Corporeality in the Japanese Oral Tradition of Storytelling by Biwa-Hoshi

This paper adopts a humanities-based interdisciplinary approach to the interaction between corporeality and art through the integration of the social and physical aspects of blindness. I will examine how physical blindness affected and even contributed to artistic production in blind 13 ^th to 15^th century Japanese traveling entertainers' chanting narratives of tragic heroes. These blind entertainers were equipped with lute-like instruments and clad in shabby monk's robes. Because of this appearance, they were called "biwa-hoshi" (a monk with a lute). At that time, blindness had a significant impact on popular thinking. In ancient and medieval Japan, it was commonly believed that the blind were born with supernatural memory. The biwa-hooshi thus deserved attention from all classes. The biwa-hoshi's oral tradition began developing a few decades after the mid-12th century when Japan saw warfare and chaos involving a three-sided struggle between the nobility and samurai clans. This was a time of hegemonic transition in which two emerging samurai clans, the Genji and the Heike, individually sought to subjugate the nobility and competed with each other for rulership over the central areas of Japan. The amalgamation of popular memories and written accounts of these turbulent years formed a series of oral tales depicting the rise and fall of the Heike clan that led to the opponent clan Genji's national reign. During the relatively peaceful period between the early 13th century and the mid-15th century, individual biwahoshi successfully chanted pieces of these amalgamated narratives generically titled "The Tales of the Heike." The mechanism of this artistic success, i.e. body-and-art interaction, will be approached from non-exclusive literary, historical, and anthropological perspectives.