| When the Ishii brothers Genzo and Hanzo avenged their father and older brother on the Ise Kameyama castle grounds in 1701 (Genroku 14.5.9) against Akahori Mizunosuke, a man who had eluded retribution for nearly three decades, stories of the brothers' long but successful revenge-killing, or katakiuchi, circulated widely in writing and by word of mouth, were recorded in numerous chronicles (Kukugoshu, Getsudo kenmonshu, Omurochuki, Sekenbanashi fubunshu, Kanroso, Nakamura zakki, and Gotodaiki), and appeared in commercial print and on the puppet stage within a year ( Genroku Soga monogatari and Dochu hyoban katakiuchi). As evidenced by the 1696 publication of Nihon bushi kagami (an anthology of historical katakiuchi narratives), the events and reception of the brothers' katakiuchi were prefigured by the late seventeenth-century redefinition of the practice---more precisely, the discovery (invention) of katakiuchi as a samurai legacy that offered evidence and examples of "ancient" valor amid "modern" uncertainties. Early interpreters of the Ishii brothers' katakiuchi read the events of the brothers' story along the grain of this late 17th-century discourse and helped to inscribe their katakiuchi as, among other things, an unprecedented feat of filial virtue and martial valor that exposed and transcended the divide between a vigorous warrior past and its infirm present. Through a careful examination of early texts emanating from the Ishii brothers' katakiuchi , the dissertation illuminates these and other tensions that animated transmission and transformation of the brothers' story in the early 18th century. By tracing these first narratives of the Ishii brothers' late Genroku-period katakiuchi across factual reports, Genroku Soga monogatari , and Dochu hyoban katakiuchi, the study contributes to a better understanding of the genesis and reproduction of popular narratives in Edo-period Japan. |
