The
Water Mirror
and Tadachika’s death, his journal is conventionally pro-
fessional, focusing primarily on the court or court-related business. There
is no mention of any of the
Mirrors
, or indeed of any private reading or
writing.
Still more troublesome in a search for concrete evidence that
The
Water Mirror
was a response to the war, there are no surviving entries in
Tadachika’s record from the months immediately after the final major
battle at Dan-no-Ura, where Emperor Antoku was lost. A five-month gap
exists between the entry for Genryaku 2 (1185).2.2 and those for the sev-
enth month of the same year, the latter of which are dominated by an
earthquake more severe than Tadachika had ever seen. Both Dan-no-Ura
and the famous battle at Yashima are passed over in silence in the surviv-
ing record.
While the reason for this lacuna is unclear, it cannot reasonably be
attributed to Tadachika’s reluctance to address the Genpei War or vio-
lence itself.
15
Although he refrains from the lurid, Tadachika nonetheless
vividly recounts the 1180 flight of the insurgent Prince Mochihito to Uji
and the armed clashes that led to his death, complete with a limited enu-
meration of heads taken in front of the By
ō
d
ō
in.
16
And in a similarly
grisly instance, he notes that Kiyomori “ordered that the wife and the fa-
vorite child of the rebel Takeda of Kai Province be beheaded by night
and their heads mounted on pikes before the gate of the Takeda [house-
hold].”
17
He is not an author who eschews the reportage of war.
Nor can the lack of extant entries on the closing days of the war be
taken as indicative of these events’ collective impact, or lack of impact,
on Tadachika. Rather, the record that does survive suggests that the ex-
perience of the Genpei War deeply unsettled him. This becomes particu-
larly clear in Tadachika’s response to the earthquake on Genryaku
15. The record for the earlier Hōgen and Heiji Disturbances is similarly frag-
mented. No entries survive from the fifth month of Hōgen 1 (1156) through the sixth
month of Hōgen 3 (1158). Nor are there any at all for the brief Heiji period (1159.4.20–
1160.1.10). See Nakayama,
Sankaiki
, vol. 1.
16. For the events of Jishō 4 (1180).5.26, including Mochihito’s death, see Na-
kayama,
Sankaiki
, 3:96–100.
17. Nakayama,
Sankaiki
, 3:149.
Multilingual Writing in Medieval Japan
91
2
(1185).7.9—the quake also described by Ch
ō
mei—in an outburst that
occurs in the midst of his catalogue of the resultant destruction: “My
vision blurs, and my head hurts. My heart and senses are jumbled and
chaotic, as though shipboard. Have we already arrived at the end of the
world? With the war of late, none have known peace. And now there is
this punishment, too. In a sullied age of wicked karma, the bitterness and
suffering of sentient beings know no respite. Lamentable, lamentable!”
18
Despite earlier instances in which Tadachika bemoaned deviations from
precedent, instances of decline, and other sources of distress, this is the
only time in over two decades of writing that the reader is given such an
intense expression of anguish about the state of the world at large. Be-
tween the war and the earthquake, the aftershocks of which would con-
tinue into the ninth month, Tadachika is moved to make his strongest
recorded statement about the end of the world.
19
Scattered utterances decrying “the decay of the realm” or character-
izing the “transience of this world” as “beyond description,” as well as jux-
tapositions of past matters with specific present practices from the eighth
and ninth months of 1184, imply a gradual buildup of concern about the
fate of the world during the closing months of the war.
20
Taken as an of-
ficial’s personal comments, such observations are not remarkable or aty-
pical for a period that was widely believed to belong to an age of decline.
However, when read in conjunction with the preface to
The Water
Mirror
—the preface and the postface are the only parts of the work to
refer to a “present”—Tadachika’s concerns bring certain aspects of the po-
sition of
The Water Mirror
’s narrator(s) more sharply into focus. In par-
ticular, the preface expresses a repeated concern about the dangers posed
by a romanticized fetishization of the past (to be discussed in detail in
“Place and Principle Anew,” below); this takes on greater meaning when
18. Nakayama,
Sankaiki
, 3:227.
19. I.e., the years 1170–94. His upset notwithstanding, Tadachika returns to form
shortly thereafter with the inclusion of identified Japanese and Chinese responses to
and interpretations of earthquakes. See Nakayama,
Sankaiki
, 3:228–29.
20. On Genryaku 2 (1184).9.9, Tadachika points out the “decay (
suihei
) of the
realm,” and on 9.28, after recording a death, he writes, “the impermanence of the world
is something that cannot be put into words” (Nakayama,
Sankaiki
, 3:214 and 221). Ex-
plicit contrasts between past and present can be found, for instance, in ibid., 3:178, 180,
and 204. Deviation from precedent in general is a much older theme for Tadachika.
92
Deviant by Design
the author was writing in a world turned, if not upside down, at the very
least on its side.
Given that Tadachika’s diary does not evince a preoccupation with
the world in disarray or exhibit an implicit preference for the past over the
present until near the close of the Genpei War, it makes sense to see
The
Water Mirror
, which will be shown below to repeatedly engage with the
characterization of the world as in decline, as a product of this concern that
apparently emerged relatively late.
21
Simply put, if
The Water Mirror
re-
flects Tadachika’s own aims—that is, if he means to dissuade his audience
from clinging to the past by demonstrating that all ages are bad, as its pref-
ace argues—it makes sense to date the work to a time when a preoccupa-
tion with destruction and decline are visible in his other writings. The
late prominence of the theme of the end or the decline of the world in
A
Minister’s Logbook
, as well as its importance to
The Water Mirror
, support
treating the latter as a work written after the Genpei War. If so,
The Water
Mirror
becomes a work that rejects the centrality of recent events—in
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