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This chapter gives a close rereading of Nakagami's most well-known work, the Akiyuki trilogy: “Misaki,” Kareki nada, and Chi no hate shijō no toki. It particularly focuses on Nakagami's depiction of the voice of a transgressive man who is oppressed by the fragmentation of the relationship between him and his family and also his subaltern (Burakumin) community during the dismantlement of the Kumano Burakumin homeland. Particular attention is paid to how Nakagami's theory of monogatari (narrative) operates to depict the voice of the Kasuga Burakumin. Of particular importance is the third novel in the trilogy, Chi no hate shijō no toki. Although this chapter provides an overview of “Misaki,” and Kareki nada, the focus of the textual analysis is on how Nakagami, a writer who consciously chose to “become a Burakumin,” represents the Burakumin voice in Chi no hate shijō no toki. It also discusses the Akiyuki trilogy as an example of Nakagami's unique writing practice that derived from overlaying the modern Japanese Western-influenced naturalist literature mode with the more traditional Japanese narrative mode.

This chapter discusses Nakagami's representation of old women or oba from Kumano. To articulate the significance of the oba in Nakagami's narratives, it first investigates Nakagami's reading of the work of well-known woman author Enchi Fumiko to provide insights into his view of the tradition of the “old woman” (omina/ōna) as a storyteller of monogatari. Based on this discussion, the chapter examines Nakagami's depiction in Sen'nen no yuraku (1982) of the aged roji woman, Oryū no oba, as a Burakumin omina. Furthermore, it discusses how Nakagami presents Oryū no oba's silenced voice. Oryū no oba has a special status that derives from her role as omina who passes down monogatari to the younger generation in the community. In contrast, the chapter considers Yuki and Moyo, two aged outcaste women who feature in the Akiyuki trilogy, as oba who can never assume the voice of community storyteller. Thus, this chapter investigates how Nakagami depicts the (im)possibility of these sexed women's voices speaking to or being heard by the community while also demonstrating how the writer presents an alternative representation of their voiceless voices.

One of the most famous archetypes of heroines in Japanese anime is that of the magical girl—a girl who holds the dual identity of both an earthly being (usually a regular schoolgirl) and a heavenly being (a super-powered girl, usually on a mission against sinister beings). While seemingly corresponding with the Western genre of superheroes, and knowingly drawing inspiration from American fantasy sitcoms of the 1960s such as "Bewitched" and "I Dream of Jeannie", the roots of the magical girl genre go deeper into traditional Japanese culture (for example, the Taketori monogatari and goddess of creation, Izanami). The author traces the divide between the earthly and heavenly identities of many anime heroines by examining the major common elements found in three film genres—adventure (Hayao Miyazaki's 1986 film "Castle in the Sky"), science fiction (Mamoru Oshii's 1995 film "Ghost in the Shell"), and historical drama (Satoshi Kon's 2001 film "Millennium Actress").

Teika was biliterate in classical Japanese and classical Chinese, and well read in the Chinese historical and literary classics. His diary was kept mainly, but not entirely, in kanbun, a Japanese variant of classical Chinese. Portions of the diary in which Teika wrote in kana are studied for what they might reveal about Teika’s attitude toward classical Chinese language, history, and culture. Teika also wrote Matsuranomiya monogatari (The Tale of Matsura), a romantic adventure tale set in Tang-period China. A reading of the tale suggests that Teika had a highly favorable view of classical Chinese culture, and did not regard it as entirely foreign.

By the close of Japan’s medieval period, the great Buddhist temple complexes lay shattered, along with their hegemony over cultural production. Improvements in printing technology and the growth of cities stimulated a new demand for entertaining tales, both printed in commercial publishing and performed in the new puppet theater. This chapter demonstrates that tales of the life of the Buddha thrived within this body of work, but now as popular literature, and their deference to canonical texts ebbed. Key bodies of this work include the Shaka no honji corpus and its elaboration in Shaka hasso monogatari. Exemplified by Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s puppet play Shaka nyorai tanjo-e, increasingly free retellings of the life dominated commercial storytelling about the Buddha through the end of the nineteenth century. These works transform the Buddha’s life into an entertaining and moving story, and the Buddha into a suffering hero, in a mode responsive to distinctly local concerns.

The epilogue draws upon a small number of anomalous tales, which defy easy categorization to bring them into conversation with the broader hermeneutical questions that have preoccupied scholars working in other times and cultures in a variety of disciplines. What does it mean, for example, that in many a medieval tale, sex is the preserve not only of humans, but that animals and vegetables too are also accorded a place in sexual intercourse? The alien and unsettling nature of these tales is used in order to highlight the impossibility of subsuming the Japanese medieval world within our own.

