Reflecting the Past: Place, Language, and Principle in Japan's Medieval Mirror Genre.

• Author: Morley, Brendan

Reflecting the Past: Place, Language, and Principle in Japan's Medieval Mirror Genre. By ERIN L. BRIGHTWELL. Harvard East Asian Monograph Series, vol. 433. Cambridge, MA: HARVARD UNIVERSITY ASIA CENTER, 2020. Pp. xiii + 327. $60.

Mirrors (kagamimono) traditionally refer to works of expository prose that treat historical topics and bear the term kagami in their titles. Many exhibit thematic and narratological ties to the superordinate genre of "tales" (monogatari), with the best-known Mirrors typically deemed "historical tales" (rekishi monogatari) by modern critics. In this study, Erin Brightwell approaches Mirrors not as a subset of tales, but as an independent genre that constituted a "powerful third option" (p. 20) for historiographic writing (the other being "chronicles" of the sort exemplified by official court histories). Her analysis focuses on eight Mirrors in particular, dates of composition for which range from the late eleventh to fourteenth century. In chronological order, these are Okagami (The Great Mirror), Imakagami (The New Mirror), Mizukagami (The Water Mirror), Kara kagami (The China Mirror), Azuma kagami (The Mirror of the East), Nomori no kagami (The Mirror of the Watchman in the Fields), Masukagami (The Clear Mirror), and Shinmeikyo (The Mirror of the Gods).

The selection immediately indicates that Brightwell's conception of a Mirror is quite capacious. Most modern taxonomies, shaped by the ideological imperatives of "national literature" (kokuhungaku), focus on works written in vernacular classical Japanese (wahun) and give comparatively short shrift to works such as Azuma kagami and Shinmeikyo, which are written in a variant form of literary Sinitic (kanbun) adapted to the Japanese language. Its title notwithstanding, Nomori no kagami would also not usually be classed as a "mirror," but as a poetic treatise (karon) on the basis of its subject matter. In addition to the eight Mirrors listed above, Brightwell extends her analysis to cover several other medieval texts that merit comparison with one or more roughly contemporaneous Mirrors. These include such notable titles as Gukansho (1219), Jinno shotoki (ca. 1343), and Baishoron (ca. 1351), as well as several lesser-known works. This undoubtedly added to the difficulty of an already daunting project, but it enriches her monograph considerably and will not go unappreciated by readers.

Chapter one takes up the progenitor of the Mirror genre, Okagami (late eleventh century), and its closest successor, Imakagami (ca. 1175). These works establish key stylistic conventions that reappear in several later Mirrors and characterize kagamimono in the traditional sense. Perhaps the most notable such convention is the use of a dramatized narrator, not omniscient but aged and extremely wise, to relate historical events. Historical processes are presented as unfolding according...