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Smashing the Great Buddha, Crossing Lines: Tsushima Yūko's Nara Report
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Summary
With her 2004 novel Nara Report, Tsushima Yūko has presented us with a “report” through which memories borne by the dead come alive. This essay traces the ways in which the novel makes present day Nara emerge as a topos resounding with the voices of those subjected to Buddhist marginalization in pre-modern Nara— women, minorities, outcasts and animals— and considers how it creates space for reimagining this densely overdetermined place.
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- Copyright © The Authors 2018
References
Notes
1 “Tsushima Yūko and Nara Report” (Tsushima Yūko to Nara repōto), Yūrin. December 10, 2004. Accessed August 8, 2017.
2 Setsuwa are brief tales that are largely Buddhist and didactic, folkloric, and legendary. Paramount works in this genre are Nihon ryōiki (Miraculous Stories of Karmic Retribution of Good and Evil in Japan; ca. 823) and Konjaku monogatarishū (A Collection of Tales of Times Now Past; it dates from the late Heian period). I shall discuss sekkyōbushi in due course.
3 R. Keller Kimbrough indicates that this practice became common around the ninth century “both in response to the imagined impurity of women and to the perceived threat that women posed to monks in their Buddhist practice.” R. Keller Kimborough, “Voices from the Feminine Margin: Izumi Shikibu and the Nuns of Kumano and Seiganji,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 12, no. 1 (2001), 60.
4 Andō Reiji, “Wildcat Dome by Tsushima Yūko” (Yamaneko dōmu: Tsushima Yūko cho), Nihon keizai shinbun, July 1, 2013. Accessed March 5, 2016.
5 Tsushima Yūko, Nara Report (Nara repōto) (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 2007) 29. Hereafter citations of this novel are given in the body of the text.
6 Morio cuts the deer's ears, which invokes a legend concerning Suwa Shrine in Nagano prefecture, where split eared deer were used as sacrificial offerings. See the explanation of Ontō festival here.
7 Included among these are songs from Kagura, Ryōjin hishō, Kangin shū, and the noh drama, Jinen koji. As I will discuss below, the Ryōjin hishō songs play a significant role in the third story of the Part II.
8 War tales (gunki monogatari) from the Muromachi period centered on Minamono no Yoshitsune, a half brother of Minamoto no Yoritomo who founded the Kamakura shogunate after defeating the Taira clan in Genpei War (1180-1185).
9 Araki Shigeru explains that since sekkyō chanters had to tap into commoners' emotions and imagination in order to appeal to them, the sekkyō texts we have today bear traces of their imaginations. See “Commentary” (kaisetsu) in Sekkyōbushi, eds. Araki Shigeru and Yamamoto Sachizō (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1973), 319. The same goes for Gikeiki, which grew from the orally passed down setsuwa-kind tales concerning Minamoto no Yoshitsune. See Kajihara Masaaki, “Commentary” (kaisetsu) in Gikeiki, Shinpen Nihon koten bungaku zenshū, 62 (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 2000), 494-499.
10 Inaba Nobumichi, The Power Structure in Medieval Temples (Chūsei jiin no kenryoku kōzō) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1997), 1.
11 Tsushima uses Sekkyōbushi, eds. Araki Shigeru and Yamamoto Sachizō, which includes versions of the text “Karukaya” published in 1631 and “Aigo no waka” published in 1670.
12 The story is embedded in the main story so as to highlight the strict prohibition of women from entering sacred Mt. Kōya by calling attention to how even Kūkai's mother was barred from entering Mt. Kōya. Wondrous Brutal Fictions: Eight Buddhist Tales from the Early Japanese Puppet Theater, trans. by R. Keller Kimbrough (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 78-84.
13 According to Matsumoto Yoshio, tsuchigumo was a general derogatory designation, rather than an ethnic group category, used to refer to those considered “other” by the people of Yamato state (fourth to seventh centuries CE) before it was subdivided into emishi, kumaso and hayato. “On Tsuchigumo” (Tsuchigumoron), Shigaku 25, no. 4 (September 1952), 434-455. In “Karukaya” she is depicted as a daughter of an emperor in Tang (China).