This essay, by the editors, draws from the various chapters to address the larger goals of the volume of contextualizing and deconstructing images of the Heike (or Ise Taira) from the time of their historical emergence in the twelfth century to the modern age. It identifies common distinctions made in discussions of the Heike (between warriors and aristocrats, and between the Heike’s actions and their later commemoration) and elucidates the aim of the volume in breaking down these binary categories to give a more holistic and accurate view of the Heike’s activities and the ways in which they have been remembered and reconstructed.

This essay is primarily concerned with a comparison between historical accounts of members of the Heike with their depictions in the Heike monogatari, in which the author clearly shows the extent to which the Heike monogatari manipulates the images of Heike figures and demonizes Taira no Kiyomori (1118-1181) in particular. The author discusses the Heike monogatari’s initial composition, which may well have involved Heike survivors and supporters at the early-thirteenth-century court. He also examines the Heike’s dual identity as both warriors and aristocrats, arguing that Kiyomori, while working within the Heian court hierarchy, paved the way for Japan’s first warrior government (bakufu) through strategies that the first Kamakura shogun, Minamoto no Yoritomo (1147-1199), later employed.

This essay deals with representations of the Heike in the Tokugawa period (1600-1868), focusing particularly on images and descriptions of the Heike in comicbooks intended for a broad audience. The author shows that the “Heike world” was an essential element of popular culture in the mid-Tokugawa period, and generally involved sympathetic portrayals of the Heike while casting the Seiwa Genji as villains, a dynamic that can be understood as an implicit criticism of the Tokugawa regime. The author also argues that sound played as crucial a role as vision in Tokugawa narratives, demonstrating this through an analysis of the figure of the blinded Taira no Kagekiyo (?-1184).

This essay examines the changing depiction of Taira no Kiyomori (1118-1181) in the postwar era. Consistently depicted as an embodiment of greed and excessive ambition in accounts of the Heike from the medieval to the Meiji period, Kiyomori is depicted far more positively in Yoshikawa Eiji’s novel Shin Heike monogatari (The New Tale of the Heike, 1950-57), a work that was adapted to film by Mizoguchi Kenji in 1955. The film became enormously popular in a postwar world where many Japanese came to identify Kiyomori with democracy and anti-authoritarianism. The author analyzes Kiyomori and his on-screen family, particularly the roles of his mother and wife, in relation to social conditions in 1950s Japan.

This chapter examines the state of Japanese crime literature prior to the emergence of detective fiction, from the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) to the early Meiji period (1868–1912). More specifically, it considers the continuities and differences between the preexisting native tradition of crime narrative and the newly imported genre. The two major forms of crime narrative in circulation before the detective story arrived in Japan were the courtroom narrative, such as Ihara Saikaku's Honchō-ōin hiji (Trials in the Shade of a Cherry Tree, 1689) and the criminal biography, an example of which is Kanagaki Robun's Tale of Takahashi Oden the She-Devil (Takahashi Oden yasha monogatari, 1879). This chapter discusses courtroom narratives in Japan during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as well as criminal biography in the early Meiji period. It also considers the genesis of Takahashi Oden yasha monogatari, with particular emphasis on its element of referentiality, incorporation of two actual legal documents, and its treatment of the themes of social identity and social mobility.

This chapter examines the theme of exile in the earliest work of prose fiction (monogatari) from the Heian court, the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter (Taketori monogatari). The chapter argues that the role of exile as a trope to express discontent within the Taketori has not been adequately understood within modern scholarship, but that this role was not so overlooked in the Heian period itself, as evidenced by the discussion of the Taketori within the Genji Monogatari (Tale of Genji).

This chapter explores the worship of Emperor Sutoku as a vengeful spirit from the Heian period to the modern era in Japan. The chapter argues that myth, literature, cult, and law cannot be considered as separate fields of inquiry, and shows through the study of the Sutoku cult how those fields were intertwined in historical discourse and practice. Finally, the chapter argues that while exile has disappeared in modern Japan and is largely absent from academic discussions of Japan, the topic of exile and banishment provides a crucial key for understanding the Japanese court during the classical period of Heian Japan.

This chapter introduces and compares three of the earliest biographical compilations of eccentrics:Hōsa kyōshaden (Biographies of Nagoya madmen, 1778); Ochiguri monogatari (Fallen chestnuts tales, 1780s); and Kinsei kijinden (KKD, Eccentrics of recent times, 1790). It examines how these publications, KKD most prominently, adapted eccentricity to contemporary conditions by conflating Daoist with Confucian ethics and ultimately (and ironically) establishing eccentrics as archetypes of moral virtue. Collectively, these works reveal a repositioning of biography in Edo period popular literature. Though embracing a newfound secular eclecticism, biography inserted itself into popular literature while preserving its traditionally didactic function. Its reinvention of the eccentric was also a repositioning in the sense that it brought socially marginalized individuals directly into the public spotlight. The result was a literary turn toward production and consumption of strangeness for commercial purposes.

