Reflecting the Past: Place, Language, and Principle in Japan's Medieval Mirror Genre by Erin L. Brightwell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reflecting the Past: Place, Language, and Principle in Japan's Medieval Mirror Genre by Erin L. Brightwell Brian Steininger (bio) Reflecting the Past: Place, Language, and Principle in Japan's Medieval Mirror Genre. By Erin L. Brightwell. Harvard University Asia Center, 2020. xiv, 322 pages. $60.00. An anonymous traveler to the temple Unrin'in north of Heian-kyō encounters a trio of uncanny elders. One of them, called Yotsugi, claims to be 190 years old and offers a narrative determined to explain the multigenerational twists of fate that resulted in the glorious hegemony of Fujiwara no Michinaga (966–1028), beginning from events in the mid-ninth century and extending to a present moment just before Michinaga's death. This is a "tale" (monogatari) of Yotsugi—that is both Yotsugi the narrator and yo-tsugi (lineage)—and was labeled as such, but by the twelfth century another name for the work began to circulate in parallel: Ōkagami (The great mirror). In the ensuing years, a string of successors followed: the preface to Masukagami (circa 1368–75) mentions Imakagami (1174–75), covering circa 1025–1170, and Mizukagami (late twelfth century), covering from the legendary Emperor Jinmu through 850 (as well as a now-lost work, Iyayotsugi, which may have focused on the late twelfth century). At the same time, other Mirrors were appearing as well. Kara kagami (mid-thirteenth century) provides a grammar-school overview of major historical figures across Chinese history, while Azuma kagami (circa 1290s) is an official record of the Kamakura shogunate. Reflecting the Past takes as its project the tracing of "the Mirror genre." Its most important intervention lies in proposing the latter as a historically meaningful category: many of the works Erin Brightwell examines have rarely or never been discussed together before and in mainstream scholarship are divided into quite different genres (vernacular history, official chronicle, anecdote collection, and even poetic treatise). Brightwell slips between several types of generic definition over the course of the study, and this diffuseness ultimately limits the force of her case for understanding Mirrors (kagamimono) as a genre. However, the originality of the approach produces a host of startling juxtapositions and trenchant questions that will stimulate and challenge any scholar of the medieval period. After an introduction that contextualizes the Mirrors within a larger opposition between tales and chronicles, chapter 1 presents a double origin for the genre: an ambivalent progenitor in Ōkagami, whose employment of [End Page 187] the tale form and insistence on karmic principles are retrospectively read and systematized in its sequel, Imakagami. The remaining chapters focus on post-Heian innovations and reactions. Chapter 2 turns to Mizukagami; for Brightwell, both this work and the preceding Imakagami are defined by the violent context of the great wars of the twelfth century. Where Ima kagami attempts to validate a "recuperative" historical order (p. 51), the later Mizukagami resorts to the normalization of cyclical violence (p. 111). Chapter 3 focuses on Kara kagami, the culmination of a wave of works in the late twelfth through mid-thirteenth centuries that sought to vernacularize (if not popularize) the historical and literary lore of Chinese tradition (including Kara monogatari, Minamoto no Mitsuyuki's waka sequences, and Sugawara no Tamenaga's translation of Zhenguan zhengyao). This work is undoubtedly the most understudied of the Mirrors Brightwell examines, and the chapter will be correspondingly eye-opening for anyone interested in the intellectual world of the thirteenth century. The focus of chapter 4, Azuma kagami, has by contrast been studied intensively by historians of the Kamakura shogunate though largely ignored by literature scholars. Here Brightwell offers an intriguing reading of this work as a mode of historiography of the "institution" necessitated by the abandonment of court-centered traditions of authority (as well as a detour into Nomori no kagami, a contemporary treatise on waka poetics). The final chapter takes up Masukagami, the last of the traditional "Four Mirrors" (Ōkagami, Imakagami, Mizukagami, Masukagami), alongside the less well-known Shinmeikyō, another fourteenth-century work that narrates the imperial bloodline from Jinmu down to the present. Brightwell sees these works as essentially trapped in a genre that had become moribund as its claims to reliability lost purchase...