Fires were a constant danger for the wooden structures of premodern Japan, but the palace remained relatively unscathed until 960, when it burned down completely. From then on, fires occurred regularly, but in seemingly portentous fits. During En’yū’s reign, three fires occurred—divination identified the culprit of these blazes as the angry ghost of Sugawara no Michizane (845–903). During Ichijō’s reign, fires in 999 and 1001preceded the one in 1005. The ruler’s name acknowledges the amount of time he spent at the Ichijōin, which substituted as his palace, until it, too, had to be rebuilt because of a fire in 1009. During the reigns of Go-Suzaku and Go-Reizei, fires broke out almost every year at either the palace
The fire of 1005 also claimed another important symbol of the emperor’s rule, a replica of the Sacred Mirror (shinkyō or yatanokagami), one of the three Imperial Regalia. Michinaga’s diary gives one account of the incident. When he heard that the flames were consuming the area of the Unmeiden, he hurriedly dispatched guards and nobles to the Kashikodokoro, the Sacred Mirror Repository, overseen by the Handmaids’ Office. The next sentence of his long journal entry from the 15th dryly notes the discovery of the damaged mirror at the scene the following dawn. The original mirror remains to this day safely enshrined in the Ise Grand Shrines, or so it has been told. Still, Michinaga must have been dismayed by the damage to this duplicate, for once before, in 960, it had miraculously escaped a fire by flying into the sleeve of the Regent Fujiwara no Saneyori (900–970), then the minister of the left.3 This time, such a miracle did not happen. The misshapen, blackened mirror, saved once before from scorching flames, no longer shone to reflect a single, unified vision of the court, which also strayed peripatetically from its site.
Collating accounts from three contemporaneous journals, Kuramoto Kazuhiro illustrates the bureaucratic process that ensued in deciding what to do with the severely damaged mirror.4 His research roundly dismisses the fantasy cultivated by modern readings of Genji monogatari that deny any meaningful occupation for the effete Heian courtiers, for the serious deliberations entailed the reading of past decisions and much argumentation in numerous, long meetings. The most hotly contested point lay in whether or not to recast the Sacred Mirror.5 New ore would need to be added, but would that corrupt the sacredness of the mirror? If a completely new mirror were made, what should be done with the old one?
This story about the mirror’s destruction can be seen as a metaphor for the cessation of the official histories and the origin of Eiga monogatari. In a physical sense, these fires impeded the writing of an official national history by destroying not only the offices assigned to its compilation, but more significantly, the many irreplaceable records needed for compiling such a history. Partly completed drafts of the Shinkokushi (the new national history) may have even been destroyed.
Metaphorically, too, the disappearance of the Sacred Mirror underscores the splintering of perspective, the multiplication of different discourses and texts in the late tenth century. Not only was this the time when female journals in kana emerged, but courtiers’ journals (kiroku) also proliferated, a trend that developed from the changes in the way the Heian court functioned.6 As discussed in the introduction, the rise of both male and female writings, which present a perspective centered in the self, has provoked some scholars to point to this era as one in which a Japanese sense of individuality emerged in writing. Indeed, Michinaga’s dismay about the mirror’s ruin is voiced not in his own journal, but in Sanesuke’s. No single text seems capable of illuminating the whole, as a unified, “national” account fails to bind the multiplying records of individuals, putting ever-greater demands upon history as it is forced to accommodate varying discourses and perspectives.
When texts do converge to give a unified account, the occasion touches upon the miraculous. On the 9th day of the 12th month, the blackened mirror was placed in a new lacquer box for its move to the interim palace and emanated light like the sun, according to Gonki (Yukinari’s diary), Midō kanpaku ki (Michinaga’s diary), and Shōyūki (Sanesuke’s
In truth, the legacy of Eiga as a whole is surely the emergence of histories written in kana, starting with the sequel itself, and their subsequent spawning of the “mirrors” from its near contemporary Ōkagami (The Great Mirror) to Imakagami (The New Mirror, c. 1170) and Masukagami (The Clear Mirror, mid- to late fourteenth century).8 In this respect, the authors of Eiga succeeded in accomplishing, even beyond their own immediate work, their vision of a pluralistic history written by many through the amalgamation (awase) of different texts, grounded in multiple families, places, and genres—a mirror that reflected not only the imperial house, but their community, however circumscribed.
