Multilingual Writing in Medieval Japan
85
month of Jish
ō
4 (1180) sparked what was to become a five-year conflict of
unprecedented scope. In addition to enduring the H
ō
gen and Heiji Dis-
turbances of 1156 and 1160, which hover at the margins of historiographic
writings such as
The New Mirror
, the capital had also faced the abortive
Shishigatani incident, an unsuccessful attempt in Angen 3 (1177) to dis-
place Taira no Kiyomori.
2
This had been followed by Kiyomori’s mili-
tary coup in Jish
ō
3 (1179). In all likelihood, the escalation of this-worldly
instability functioned as a sign that Japan had entered the latter days of
the Buddhist law.
Although it is widely accepted that the Genpei War was not an ef-
fort to displace the imperial system, it both led to a certain restructuring
of government and, arguably of more significance, occasioned a serious
alteration in the worldview of at least some of the elite. With the establish-
ment of the semiautonomous
bakufu
in Kamakura, victors and van-
quished alike found themselves in a world in which imperial power was
circumscribed in a way previously unthinkable. Not only was the court
confronted with implicit and actual limitations to its authority, but also
for the first time, a sitting emperor had been reduced to a battlefield ca-
sualty. It is not an overstatement to assert that the war irrevocably altered
the political and sociocultural landscape of Japan.
In addition to the social and political reorganization that followed
the war, there were also new demands made of those writing about the
past. Japan had never before encountered a sustained or even semisuc-
cessful attempt to establish an authority independent of the court. Thus,
the war’s violent reapportioning of power can be thought of as a rupture
that invited or necessitated new ways of accounting for the events that
led up to and followed it.
3
A
Mirror
that sought only to fetishize the cul-
ture of the court would have had very limited suasive ability in a postwar
reality in which power apportionment continued to shift between the
court and the
bakufu
as they negotiated their spheres of authority.
While the primary sources we used differ greatly, our evaluations of the war are very
similar.
2. For a brief synopsis of the Shishigatani incident and some of its immediate im-
plications, see Adolphson,
Gates of Power
, 154–55.
3. For war tales facing this challenge, Oyler suggests that the evolving depiction of
Yoritomo and Yoshitsune’s relationship in post-Genpei texts are among “attempts to shore
up the new order with accounts of the rectitude of the Minamoto” (
Swords, Oaths, and
Prophetic Visions
, 113; see also 114).
86
Deviant by Design
Presumably, this issue of how to interpret the immediate past was
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