This chapter examines The Tale of Genji or the Genji monogatari, written in the early eleventh century by a woman named Murasaki Shikibu. The title The Tale of Genji comes from the surname of the hero, who is the son of the emperor regnant at the beginning of the narrative and whose life, marriage, and relationships with various women are described over the course of the first forty-one chapters. The remaining thirteen chapters are primarily concerned with the affairs of Kaoru, Genji's putative son. Shikibu's creation of highly individualized characters in a realistic social setting and her subtle presentation of inner thought and emotion have encouraged critics to call the Genji the world's first psychological novel.

The symbolic center of the Japanese and Roman state was the capital. Its topography and history were constant points of reference, as its residences and salons provided prime spaces for literary activities. The chapter sketches how very unlike Kyoto and Ancient Rome were as capitals. It then explores how these differences informed literary production in eleventh-century Japan and Augustan Rome, along the vector of time and the vector of romance. How did writers locate the capitals they inhabited in time? With what kind of teleologies, vectors of destiny, did they endow their cities and how did the genres they chose inflect their capital visions? This chapter examines two particularly contrasting cases: the strongly prospective vision of Rome in Virgil’s Aeneid and the floatingly timeless vision of the capital in the Collection of Japanese and Chinese-style Poems for Recitation (Wakan rôeishû). Next it explores the new literature of romance that was intricately connected with the urban fabric of capital culture—the rise of vernacular romantic prose tales and diaries in eleventh century Japan and the emergence of Latin love elegy in first century BCE Rome—comparing some of Propertius’s Elegies with moments from Sei Shônagon’s Pillow Book.

There was one cultural achievement that Rome and Japan self-consciously lacked: indigenous philosophical traditions. This made philosophers in Rome and Confucian scholars in Japan into both exemplars of authority and targets for satirical attack. This chapter explores the strategic use of satire by Japanese and Latin authors in appropriating and attacking their reference cultures’ philosophical traditions. It compares the little-known Genji Poems (Fu Hikaru Genji monogatari shi), a re-creation of Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji in Sino-Japanese verse, to Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Philology and Mercury, a canonical compendium of the Seven Liberal Arts. Both texts play with cultural and linguistic translation. The Genji Poems translate the romantic Tale of Genji into the Chinese-style world of scholarship, boldly claiming canonicity for a vernacular tale, but also ridiculing scholarly pretensions. Similarly, Martianus translates some of Cicero’s polemics against Plato into Greek Mennipean satire—explored here through Lucian’s satires—which is playful and slap-stick, but also considers the act of making fun of philosophers to be a superior form of philosophy. Both the Genji Poems and Martianus’ Marriage show how serious aesthetic and philosophical critique joins hands with parody and satire as a tool of canonization, of cultural reconciliation, and empowering self-deprecation.

The Gotō Museum’s “Yomigaeru Genji monogatari emaki” exhibit of 2005–2006 was an ambitious attempt to “resurrect” the museum’s legendary illustrated handscrolls of The Tale of Genji (the Genji monogatari emaki) by having artists paint a series of new, more polished and more vibrant but ostensibly “faithful” copies to be exhibited alongside the originals. However, the refabrication of the scrolls strategically excludes the narrative calligraphic kotobagaki sections that compose the lion’s share of the extant Genji scrolls, effectively severing an intimate bond between narrative text and narrative image. The redacted reproduction also fails to account for the calligraphic performance of dying that figures so prominently in the climatic deathbed scenes of the Tale of Genji protagonists Kashiwagi and Murasaki no Ue. This chapter considers some of the potential implications of this omission. It aims to think through the spatial and temporal dimensions of artistic representations of death in relation to the composition—and decomposition—of the Genji emaki. Specifically, it examines some of the consequences involved in “resurrecting” the twelfth-century scrolls within the context of the twenty-first-century gallery in order to critique a contemporary insistence on the flatness of images and the displacement of text that results.

This chapter focuses on subculture, beginning with a discussion of why it is being rejected by critics and writers of fine fiction. Meanwhile, the subculture critics assert its new domain by drawing on the unrecognized properties of prose fiction; these properties include the concept of monogatari and an image of fiction derived from the literary naturalism of the early twentieth century. Nakagami’s subculture acts as one way of introducing it to stories outside the limits of the common US-Japan relations narrative, instead shifting to Asian locales. The chapter also features two texts: Different Tribes (Izoku; 1984–92) and Eternal Return of a Southbound Ship (Minami kaiki-sen; 1989–90), as examples of works restored by OtsukaEiji and Azuma Hiroki, the same media critics who dismissed the significance of literary fiction.