Although both the sequel and the main chapters exhibit these hybrid properties, the combination of personages and texts varies to a certain extent between the two sections, sometimes in striking ways. The sequel is thus essential to understanding the work’s full range, and cannot be disregarded as an inferior afterthought. While these variations in content and approach indicate different sources and authors, more intriguing is their demonstration of the work’s malleability to encompass this spectrum so fluidly. Some may counter that the text fails to tie all of its materials together, but the existence and perception of Eiga as a single work demonstrates that for its original readers, it remained one unified representation of their world, despite the meanderings.
A fundamental premise underlies the composition of Eiga: the matching of historical material with the language of tales, a brilliant and complementary awase that was no doubt inspired by Genji, achieved with greater clarity in the main chapters, and carried on into the sequel, as well as the later historical tales. This matching carves out that nebulous space between history and memories, the past and the present, where people live on, not quite dead and removed from their living memories. Although contemporary readers are distant from the world of emperors, princesses, and the like, the narrative never loses sight of their humanity, their roles as fathers, daughters, and mothers, allowing them to come to life even today. In recurring scenarios in their myriad variations, these personages face death, illness, jealousy, and joy—all of which bound people then and do so now. Their experiences not only serve to illuminate the human condition, but also invite compassion.
This empathy is one of the work’s effects that this study has highlighted. The solicitude of everyone in the community, offering sympathy to all who suffer loss, results in the taming of spirit possessions. Whether or not the author intended for her text to act as a prophylactic, the narrator pays attention to the dangers of rumors. She keeps converting them into the stuff of romance, a genre that brought people together and mitigated the negativity surrounding gossip, which conversely could foster the spawning of resentments and dangerous specters. The narrator acts as a
Today, the first history written in the vernacular continues to demonstrate how “history” does not have to be written by the victors alone according to their story lines of domination. The sacred mirror does not have to remain hidden in the palace, but can be brought out, perhaps at destructive costs in a radical move, to let it shine upon other people and their stories. Those in power may hold an iron grip on the traditional modes of archival documentation. Even these other narratives may ultimately only confirm the authority of those in power. But the authors of Eiga demonstrate that there always are multiple ways of envisioning the past, even if those other articulations are couched in discourses that do not accord with what is, at the time, configured as orthodox history.
Though it may then be tempting to place the work in a competitive, binary relationship with official histories such as the Rikkokushi, Eiga is not antagonistic to those other modes. After all, whoever the authors were, they were literate people with the time and means to write. They were not iconoclastic activists seeking to overturn society. As in the uta awase, the juxtapositions of various people, genres, and topics—kana and mana, history and tale, victors and losers, the living and the dead, fathers and daughters, past and present—ultimately present a rich, evocative panorama, an expansive reflection of how some people envisioned themselves, their family, and their society in eleventh-century Heian Japan. Such binaries continue to fuel ways in which people construct their own identity and place in the world. Though ideally there may be ways to break out of such dualisms, Eiga also shows how such agnostic relationships could be harnessed to foster peace.
Midō kanpaku ki 2:135; Hérail, Notes Journalières de Fujiwara no Michinaga, 1:572.
For a table detailing the fires from the reign of Murakami to Go-Sanjō, see Takinami, Heian kento, 350–51.
This story is preserved in Gōke shidai. Fusō ryakki records, however, that the mirror was found the next day in the ashes (Sakamoto, Nihon no shūshi to shigaku, 337–38).
Kuramoto, Sekkan seiji to ōchō kizoku, 79–85.
The mirrors of ancient Japan did not feature glass with silver backings, as they do today. Rather, they were made of polished bronze or other ores, and gave off a blurry reflection.
Yoshida Sanae explains the rise of kiroku in the ninth to tenth centuries by three basic points: the increased gap between the ritsuryō model and the actual conditions necessitated reference to precedents based on personal observation, the new concentration of court protocols around the emperor’s intimate space, and the splintering of powerful families leading to an emphasis on the identity of one’s house. See Yoshida, “Aristocratic Journals,” 8–17.
Kuramoto, Sekkan seiji to ōchō kizoku, 81.
Imakagami covers the years 1025 to 1170, picking up from where Ōkagami’s record ends. Masukagami documents the years 1180 to 1333. Thought to have been composed toward the end of the twelfth century, Mizukagami (The Water Mirror) is a record of the history before Ōkagami, starting with Emperor Jinmu. It borrows extensively from Fusō ryakki. These are the most notable extant “mirror” histories, but there are other rekishi monogatari (Akizushima monogatari, Tsuki no Yukue, Ike no mokuzu) that provide a complete historical record into the Edo period (Emperor Go-Yōzei’s reign, 1586–1611). Beyond the mirrors, records such as Angen onga no ki (1176) by Fujiwara no Takafusa also testify to the rise of kana for historical documentation (see Inose, “Rekishi jojutsu”).