<敦盛・直実図>といくさの記憶 – 『平家物語』と<平家絵>のあわいから –

Abstract

Chapter 9 of The Tale of the Heike depicts the episode known as the Battle of Ichi-no-tani. The latter half of the chapter lists stories about the deaths in battle and the captures of the members of the Taira clan. The story about the death in battle of the young warrior Taira no Atsumori is especially famous among them: the Minamoto warrior Kumagai Naozane, moved by Atsumori’s youthful beauty and his valiant words and deeds, offers to save his life, but Atsumori refuses his offer and choses to die. This paper focuses on a picture based on this story. It depicts the scene in which Naozane raises his fan at the water’s edge to call back Atsumori, who rides on a horse forward into the sea. Although this picture, which I call “The Picture of Atsumori and Naozane” in this paper, is a narrative painting based on The Tale of the Heike, it creates a different world from that of the body of the text. Despite being a well-known picture, this aspect has rarely been noted so far. This paper first considers the way in which this kind of composition had been established by the seventeenth century. By looking at the gap between the text and the composition of the picture, I will then examine how the interpretations of the story have fluctuated and have transformed in the interstices between The Tale of the Heike and Heike pictures. The Tale of the Heike, drawing on a war that actually took place in the past, has had a significant influence on later generations’ understanding of that war and still continues to do so. The way in which Japanese language textbooks for second-year junior high-school students treat The Tale of the Heike is a typical case. After examining this and other cases, I will conclude this paper by considering in what way “The Picture of Atsumori and Naozane” may affect the construction of the memory of the war narrated in The Tale of the Heike.