Flowering Tales: Women Exorcising History in Heian Japan by Takeshi Watanabe (review)

This is the first monograph-length study in English of Eiga monogatari (Flowering Tales), the progenitor of rekishi monogatari (historical tales) in Japan. Eiga monogatari, considered to be of multiple female authorship, comprises forty chapters: the first thirty, seihen (the main books), cover the years 946–1029, and the last ten, zokuhen (the sequel), the years 1030–1092. An excellent translation of the seihen by William H. McCullough and Helen Craig McCullough, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes, has been available since 1980,¹ but the text has elicited scant critical attention in English compared to Genji monogatari, Heian diaries, or Heian poetry. Watanabe's volume redresses this gap.

One of the obstacles to appreciation that Eiga monogatari presents is its hybrid identity: is it history or literature? In their introduction to Flowering Fortunes, the McCulloughs stress that in Heian Japanese, the term monogatari (tale) did not exclusively connote fiction, but rather meant "'colloquial narratives,' which might be fictional, semi-fictional, or nonfictional"; they assert that Eiga could be considered "the historical side of the monogatari coin whose obverse was the fictional Genji" (McCullough and McCullough, vol. 1, pp. 7–8). Nonetheless, the fabrications and many factual errors in the text (outlined in McCullough and McCullough, pp. 33–37), make it difficult for historians to take it seriously as history. For the literary scholar, on the other hand, the work's chronological structure and seeming absence of central themes can make it appear like a long string of anecdotes, not that interesting as literature.

Watanabe suggests that another reason for the relative lack of attention afforded Eiga may be found in the contrast between its opening passages and those of Genji:

Genji commences with a riddle and disorder. With affirmative declarations, Eiga sees harmony, which may have been ideal, but makes for a less riveting plot. Most narratives are driven by conflict and its resolution. Evolutionarily, human beings are wired to be attentive to danger (the negativity bias). Eiga is relatively free of such confrontations, not because that period was peaceful, but precisely because the aim was to quell such tensions.

(p. 7)

This introduces Watanabe's central thesis, that the authors of Eiga were writing history to promote harmony and healing in a society riven by competition and jealousies. He stresses that there was a real fear of vengeful spirits, which were believed to arise after the deaths of people who felt they had been wronged, whether by other people or fate itself. Watanabe posits that the narrator in Eiga can be considered metaphorically a shaman who exorcises the potentially negative energy of the losers, the unlucky, and the unjustly persecuted in that community by providing an empathetic retelling or "re-remembering" of their stories that offers, at least, a "placatory, symbolic space of honor" (p. 141). He argues that Genji supplied the model for writing a realistic representation of that society in "a prose language that could grapple with its members' turbulent experiences at court, occupied with merciless political intrigue, unsettling gossip, and dangerous envy" (p. 2). The authors of Eiga employed the discourse of fiction to write a history of the personal side of court life (which could arguably be considered the more politically important arena, especially for women). Watanabe calls the genre they invented "affective history," a serious historical record that only occasionally sacrifices factual accuracy to serve its primary goal of fostering empathy, connection, and reconciliation within a community. This thesis convincingly explains why, despite its emphasis in the main books on recording the flowering fortunes of the Northern branch of the Fujiwara and, in particular, the spectacular career of Fujiwara no Michinaga (966–1027), Eiga nevertheless includes so many narratives of those who lost in the competition. Likewise, it explains why, despite the surface texture of harmony and auspiciousness, the work also contains many scenes of illness, death, and mourning.

Watanabe sees another important inspiration for the affective history...