2020, Vol., No.87

Journal of Japanese Culture 2024 KCI Impact Factor : 0.46

pISSN : 1226-3605 / eISSN : 2733-8908
https://journal.kci.go.kr/JJC

In“Otogi Zoshi”, Izumishikibu is described as a prostitute. Domyo was abandoned by her at an early age. He grew up and became a fine monk, but he committed adultery with his mother. Shikibu noticed that they had committed incest, and she became a nun. In the story, the image of Shikibu was different from her general character. Her romance was fictionalized. This kind of fiction was already used in medieval tales. Both of them were famous poets. Shikibu was a free-spirited woman, and Domyo was a monk who was famous for reading sutras clearly. This is why they were described as a romantic couple in stories. why did the main characters commit mother-child adultery? It can be said that the Muromachi period, during which this work was written, reflected the possibility that all moral and value pursuit in the world was not normal due to the war. Such plots seem crude and simple, but they seem to contain the author’s detailed intentions. Men are the existence of desire, and it is a man who pursues it. This plot draws the most fundamental desire of maternal and child adultery into the story and leads the main character to Buddhism. This is thought to be because Buddhism is most effective in preaching the last commandment after letting readers savor and enjoy human desires. It can be said that the was good at calculating the taste of stories between the aristocrats and ordinary people who were readers of the day.

Kaoru, the protagonist of the third part of The Tale of Genji, composes 18 soliloquy poems, which describe his emotions in various scenes. In the volume of Kagero, three poems are recited in three scenes: (i) the scene where Kaoru heard about the death of Ukifune in Uji; (ii) the scene where Kaoru, who failed to be in a relationship with Onna-Ichinomiya, reflects his life; (iii) the final scene of the volume of Kagero where Kaoru melancholically reminisces Uji. There are several motives which led Kaoru to create these poems, one of which is his desire to express his vacant emotion, but what is notable here is that Kaoru narrated his emotions through these poems and sort out his feelings, which drastically shifted several scenes of the story. All of what Kaoru has sought is Kagero, or impermanence. Kaoru feels the sense of loss as if he lost everything, and he feels alone and lonely when he recites poems. These are indicative that Kaoru realized the death of Ukifune and he would never be in a relationship with her no matter how he seeks to meet her again.

To show the “uniqueness” of the modern and contemporary system of Tennou, it is important to consider the merits of Tennou and the theory about Him until the Tokugawa period. Despite the fact that the dynasty changed substantially, Tennou and His Court were allowed to exist only as long as they were of use to the Samurai Sovereignty. The ideology that the Tennou system was regarded as a characteristic of Japanese history and political order comes to the fore with the operation of Japanese nationalism. However, after the Meiji Restoration, it was heavily influenced by the repeated proclamation in the systematic structure of the orthodox Japanese theory on Japan crowned with Tennou, the incarnated God with the unbroken imperial line, by being reorganized into a content of the “tradition” of the modern nation-state, the state that “the creation of tradition” was made a priority task.