Imakagami
, 2:300–302. The notes to this edition indicate that the
wresting of the headship from Tadamichi also appears in “imperial” scrolls (see ibid.,
2:303). I follow the modern gloss in translating
onmabori
as aid received specifically
from the
kami
and buddhas rather than as protection more generally (see ibid., 2:302).
115. Takehana,
Imakagami
, 2:307–9.
72
New Reflections
Such repetition lends itself to two interpretations. On the one hand,
The New Mirror
subscribes to a logic of karmic causality, and it may be
that patterns are more effectively presented when the reader sees how
they consistently play out over multiple generations and across families.
Adhering to a single chronology and moving back and forth between
families would break the chain of events and could easily lessen the im-
pact of the pattern on the reader. Given that the narrator spoke at the
outset of a world of origins and suitable endings, repetition may thus be
a way to elucidate the cause-and-effect relationship that informs her his-
torical perspective.
On the other hand, the circular structure of the narrative may also
be bound up with the attitude of the work toward its subject, an attitude
identified in
Ō
ki’s “yearning for the past” and Takehana’s claims that the
work acknowledges a vanishing way of life as such.
116
In a universe gov-
erned by karmic causation, there is no guarantee that temporal progress
is akin to advancement or any other sort of improvement. One might thus
suppose that a general uncertainty about what karma portended for the
future may have heightened the appeal of rendering the past, a known
quantity, as not entirely lost.
Such evaluations of the historical perspective are not far removed
from an understanding of, or desire for, the past as “recoverable” in a way
that goes beyond mere preservation.
117
In the case of
The New Mirror
,
however, this “recoverability” is not simply that of a “naked, unadorned,
unequivocally reproducible truth,” which Reinhart Koselleck contends is
a hallmark of the premodern historian’s understanding of the past.
118
Rather, in my analysis,
The New Mirror
implies that the favorable
condi-
tions
of the past are recoverable. The work’s circular structure permits the
repeated narrative recuperation of bygone days, allowing the reader to ex-
116. Takehana asserts that this is the work’s orientation—an awareness of the fra-
gility of the world it depicts—based on its elision of current events (
Imakagami
, 3:619).
117. See Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” 252–53. I do not wish to
engage with Benjamin’s specific project(s) in this essay, but it is to this piece that I owe
the abstract question of the “recoverability” of the past.
118. Koselleck,
Futures Past
, 132. This is part of a larger discussion of the
Mirror
metaphor in premodern European writing in chapte
r
2. Koselleck is a useful interlocu-
tor here because he addresses the “premodern” world, although he does not allow for
non-European cosmologies.
Refuge in the Past during the Final Age
73
perience time as an endless series of loops. In other words, it is not a
complete accounting of the past that is the aim of the historian here, but
rather establishing the potential to return to a type of experience. In
The
New Mirror
, this happens most obviously when an event is narrated more
than once in diff erent “lines,” but the simple fact of returning to origins
with each of its major genealogies is also a commitment to cyclicality.
At the same time, the patterns of cause and effect (karmic causation)
revealed in these orderings of events demonstrate that society or the indi-
vidual can influence subsequent events and conditions, thus making
The
New Mirror
a fundamentally diff erent project from the type of history
that Koselleck identifies with the premodern.
The New Mirror
does not
subscribe to the idea of “a present [that] in its forward movement col-
lected the past without, however, being significantly able to change
itself.”
119
The principles at stake in
The Great Mirror
and
The New Mirror
are in direct opposition to that view: past karma shapes both present and
future events. Thus, the disentangling of past and present suggested in
Koselleck’s discussion of premodern historiographic sensibilities is, at a
basic level, impossible.
In my reading, this circular narrative and chronology are not an ef-
fort to recover the past in terms of its exhaustive representation; instead,
they indicate a potentially more complicated appeal of
The Great Mirror
for Tametsune. By alluding to
The Great Mirror
, he recuperates an in-
herently conservative model for narrating history to recuperate a conser-
vative vision of the past. However, whatever Tametsune’s intent may
have been, the import of this gesture resists a single interpretation. On
the one hand, because
The Great Mirror
concludes its historical narrative
on a positive note, by appropriating this historiographic vehicle from
happier narrative days, Tametsune may have been enacting a recursive
practice of optimistically narrating the past.
120
On the other hand, his-
torical realities make reading the return to
The Great Mirror
as a purely
celebratory gesture problematic. As Tametsune would surely have known,
by the time
The Great Mirror
was written, Kenshi was long dead, and in
1074, Sh
ō
shi—who bore two emperors and was thus, by some accounts,
the “origin” of Michinaga’s success—had likewise died. In other words,
119. Koselleck,
Futures Past
, 133.
120. See Ishikawa,
Ōkagami
, 345–46.
74
New Reflections
The Great Mirror
recounts a glory that was already on the wane by the
time it was narrated. Therefore, rather than thinking that Tametsune
turned to
The Great Mirror
only because of its promise to present a dif-
ferent kind of history, one might also consider whether he did so with a
sardonic awareness that the past he was about to depict was gone. The
Genji scrolls, in particular, lend themselves to this latter reading: their
diminished scale (two rather than three scrolls) and the narrator’s closing
rejection of the present noted above can be interpreted as signs that the
world of the past is receding. Nonetheless, whatever Tametsune’s moti-
vations, the result was the reanimation of an approach to the past that
derived its authority from a combination of a powerful ritual narrative
setting and a promise to present the past as ultimately subject to cosmo-
logical law.
Road to Perdition: Truth and Witness, Speech
and Sin in Twelfth-Century Japan
The New Mirror
also follows in the footsteps of
The Great Mirror
in its
use of a style suggestive of spoken, rather than written, language. Just
how loaded a choice that was becomes clear when put into the context
of contemporary discussions about speech, writing, and morality—in
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