Flowering Tales
Women Exorcising History in Heian Japan
WW Norton · Print & ebook · January 7, 2020
Telling stories: that sounds innocuous enough.
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- Who it’s for
- Takeshi Watanabe examines how women’s storytelling shaped histories of late Heian society and communal memory.
- Themes
- Women’s authorship of history, Political marginalization, Memory, ghosts, and communal peace
- Genres
- Japanese Literary Criticism, Women Authors Criticism, Japanese History
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Start with this bookAbout this book
Telling stories: that sounds innocuous enough. But for the first chronicle in the Japanese vernacular, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari), there was more to worry about than a good yarn. The health of the community was at stake. Flowering Tales is the first extensive literary study of this historical tale, which covers about 150 years of births, deaths, and happenings in late Heian society, a golden age of court literature in women’s hands.
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Takeshi Watanabe contends that the blossoming of tales, marked by the Tale of Genji, inspired Eiga’s new affective history: an exorcism of embittered spirits whose stories needed to be retold to ensure peace. Tracing the narrative arcs of politically marginalized figures, Watanabe shows how Eiga’s female authors adapted the discourse and strategies of the Tale of Genji to rechannel wayward ghosts into the community through genealogies that relied not on blood but on literary resonances. These reverberations, highlighted through comparisons to contemporaneous accounts in courtiers’ journals, echo through shared details of funerary practices, political life, and characterization. Flowering Tales reanimates these eleventh-century voices to trouble conceptions of history: how it ought to be recounted, who got to record it, and why remembering mattered.
Heian Storytelling
Takeshi Watanabe examines how women’s storytelling shaped histories of late Heian society and communal memory.
Come here for
- An account of how female authors reworked strategies from The Tale of Genji
- Comparisons with courtiers’ journals, funerary practices, and political life
Expect
- Narrative arcs of politically marginalized figures
- A study of genealogies built through literary resonances, not blood
Where it sits
| Japanese Literary Criticism | 99% |
|---|---|
| Women Authors Criticism | 52% |
| Japanese History | 34% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- Japanese Literary Criticism
- Medieval Literary Criticism
- Women in Literature
- Authors
- Takeshi Watanabe
- Publisher
- WW Norton
- Published
- January 7, 2020
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Theme
- Women’s authorship of history · Political marginalization · Memory, ghosts, and communal peace
- Reading lane
- Japanese Literary Criticism