14 It bears traces of another sekkyō tale, “Shintokumaru,” which involves a journey of the protagonist afflicted with leprosy to a curative hot spring.
15 Miura Keiichi, The Studies of the History of Lowly People of Medieval Japan (Nihon chūsei senminshi no kenkyū), (Kyoto: Buraku mondai kenkyūsho shuppanbu), 201.
16 See Miura Keiichi, 199-204. Niunoya Tetsuichi, Class and Society in Medieval Japan (Nihon chūsei no mibun to shakai) (Tokyo: Hanawa shobō, 1993), 503-514. These two books are listed in the Bibliography included in Nara Report. See also Michele Marra, Representations of Power: The Literary Politics of Medieval Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), 62-65.
17 Niunoya, Class and Society in Medieval Japan, 504.
18 Two similar tales are alluded to here. One concerns the Empress Kōmyō (701-760) associated with the founding of Todaiji who, after receiving a divine message, established a curative bathhouse. There are multiple variant forms of this tale. See Abe Yasuro, The Empress of a Bathhouse: Sexuality and the Sacred of the Medieval Period (Yuya no kōgō: chusei no sei to sei naru mono), (Nagoya: Nagoya University Press, 1998), 18-64. The other tale is Volume 19, Tale 2 from Konjaku monogatarishū.
19 Louis Frédéric, Japan Encyclopedia, trans. Kathe Roth, Harvard University Reference Library (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 531.
20 Emperor Go-Shirakawa (1127-92) compiled these songs in a genre of the modish and popular between the mid-Heian and the early Kamakura period. They are deeply rooted in everyday feelings with abundant use of vernacular language. Saigō Nobutsuna, Ryōjin hishō (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2004), 163. I'm using the English translation by Yung-Hee Kim from Songs to Make the Dust Dance: The Ryōjin Hishō of Twelfth-Century Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). See song #116, 81.
21 Araki Shigeru, “Commentary,” 320.
22 Itinerant entertainers who specialized in singing and dancing to songs in the genre of imayō while dressed in men's robes.
23 This idea can be traced back to the ninth century. See Emiko Namihira, “Pollution in the Folk Belief System,” Current Anthropology 28, no. 4, Supplement: An Anthropological Profile of Japan, S65-74.
24 These hymns include Ketsubonkyō wasan (Blood bowl sutra hymn), Nyonin ōjō wasan (Women's salvation hymn), and Chinoike jigoku wasan (Blood pool hell hymn). They are based on the ketsubonkyō (Blood bowl sutra) introduced from China in the fifteenth century. See Jacqueline IIyse Stone and Mariko Namba Walter, Death and the Afterlife in Japanese Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008), 176-179. Monma Sachio, “The Geopolitics of Implications and Discrimination of ‘defiling’ and ‘being defiled’” (‘Kegare’ to suru sareru koto no gan'i to sabetsu no chiseigaku) in Fukuto Sanae et al. eds., Cultural History of Defilement: Narrative, Gender, Rituals (Kegare no bunka shi: monogatari, jendā, girei). (Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2005), 216-235. Curiously, as pointed out by Monma Sachio, the sutra on which these hymns are based was until recently recited by monks during various folk events. See Monma Sachio, 220-221.
25 Kim, Songs to Make the Dust Dance, 127.
26 Saigō Nobutsuna, 163.
27 Kim, Songs to Make the Dust Dance, 126.
28 Kobayashi Hideo, “History and Literature” (Rekishi to bungaku) in On Impermanence (Mujō to iu koto). (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 1982), 34. Emphasis added. I'm borrowing James Dorsey's translation of the phrase, “kimo ni meijiru.” See James Dorsey, Critical Aesthetics: Kobayashi Hideo, Modernity, and Wartime Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 175.
29 Andō Reiji, The Mandala of Light: On Japanese Literature (Hikari no mandara: Nihon bungakuron). (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2016), 8.
30 “Tsushima Yūko and Nara Report.”