This essay examines the intertextual relationship between Kaidōki 海道記 (Record of a Journey Along the Eastern Sea Route, 1223), a travelogue written two years after the politically divisive Jōkyū disturbance (1221), and the symbolically rich episode “Kaidō-kudari 海道下” (journey down the eastern sea route), from the Heike monogatari (Tale of the Heike, 1371), the epic war tale describing Japan’s first major civil war (1180-1185). Kaidōki has long been recognized as an important allusive referent for the “Kaidō kudari” episode of the Heike; segments of narrative and a poem are in fact borrowed directly from it. I argue, however, that the intertextual relationship between Kaidōki and the Heike variants’ accounts of a chance meeting between a prisoner of war, Shigehira, and Jijū, the hostess at an inn where his party spends a night, reflect a more fundamental incorporation of thematic paradigms by drawing attention to the landscape of Japan’s east country (Azuma) in a poem exchange between Shigehira and Jijū.
Throughout the classical period, the east country had always been considered the hinterland, but with the establishment of the first shogunate in the eastern locale of Kamakura, the meaning of “the east” began to shift in recognition of Kamakura’s political and cultural importance. This essay explores how of a brief section of the Heike narrative draws on concerns first raised in Kaidōki to explore and accommodate the new cultural significance of the eastern landscape. |