Seppuku (Disembowelment)
Among all forms of bodily mutilation, the frequently featured practice of seppuku most clearly sets the Taiheiki’s text apart from other war tales. In the last battle scene in the Tale of the Heike, most of the defeated drown in the sea with no mention of cut flesh.
But in the Taiheiki, collective bloody disembowelment (seppuku) in the Hojo camp dramatises the denouement. This section asks why seppuku images suddenly appear in this war tale, what coherent textual meanings they convey, and how those meanings relate to the concept of ‘violence’. We begin with an episode taking place at Toshoji Temple, where ‘Nagasaki Jiro Takashige, who had been fighting bravely in support of the Hojo drank sake in three sips’, and:Pushed the sake cup to Dojun. Saying, ‘Have this cup, and use THIS as an accompanying snack’, he stuck his sword to his left side, sliced long all the way across to the right side, pulled out his intestines with his hand, and with it, fell in front of Dojun. Dojun then took the sake cup, exclaiming, ‘Wonderful snack!’
The scene shows that the mode of self-slicing comes with an infectious spirit of camaraderie:
Most fully have the young men displayed their loyalty. It will not do for others to be idle, or to say, ‘I am ripe in years’. From this time forth, let all eat of this repast! [Dojun] cut open his belly in a cross, drew forth the dagger again, and laid it down before His Lordship the lay monk (Hojo). While in the hall, Hojo kinsmen and men of other houses bared their snowy skins to the waist, some cutting open their bellies and some striking off their own heads. Truly two hundred and eighty-three men of the Hojo took their lives, each striving to be first.
The temple is then torched, and as the smoke rises, other warriors outside also cut their bellies. Some died by jumping into the flames, and others cut each other and died in a heap.
As a great river was the rushing of their blood... [l]ater it was known that more than eight hundred and seventy men perished in this one place. Truly it is said in Kamakura alone they were more than six thousand persons [who killed themselves].[1060]
The textually preferred mode of cutting, the warriors' shared sense of ownership of the act, accompanying language of bravado, and the numerical scale easily impress the reader and imprint the image with great poignancy.
In exploring the meanings that support the image, the first thing to note is that these are representations. Representation and historicity of what is represented belong to two different traditions and analytical categories. Unfortunately, treating the Taiheiki as ‘history' instead of as a ‘tale' is fairly common, partly because the narrative follows evolving events in close to ‘real time'. It is often stated that the ‘Japanese traditional practice' of seppuku began in the time of the Taiheiki. While it is possible that people actually committed seppuku, the tale's descriptions cannot serve as evidence of it; moreover, there is no contemporary documentary, archaeological or forensic basis for it.[1061] I probe the narrative purpose of seppuku and its meaning by viewing the tale as a literary text and approach instances of seppuku as an element of the entire textual production. This means attending to narrative techniques, such as exaggeration, allusions and so on. Weighing seppuku in light of other extravagant deeds also may help to suggest its function. For example, one amazing episode describes Nitta Yoshisada who, shot with an arrow in the forehead, determinedly cuts off his own head and buries it deep in the mud, and lies down over it. But an enemy runs up, skewers the head on the tip of his spear, and takes it away along with Yoshisada's armour, sword and dagger.[1062] This vignette is not only somewhat comical but also highly useful, because an impossible act such as this one relativises other acts, including seppuku.
The Taiheiki's narrative movement also calls our attention to another prominent feature: the many allusions to Chinese historical cases to explain the conditions at hand, not to mention the overall Confucian-style moral framework in which the narrative operates. By adopting select situations in classical Chinese texts, the tale shows both the reason for the protagonist's act as well as its legitimacy. The prevalence of textual connections suggests the author's deep knowledge of legends and anecdotes featured in various Chinese compendia, which the Japanese elites read eagerly.
