Black-toothed Beauty: Teaching Gender and Hegemony in Heike monogatari

Abstract

あっぱれ、みかたにはかねつける人はいないものを。 “Heavens! No one on our side blackens his teeth!” The above is the remark of a Minamoto soldier, upon encountering a suspiciously good-looking gentleman on his side of the lines during the battle of Ichi-no-tani. While the gentleman, in fact his enemy, Taira no Tadanori (1144-1184), claims to be mikata zo (“one of yours”), his deception is quickly discovered as a result of his refined appearance. At this time in Japanese history, blackened teeth were an expression of beauty reserved for the highest aristocracy, mostly for women, however, “The classical standard of beauty was very similar for men and women. The key components were delicate beauty, elegance and sensitivity.” To the eyes of a rough and unkempt samurai from the east, the beauty of his enemy is what ensures his defeat. The story of the war that brought the Heian Period to an end, immortalized in over 50 extant versions of roughly the same narrative, is replete with moral imperatives from start to finish, in particular the most commonly studied Kakuichi-bon 覚一本 version. The theme of karma ensuring the fall of the powerful, for example, is present in almost every version of Heike monogatari, in the form of some of the most famous lines of all Japanese literature: “The Jetevana Temple bells ring the passing of all things. Twinned sala trees, white in full flower, declare the great [one]’s certain fall. The arrogant do not long endure, they are like a dream one night in spring.” Yet while the text makes no secret of its didactic intent in general, the specific social messages it seeks to convey are difficult to disentangle from our own perception of both modern and premodern Japan, as well as our own perceptions of gender. This thesis will seek to show the ways that the Kakuichi-bon version of Heike monogatari takes a specific stance on gender ideology as a way to reinforce its political message, primarily through a case study of Atsumori no saigo, the short section which describes the death of Taira no Atsumori (1169?-1184). Several other characters are important to establish isolated aspects of gender ideology: Imai Kanehira, Kiso no Yoshinaka, Saitō Sanemori, Taira no Tadanori, Taira no Rokudai and Emperor Antoku, among others, and these will be discussed as they become relevant. But Atsumori lies on several crucial intersections of politics, class, locality, age and morality, which make his story an ideal vehicle for the subtly gender-coded message of the Kakuchi-bon. Namely, that this text seeks to draw a strong association between the court – specifically the emperor – the Taira, and femininity. This association comes at a juncture in history when an influx of Confucian ideology was gradually marginalizing women’s status as part of an attempt at broader social control, a movement which would become particularly advantageous to the rise of the samurai. In short, this thesis theorizes that the text seeks to subtly send the imperial family into the realm of the feminine, the powerless, and subsequently the past, as a means to secure samurai authority.