Envisioning the Classics
Envisioning the Classics
The Tale of the Heike in Edo-Period Comic Books
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).
Keywords: Taira no Kagekiyo, Taira no Tadanori, Heike monogatari, kusazōshi, Tokugawa bakufu, blindness
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