Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
SUMMARY −217− The Repentant Snake-Demoness TSUTSUMI Kunihiko A woman who falls in love with a young monk on a pilgrimage becomes so obsessed with him that she turns into a snake. This oral tradition of Dojoji Temple in Kii Province (now Wakayama Prefecture) has its origins in several ancient texts including Hokke Genki [Miraculous Tales of the Lotus Sutra]. The story was embroidered in medieval Noh dramas and early modern plays, fiction, songs, and art, forming a continuous thread in Japanese literary and cultural history that came to be known as the “Dojoji-mono” genre. In particular, the early modern versions of the story, by making the heroine Kiyohime a young girl, took as their central theme a passion so consuming that it transforms an innocent maiden into a serpent. As female passion came to be viewed as sinful, both in the mores of the common people and in the instruction that women increasingly received from Buddhist temples in the medieval and early modern eras, religious books and moral guides added a new interpretation to the tale by censuring the serpent-woman’s immorality. In response to these social trends, Kiyohime came to be portrayed in literature as recognizing and repenting the depth of her passion. In the eighteenth-century joruri ballad Dojoji Genzai Uroko [The Scales of Dojoji, A Modern Version] and in zappai (comic verses) of the same period, we find a new image of the heroine as a serpentdemoness tormented by love—an image that originated in the popular literature of the early modern era. The creation of this character later gave rise, in Edo ghost tales, to fictional depictions of the faithlessness of a cowardly man who flees a love-crazed woman. The introduction of this theme of male desertion led to the establishment of the literary techniques which were used in Edo ghost tales to depict the supernatural beauty of “vengeful female spirits.”