Lovable Losers: The Heike in Action and Memory ed. by Mikael S. Adolphson and Anne Commons

Abstract

Reviewed by: Lovable Losers: The Heike in Action and Memory ed. by Mikael S. Adolphson and Anne Commons Linda H. Chance (bio) Lovable Losers: The Heike in Action and Memory. Edited by Mikael S. Adolphson and Anne Commons. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 2015. xviii, 284 pages. $55.00. What would we do without conference volumes? Although every meeting convener hears that this genre is not welcome at most publishers, when well done, as with the present book, we reap a concrete exemplar of the inter-disciplinary that Japan studies, at its best, aspires to. This book is chock full of useful, definitive essays that display scrupulous scholarship, broad thinking, and interconnectedness. Everyone involved with Lovable Losers deserves huzzahs for sticking to the promise of the original conference in Banff, Alberta, over the four years it took to get to press. The editors/organizers, Mikael Adolphson and Anne Commons, tell us that Banff was an apt setting for “frequent and concentrated discussions in both formal and informal situations” (p. ix); no reader can doubt that was true, nor fail to be glad of it. Research in English on the late Heian period, and specifically that which uses the magnificent Heike monogatari account of the Genpei War between the Taira and Minamoto as a lens, has blossomed over the last ten years. No fewer than three monographs and a dozen new articles mean that scholars and students alike can find answers to almost every question on the Heike. What’s more, we are no longer limited to treatments of the popular edition, the Kakuichi variant; we can immerse ourselves in the early Engyō edition, the Genpei jōsuiki, or the rival Azuma kagami. This volume enfolds and expands on the present critically nuanced field to solid effect. Among many things it does well is to explain such terminological choices as their reference to the “Ise Taira” (to distinguish them from other Taira lineages) until the rise of Kiyomori and his relatives to the elite, when they become the “house of the Taira,” i.e., the Heike. The book seeks to engage two big questions. First, how did the Heike act in their own day? The answers are deeply revisionist, showing that many have misconstrued their impact on the late twelfth century. Second, how have the Heike been remembered (which has naturally had something to do with the blind spots we have about the ways they behaved)? This is only a convenient binary, however, as the volume editors aver in their opening essay, “Blurring the Lines.” How the Taira were and how later generations represent the Taira are bound up with one another, just as the historical disciplines that take the actual as their concern and disciplines that focus on the aesthetics and rhetorics of presentation each cannot do without the [End Page 132] insights of the other. Reviews in a recent volume of this journal (Vol. 42, No. 1; Winter 2016) contained mild grumbling by the historians David Spafford and Bruce Batten about the treatment of history by literary scholars; as a “literature person,” I feel the present book leans heavily toward historical thinking even when taking religion, say, as the subject, while its historians are attentive to literary discourses and play (in the good sense) with literary adaptations. Thus, it comes closer to the successful interdisciplinary parsing of its topics than some monographs. The book clarifies precisely how and why we need to think of the Heike as warrior-aristocrats, marshaling both historical and literary evidence. Contributors make a strong case for the Heike leader Kiyomori’s success in blending conservative strategies that pay due respect to the reigning hierarchy with innovations that gained him attention. Each of the authors seems to have gotten the memos on these overarching themes and gives cross-references, producing a coherent work of scholarship. The first three chapters on “The Heike in Action” serve as a suite on Kiyomori’s decision to move to a new capital at Fukuhara, near the port of Ōwada no tomari. Led off strongly in “Fukuhara: Kiyomori’s Lost Capital” by Adolphson championing the thesis that Kiyomori had ambitions to establish a new imperial line there headed by...