Refuge in the Past during the Final Age
35
While conventional wisdom dated the beginning of the final age of the
Buddhist law to 1052, for many of the court elite, it would take another
century before things began to decline rapidly in a more immediate
worldly sense.
1
However, after violence arrived in the capital in the mid-
twelfth century,
The New Mirror
emerged only two decades later as the
first full-length historiographic narrative to confront recent events. When
the violence continued,
The New Mirror
was followed just ten years later
with another related work titled
The Water Mirror
. Yet neither of these
was the first historiographic
Mirror
to appear—
The Great Mirror
had been
written over a century earlier. So why, after a hundred-year hiatus, did
the idea of a
Mirror
suddenly seem to resonate with readers and writers
in late twelfth-century Japan? Why turn back to this older model for
making sense of twelfth-century events?
The seeds of the answers to these questions lie in
The Great Mirror
,
so our journey will begin with an examination of those elements that had
the greatest impact on subsequent
Mirrors
:
The Great Mirror
’s preface and
its implications, the vernacular register, and the promise to lay bare a logic
for the workings of the world. Then the chapter will turn to the late
twelfth century to explore two contemporary factors that may have in-
fluenced the decision to return to the genre—social instability and the
discourse on the “sinful” nature of fictional narratives—as a way to ap-
proach
The New Mirror
. The former factor can be tied to
The New Mir-
ror
’s inscription of time and the latter to the work’s “last words”: a con-
versation on the morality of fiction.
The New Mirror
’s discussion of karma,
creative writing, and sin suggests an intellectual world in which writing
a
Mirror
could offer a way of narrating the past that sidestepped the prob-
lematic morality of “tales”—namely, as a
historiography grounded in
cosmology that thanks to an eyewitness narrator was decidedly not to be
confused with fiction, despite using the classical
wabun
register of tales.
2
1. For a more detailed summary of positions regarding the Buddhist units of time,
see Marra, “Development of Mappō Thought in Japan (I),” 25–27. Marra completes his
analysis in a second piece that focuses primarily on Shinran and has no overlap with the
events under discussion in this chapter (“Development of ‘Mappō’ Thought in Japan
(II).” For a similar and more recent characterization of the manifestations of
Dostları ilə paylaş: 
