Chapter One
The Genpei jōsuiki and the Historical Narration of the Genpei War
On the second month of the first year of Hōgen, a rebellion broke out in the Japanese realm, and from this moment the age of the warrior began. (Jien, 1221) As the Japanese court thinker Jien (1155–1225) observed in the political his- tory Gukanshō (1221), the latter half of the twelfth century was a period of historical turmoil. Three conflicts—the Hōgen Rebellion (1156), the Heiji Rebellion (1159–1160), and the Genpei War (1180–1185)—shook the polity as numerous elite and non-elite institutional players, including emperors and retired emperors, temples and shrines, military aristocrats and local strongmen, jockeyed for power. The last of these conflicts, the Genpei War, led to the birth of the shogunate, or government run by warriors. The historical record shows that the emergence of warrior power was the culmination of two centuries of institutional and social change. Yet, the hundred-odd variant texts of the Heike monogatari (Tales of the Heike; hereafter Heike) imagine a world at a critical turning point. As imperial authority declines in this world, bitterly opposed religious and political factions plunge the realm into war; peace returns to the realm only after the timely intervention of the future shogun Minamoto Yoritomo. Echoing Jien’s remark about epochal shift, the Heike presents the transition from a courtly era to the musa no yo (age of the warrior) as a fait accompli. These tales, though begun around Jien’s time, were completed dur- ing the fourteenth century as new political struggles were unfolding. In 1336, for example, the warrior Ashikaga Takauji (1305–1358) drove out the sitting Emperor Go-Daigo (1288–1339) from the capital of Kyoto to estab- lish the Muromachi shogunate. For the next sixty years of the Nanbo kuchō (Northern and Southern Courts, 1336–1392) period, the shogunate remained at the helm of a polity divided between the Northern court established by Ashikaga Takauji and the Southern court established by his rival Go-Daigo. The political turmoil of the fourteenth century functioned as a crucible for the creation of multiple accounts of shogunal rule in texts such as the Baishōron (Discourse of Plums and Pines, 1352–1388) and 2 chapter one
Gen’ishū (Tales of Minamoto Authority, 1387–1389), and painting scrolls like the Gosannen kassen emaki (Illustrated Tale of the Latter Three Years War, 1347), Yasuhira seibatsu-e (Illustrated Tale of the Defeat of Yasuhira, 1359?), and Suwa daimyōjin ekotoba (Suwa Shrine Scroll, 1356) (see chapter 6 of this volume). In many of these texts, the twelfth-century past became a foundational moment—an origin imbued with significance—from which subsequent Japanese history could be narrated. The impulse to re-narrate the Genpei War in the Heike was an integral part of this historiographical enterprise, designed to provide shape to a chaotic past such that it legiti- mated the present and underwrote a future for shoguns. The Heike corpus is thus frequently characterized as the ‘charter myth of warrior order.’ To scholars who read the English translation of the Heike, this aphorism has always been confusing, since the canoni- cal Kakuichibon variant (1371) does very little to valorize the first shogun Minamoto Yoritomo. More critically, readers lack an understanding of the iconography used to narrate this historic shift. This book tackles our misconception of Yoritomo’s small textual footprint by showing that the mythicization of warrior power is clearest in the last and longest vari- ant, the Genpei jōsuiki (late fourteenth c.). I suggest, by extension, that the twelfth-century past was subject to ongoing interpretation in the retrospective glance of the Heike corpus, creating ever more detailed accounts of shogunal power. With respect to the second problem—that of the iconographic construction of warrior power—I contend that the Heike incorporates symbolic frames rooted in ritual and material culture to contain violence, and to evoke social and political order. These frames, often overlooked when the text is treated as an autonomous whole, reveal that texts coexist with a range of phenomena that form a culture’s signifi- cative systems. The rituals, customs, and objects taken up in this study are not “deposits” of an anterior historical reality; they are expressive devices through which historical change is explained. These symbolic strategies, alternately celebratory and domesticating, reveal that the scripting of sho- gunal power in the Heike corpus was not just concerned with the legiti- mation of a new polity, as the term ‘charter myth’ might indicate. Writing about warrior power was equally about domesticating and regulating war- rior violence.
The Late Heian World and the Genpei War
Fictional portrayals of the Genpei War frequently dramatize the con- flict as the settling of scores between two families, the Taira and the