Helen McCullough translated and published the first twelve chapters of the medieval military chronicle Taiheiki, The Chronicle of Great Peace, in 1979. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Kyoko Selden and I, then colleagues on the faculty of Cornell University, began meeting weekly to read, discuss, and translate a broad range of Japanese historical texts, including sections of the Taiheiki through Chapter 19 (out of forty). Our short-term objective was to develop materials for an interdisciplinary seminar that would introduce more of the Taiheiki to English readers. In this special issue, two selections from the Taiheiki—the dramatic and tragic death of GoDaigo’s cast-off son Prince Moriyoshi (alt. Morinaga, 1308-35) from Chapter 13 and an account of the critical battle at Hakone Takenoshita from Chapter 14, both events of 1335—are paired with linked verse by the basara (flamboyant) warrior Sasaki Dōyo, and the Edo-period Hinin Taiheiki: The Paupers’ Chronicle of Peace. All were originally translated and annotated for our Taiheiki course, first taught in 1992, a class that I continue to teach at the University of Southern California.

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Daily Life and Demographics in Ancient Japan. By William Wayne Farris. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2009. Pp. ix + 137. ISBN 10: 1929280491; 13: 9781929280490. - Volume 7 Issue 2

as, “Hyakken reconstructs a personal and commercial memory of this decisive national battle in the context of a remilitarizing, imperially expanding Japanese empire,” if only because Hyakken composed “The Triumphant March” at a time when Japan’s imperial army was at the nadir of its popularity at home (following the Siberian debacle), the Katô government was cutting military expenditures and force size, and the mainstream of the foreign policy establishment called for cooperating with the Anglo-American powers in China. Reading the re-edition is certainly an important, critically productive move, but it risks obscuring the original context within which Hyakken felt free enough to commit this text to paper (despite the recent passage, as DiNitto notes, of the Peace Preservation Law). In this regard, while DiNitto mentions in passing that Hyakken refused to join the wartime Japanese Literature Patriotic Association, some consideration of his writings from these years (two zuihitsu collections and one book of poems between 1942 and 1945) might have shed light on his further struggles with, or avoidance of, the totalizing forces of the time. Ultimately, the reader comes away persuaded of the potential that Hyakken’s methods offered for sustaining critical subjectivity in the face of the homogenizing forces of capitalism and militarism. DiNitto’s study thus offers a valuable complement to existing studies of Japanese modernism, proletarian literature, and romantic nationalism, and introduces us to texts with which we will no doubt continue to grapple fruitfully.

This translation makes entries from a courtier journal accessible to English readers for the first time. The finished work provides startling insights into the Heian court led by Tadahira during the 930s and 940s. NB: This book reads from right to left.

In conclusion, this compact study reexamines old problems in novel ways and introduces new material that complicates and enriches our understanding of medieval war tales. Historians should welcome its provocative treatment of documents in war tales, and literature scholars will learn much from an approach that manages to extend the performativity model in interesting directions without losing sight of the still-critical place of texts and textuality in medieval culture. If I experienced one disappointment in reading this book, it is that the author did not provide more of her excellent translations and fewer summaries of the many texts discussed, especially the kōwakamai pieces and variant sword narratives. But it may be that publisher concerns about length were a factor in this decision, so perhaps we can look forward to these in the author’s next publication.