27 - Revealing the Manly Worth: Cut Flesh in the Heavenly Disorder of Medieval Japan

Summary

‘Violence’ is a term that has no counterpart in medieval Japanese. Instead, the epistemology of “disorder” that destabilized the Confucian notion of Heavenly order governed the newly graphic images of mutilation, injuries, and death emanating from the fourteenth-century War of Northern and Southern Courts (ca. 1330s-90s). In this war, instigated by an emperor – the supposed keeper of Heavenly order– instead of a warrior, the dismembered male body came to articulate the symbolic weight of discord, epitomized by a form of self-mutilation, seppuku (disembowelment), described en masse for the first time in The Tale of Grand Pacification. The precisely measured and recorded cut flesh of the male body also represented the calculable cost and benefit of the war, by serving as the legible evidence of “loyal military service” that could accrue reward. All forms of cut flesh, whether narrated in the tale or inscribed in administrative records of loyal service, belonged to the male body, whereas the female body, with its womb (the same word as the men’s “bowel”-to-be-cut), was typically shielded and ritually excluded from the combat space. This war, more than any other, determined the descriptive language of masculine dismemberment, which would serve as a model for future writings.