Abstract

Abstract:

Within the history of medieval Japanese storytelling, including early medieval martial tales and late medieval kōwakamai, sekkyō, and otogizōshi, there is a tradition of employing prayers and supernatural spells to boost an ally or bring down a foe. While in early medieval works like Heike monogatari and its variants curses and other esoteric formulas tend to be invoked by monastic practitioners on behalf of laypeople, from around the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century a small number of extramonastic warriors can be seen using mudras to cast spells on their own, without professional (monastic) assistance. In the present article, I explore the nature and rhetoric of curses, spells, and secret scrolls—including Heihō hijutsu ikkansho (Single Scroll of Secret Martial Techniques)—in several works of principally late medieval martial fiction in the genres of kōwakamai and otogizōshi. In doing so, I seek to illuminate what I argue was a new development in the conventions of an emerging genre fiction of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and to provide nuance to our understanding of the vast and diverse body of medieval martial prose literature, which, in English-language scholarship and translation, has tended to be overwhelmingly represented by the great canonical works of the early medieval period.

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