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Home , Samurai

Elizabeth Oyler

The Woman in Medieval and Early Modern Japanese NŇ Plays

Two genres—recitation of Heike monogatari (‘Tales of the Heike’), ’s great war tale, and the nŇ drama—tell the story of Japan’s most recognizable woman warrior, Tomoe. Although both arts emerged from a mixture of popular and narrative and dramatic practices, Heike recitation and nŇ enjoyed the patronage of medieval and early modern shogunates, under whose protection their repertoires were refined. This essay examines versions of Tomoe’s story from both within and outside of official repertoires. It focuses on the ways in which Tomoe’s anomalously gendered character is feminized within official repertoires, while it conversely becomes a springboard for resistance to such reduction in two extracanonical nŇ plays about her battlefield heroics.

Japan’s ‘age of the samurai’ encompasses its medieval and early modern periods, roughly the late twelfth through mid-nineteenth centuries. This era is conceptualized as an age of men, and for good reason. Although the classical age that preceded it was a high point for women’s rights to own and deed property, marry and divorce at will, and maintain their own households, their privileges began to erode after the establishment of the first shogun’s office in 1192, and continued to be whittled away well into at least the nineteenth century.1 Women’s contributions to belles lettres also seemingly went on hiatus: artists of the stature of and Sei Shonagon for the most part disappeared from the literary scene until the modern era.2 The actual changes were gradual, but the shift from the aristocratic to the warrior-dominated world that so altered gender politics is generally seen as a result of the of 1180-1185, which brought the warrior class to power. The first prolonged civil conflict to affect both provinces and the capital city in over 400 years, the war represents a watershed event in cultural memory. Japan’s great medieval war tale, the Tales of the Heike (Heike monogatari ᖹᐙ≀ㄒ) and the numerous works derived from it—including a

1 For a discussion of women’s legal rights during the medieval period, see Tonomura 1990: 592-623. 2 Authors of The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari ※Ặ≀ㄒ) and The Pillow Book (Makura no sŇshi ᯖⲡ⣬), respectively. Both works were written at the height of the classical period, around 1000 CE. 44 Elizabeth Oyler large number of plays of the nŇ ⬟ theater—commemorate both the events and the primary characters of the war. 3 Among the Genpei War characters appearing also in the nŇ, none is more provocative than Tomoe, the woman warrior. She appears across the variants of the Tales of the Heike, in the canonical nŇ play Tomoe, and in several extracanonical nŇ plays, two of which are discussed below: ‘The Living Tomoe’ (KonjŇ Tomoe ௒⏕ᕮ) and ‘Tomoe in Her Time’ (Genzai Tomoe ⌧ᅾᕮ).4 She is the only woman warrior given sustained narrative attention in pre-modern Japanese literature and culture, and she is always identified as the ‘woman warrior’ (onna musha ዪṊ⪅), which draws attention to the unusualness of her situation in specifically gendered terms. In the context of a society increasingly stripping women of legal rights and identifying them as subordinate members of their husbands’ households, the appearance of a woman warrior is predictably problematic, since she embraces roles that exceed the limits of “the feminine.” By simultaneously representing the active and assertive woman in a male’s role and the conventional self-sacrificing, supportive female, she is a paradox requiring explanation, which is precisely what readers find in literary works about her. The urge to resolve or sustain this paradox is one key difference between canonical and extracanonical versions of her story; the terms in which this divergence are drawn tell readers much about the reconfigurations of gender occurring in samurai culture and the role of canonization in defining the limits of those configurations.

Tomoe in the Canon: Tales of the Heike and the nŇ Tomoe

The Genpei War is among the most popular subjects of Japanese history, in large part because it marks the emergence to power of one of Japan’s most recognizable characters: the samurai. At the head of the samurai order sat the shogun, a newly-politicized military post.5 The medieval age that followed the war witnessed the establishment of two successive shogunal

3 Gunki monogatari ㌷グ≀ㄒ. This category is broader than a genre, referring generally to any narrative work from the late classical through early modern periods taking battles and/or as its subject. 4 Others include: ‘Tomoe and Yoshinaka’s Wife’ (Midai Tomoe ᚚྎᕮ) and ‘Tomoe Retreats In Yoshinaka’s Robe’ (Kinukazuki Tomoe ⾰࠿ࡎࡁᕮ). 5 Literally ‘great general.’ The term had been used to designate the leader of a military expedition up until this time. Pre-medieval shoguns were appointed on a temporary basis; after completion of their missions, they returned to their civilian positions. For a discussion of the history of the term, see Saeki 1997.