The Water Mirror
,
The Clear Mirror
reflects the perspective of
the (relatively) disenfranchised. And as in
Plums and Pines
, the state of
affairs celebrated in
The Clear Mirror
’s narrative has already been con-
signed to the past. What would the principle be that enabled both the
Kenmu Restoration and its collapse? How persuasive could an institu-
tional focus be when its strongest proponent, Emperor Godaigo, was
dead? Given such dramatic developments,
The Clear Mirror
may mark
an epistemological shift, with the actual division of the court suggesting
that the former ways of understanding the world could not be produc-
tively applied to interpreting a new reality.
82
If this is the case, then the
78. Perkins observes that a return to the framing story “would have diminished
its [the ending poem’s] impact,” although he does not elaborate beyond that (
Clear
Mirror
, 25).
79. Kaneko e
t a
l.,
Mizukagami zen chūshaku
, 449.
80. Kidō,
Masukagami
, 8. The translation is from Perkins,
Clear Mirror
, 28.
81. Perkins writes, “His [the author’s] basic aim, like Emon’s [author of
Tale of
Flowering Fortunes
], was to tailor historical writing to the taste of an aristocratic reader-
ship by employing the elegant devices of the fictional tale, and in that he succeeded
better than any of his peers” (
Clear Mirror
, 16).
82. Watase Sigeru similarly sees
The Clear Mirror
as the end of a genre, albeit the genre
of the “historical tale” (“Rekishi monogatari no shūen”). He attributes this to the irrecon-
cilability of language and topic. Watase’s analysis rests on the traditional categorizations
266
Memories of Mirrors
decision to write the history of the events that led to the Kenmu Restora-
tion as a
Mirror
becomes a doubly nostalgic gesture, one that celebrates
not only the court culture that Godaigo represented, but also the age in
which the world was still legible via the
Mirror
genre. In this light, it is
unsurprising that
The Clear Mirror
marks the end of the writing of the
medieval court-oriented historiographic
Mirrors
.
BAKUFU TIES: THE MIRROR OF THE GODS
The Mirror of the Gods
is the last of the medieval historiographic
Mirrors
,
the final stop on the path set by
The Mirror of the East
. Although
The Mir-
ror of the Gods
has not received much scholarly attention, the fact of its
composition attests to how mainstream the
Mirror
had become as a ve-
hicle for narrating the past.
83
After the varying results of the early
fourteenth-century experimentation with
Mirrors
and their features that
resulted in chronicles, discussions, and even tales of the past, it was a
Mir-
ror
that was selected late in the fourteenth century to narrate an account
of history legitimating the Ashikaga-backed Northern Court. And as with
The Clear Mirror
, the composition of
The Mirror of the Gods
seems to have
initially been inspired by the divided court. The first sovereign listed as
the “current emperor” (
kinjō
) is Goen’y
ū
(1358–93), which dates the work’s
initial composition to the rule of the third shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimit-
su.
84
That said,
The Mirror of the Gods
is also a work that continued to be
added to well into the fifteenth century: each of the subsequent entries,
of the genre: Classical Japanese only, exclusive focus on the court, and so on. Although
framed in discursive terms that do not line up with the goals of the present study,
Hyōdō Hiromi’s characterization of this development also resonates: “The fact that
historical tales of the court, which ran from
The Great Mirror
to
The New Mirror
,
The
Water Mirror
, and
The Clear Mirror
, concluded with Emperor Godaigo’s attack on the
bakufu
signifies, in a nutshell, that the age in which the relation of the history of court
society as ‘Japanese’ history was possible ended with the age of Emperor Godaigo”
(
Godaigo tennō
, 4).
83. Sasaki Kiichi identifies three manuscript lineages for this text, as well as the type-
set
Zoku Gunsho ruijū
edition, and one other (unseen) version in the possession of Sokō
Bunko as the forms in which it survives today (“‘Shinmeikyō’ denpon [jō],” 16–17).
84. Goen’yū reigned in 1371–82, which could mean that
The Mirror of the Gods
was
being compiled or composed even as Yoshimitsu’s mentor, Nijō Yoshimoto, was writing
The Clear Mirror
.
Nostalgia for a Unified Realm
267
which run through Emperor Gohanazono, refers to its subject as currently
occupying the throne. And with the latest dated event a large earthquake
in Eiky
ō
6 (1434), the work clearly contains later additions.
85
This obviously layered composition is unprecedented in the
Mirrors
.
On the one hand, it may indicate that
The Mirror of the Gods
had enough
lingering prestige to not be supplanted by a new history of the reunified
courts. On the other hand, the fact that it inspired no known successors
as well as the way the final entry seems to end in the middle of Emperor
Gohanazono’s reign can be interpreted as signs that the
kanbun
,
bakufu
-
sympathetic
Mirror
, like its
wabun
court-oriented counterpart, had out-
lived its usefulness as a productive means of narrating the past.
As with many of the predecessors to
The Mirror of the Gods
, the text’s
authorship is unclear—although the work follows the emperors of the
Northern Court as the legitimate line, which suggests a pro-Ashikaga ori-
entation. Sasaki Kiichi argues for the involvement of the Satake family
in addenda to the work.
86
His painstaking comparison of surviving man-
uscripts leads him to conclude that a reconstruction of the original text,
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