Bibliographical Essay

The general history of warriors, which helps to situate fourteenth-century events, begins with the ‘origins' of the warrior class in the ancient period. Hiroaki Sato, in his Legends of the Samurai (Old Saybrook: The Overlook Press, 1995), offers a convenient summary of samurai history, translated myths and legends, a special section on ‘decapitation and disembowelment', and an extensive chronology of notable events from the sixth to the twentieth centuries, including the 1970 disembowelment of Mishima Yukio, a right-wing author.

Despite its fame, only twelve out of forty chapters of the Taiheiki, or The Tale of Grand Pacification, are available in English, expertly translated by Helen Craig McCullough as The Taiheiki: A Chronicle of Medieval Japan (Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle, 1959). She describes the epic as ‘episodic, disorganized accounts of fights' similar to those in certain Icelandic sagas, and ‘a first-rate entertainment' (p. xvii). McCullough also translated The Tale of the Heike (Heike monogatari) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), which is shorter and more coherent than the Taiheiki.

In his Warriors of Japan as Portrayed in the War Tales (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994), H. Paul Varley presents a synopsis of various war tales, including The Tale of Hogen (Hogen monogatari), The Tale ofHeiji (Heiji monogatari) and The Taiheiki, translated as the ‘Chronicle of Great Peace' (pp. 159-216). He notes the Taiheiki's exceptional length and broad coverage, and its presentation of Go-Daigo as a prototypical Confucian ‘bad ruler' who listens to women's selfish advice, abuses public revenue and fails to reward vassals impartially.

Historians view Go-Daigo in two contrasting ways. Paul Varley, in his Imperial Restoration in Medieval Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), offers a conventional view that Go-Daigo and his imperial restoration were anachronistic, and therefore doomed to failure. Andrew Edmund Goble's Kenmu: Go-Daigo's Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1996) sees him as a revolutionary who fitted ‘a society undergoing substantial political, social, economic, and intellectual changes' (p.

Jeffrey P. Mass addressed the fourteenth century as a transformative moment in various social, economic and political aspects, in The Origins of Japan's Medieval World: Courtiers, Clerics, Warriors, and Peasants in the Fourteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). It includes Hitomi Tonomura's ‘Re-envisioning Women in the Post-Kamakura Age', on the transformation in women's social and economic positions, with an analysis of a diary written by the wife of a courtier, whose execution the Taiheiki narrates vividly.

Disembowelment, harakiri or seppuku, often deemed ‘a unique Japanese method of self­destruction', is typically discussed as a component of a related concept, bushido, or ‘Warriors' Way'. Jack Seward pursues seppuku's origin, types, customs and formalities, and its later institutionalisation, in Hara-kiri: Japanese Ritual Suicide (Rutland: Charles Tuttle, 1968). Andrew Rankin offers a more thorough examination in his Seppuku: A History of Samurai Suicide (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2011). These authors would agree that seppuku evolved to define certain moral principles that came to be associated with samurai and, in modern times, further evolved to serve a nationalistic agenda. The rhetorical impact of scenes from the Taiheiki upon the later performance of the actual disembowelment is unmistakable. Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushido in Modern Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), by Oleg Benesch, explains seppuku's modern manifestations and dispels the notion that bushido was a constitutive element of Japan's warriors from their origins.