EASC Colloquium

PRESENTER: Elizabeth Oyler (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

TOPIC: The Genpei War Remembered in the Noh: rewriting the classical landscape in the plays Tadanori and Shigehira.
DATE: Friday, September 9, 2011

TIME: 12:00-1:15 p.m.
LOCATION: Ballantine 004

During the centuries following the Genpei War, the unhappy fates of numerous members of the Taira clan who lost their lives because of it became fertile topics for interpretation in narrative, art, and drama.  The status of Taira heroes as “beautiful losers,” tragic figures tormented in the afterlife by their rancor and longing for the past, is especially evident as a basis for the numerous Noh plays composed in the fifteenth century and beyond, works which were surely as influential in shaping popular perceptions of the Genpei past as the monumental Heike monogatari itself.  In particular, the  noh’s emphasis on specific characters’ posthumous suffering at a specific (and often peripheral) locale further served to imbue historically significant locations with cultural meaning for theatergoers throughout the country. This talk considers two mugen nō (fantasy Noh) plays about Taira heroes: Tadanori and Shigehira (alt.: Kasa sotoba).  In each, the space of the play is previously inscribed with poetic or cultural (and specifically religious) meaning: the Suma coast and the ancient capital of Nara. Both are the haunts of Taira ghosts, and their presence at once reinforces and reinscribes meaning on those locales.  The ways the spaces simultaneously pacify and reify the Taira spirits, as well as the effect that cultural geographies created in such plays on the physical geography of the realm, are the central questions posed in this inquiry.

Elizabeth Oyler is Associate Professor of Japanese and Director of the Center for East Asia and Pacific Studies at the University of Illinois.  She specializes in medieval Japanese literature and drama, particularly the Tales of the Heike and other works recounting the Genpei War, about which she has published a book, Swords, Oaths, and Prophetic Visions: Authoring Warrior Rule in Medieval Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2006) and several articles.  She is also coeditor of Like Clouds or Mists: Studies and Translations of Nō Plays of the Genpei War (University of Hawaii Press, 2011).

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