Seppuku by Akahashi Moritoki, a vassal of the Hojo, serves as an example of the explanatory power of Chinese models. Moritoki, in his words, makes references to Chinese classics in two ways. The first relates to the timing of his seppuku, an act that is typically done in the face of certain defeat. Moritoki explains why he is killing himself now: ‘I shall cut open my belly in this place without waiting to know the fate of our house. Similarly, China's Han Gaozu withstood eight years of many defeats but finally destroyed Xiang Yu in a war with Chu.' By referencing Han Gaozu's eventual victory, Moritoki suggests the Hojo, who may seem to be losing now, eventually might win. Therefore, his seppuku at this moment may seem premature. What, then, compels him to commit seppuku now? Moritoki, whose sister was the wife of the enemy Ashikaga Takauji, wants to avoid the situation in which: ‘Lord of Sagami (Hojo) and others of my kinsmen shame me by looking upon me with distrustful eyes, by reason that I am kin to Lord Ashikaga through a woman.' His act to silence himself by suicide is modelled after China's Tian Guang, who killed himself in order to keep secret the information his superior, Yan Dan, had shared with him in strict confidence. Similar to Tian Guang, Moritoki killed himself in order to pre-empt any suspicion of betrayal by remaining alive. ‘He thus went inside the tent, threw away his armour, cut his belly across, ending it with a cross-shaped cut, and lay down with his pillow to the north.
More than ninety samurai followed him in death.'[1063]In a similar way that allusions to earlier poetic phrases shape meanings in courtly literature, such as the Tale of Genji, references to characters and situations that appeared in the Chinese classics often explain protagonists' motives and actions in military tales. This has the effect of inscribing the similar moral virtues expressed, for example, by Chinese officials' noble suicide to the Japanese situation. It is probably no coincidence that many, though not all, of the allusions come from the literature that describes periods of division and moments of turmoil, such as the Spring and Autumn period (eighth to fifth centuries bce ) or the Three Kingdoms period (220-80 ce), a complex time of division, with multiple potential winners, during which any soldier's loyalty easily could be questioned. For example, a story of mass suicide following the death of the leader Qin Mukong (r. 660-621 bce) and another about cutting one's belly and extracting intestines by Hong Yan of Wei appear in the Shiji by Sima Qian (first century bce), and the Annals of LU Buwei, a Qin dynasty minister (third century bce).[1064] The war that the Taiheiki describes resembles certain conditions in classical China in which one's loyalty could be at stake or misunderstood. As for the mass suicide of the Hojo, a possible model may be found in the case of AnJincang of the Tang dynasty (618-907), who chose to cut himself open in front of Empress Wu Zetian (r. 690-705) instead of giving false confession under torture that the prince, the heir apparent, was plotting against the empress. His five organs fell out as he bled profusely. China's dynastic histories repeatedly included this legend.[1065] It seems entirely possible that the Japanese author of the Taiheiki was familiar with such stories, borrowing the motif and underlying meaning, and adjusting its dramatic image to fit the Japanese situation.
The Taiheiki's abundant connections to Chinese legends may serve to suggest a reason for enlisting such numerous cases of disembowelment in shaping the narrative. As for the Hojo's spectacular seppuku, I re-emphasise the incontrovertible fact that the war was initiated by the emperor against the Hojo, and posit that their seppuku may have been textually constructed to signal and symbolically explain the Hojo's innocence, as did the belly-cutting of An Jincang of the Tang dynasty, who sacrificed his anatomy to prove the prince's innocence, and in turn his own righteous stand towards the empress. After all, the Hojo did not rebel against the imperial symbol or authority. They were the recipients of aggression by a disgruntled emperor.
In addition to the Hojo's innocence as a possible explanation, the Taiheiki's narrative invests several other meanings in the act of seppuku. The most readily apparent is to show the idealised sense of loyalty that justified the will to die and upheld the warrior order, expressed by the protagonists' martial resolve in times of defeat. The second point is connected to the text's larger commentary on the war as a caricature of disorder, or ran. The preponderance of seppuku, the potent physical act of self-destruction, occurring across the narrative space, is an emblematic embodiment of the ‘disorder' itself. Yet the third point is that the act of seppuku not only plots a man's end to his fight and life, but also prompts closure to the perpetuation of violence in each battle and the war. Importantly, seppuku has the power to reinstate order in the condition of disorder.
The Taiheiki empowers the act of seppuku to represent both disorder and the promise of a return to the moral order of ‘normalcy', as predicted in the tale's concluding chapter. Far more than an anatomical event, seppuku in the narrative of the war tale viscerally and visually communicates the disorder, ran, and a promise of its dialectical opposite, the normalcy of moral order.