heike monogatari.

While many of the primary sources examined will be familiar to readers in the field of premodern Japanese literary studies, Bialock approaches them in refreshingly new ways and with new intellectual concerns. In a subsection of chapter 6 (“China in the Medieval Imaginary”), for example, he quotes and discusses an extended passage from the eleventh-century scholar Ōe no Masafusa’s Kairaishiki (which Bialock renders as Kugutsuki, employing an alternate reading of the characters in the title). Kairaishiki is well known in contemporary Japanese- and English-language scholarship—in addition to Amino Yoshihiko’s disquisitions upon the work, Janet Goodwin, Terry Kawashima, and Jane Marie Law have translated it in its entirety and discussed it at length in their respective books—but whereas Amino, Goodwin, Kawashima, and Law have tended to consider Kairaishiki for what it can and cannot tell us about the lives and customs of kugutsu puppeteers,¹ Bialock examines it for what its exoticization of the kugutsu suggests about “a new geographical imaginary where the play of difference works both within and against the dominant ideology of the center” (p. 185).² Bialock thus takes a recognized text and interprets it toward a new and seemingly unconventional purpose. Again, in a discussion of...