Paper short abstract:

After the Great Fire of Tenmei (1788), Emperor Kōkaku restored the imperial palace and its rites imitating emperor Murakami's Heian court, probably using the Hana no en chapter of the Genji monogatari as a model to inform his idea of restoration.

Paper long abstract:

Literary texts have the power to create worlds their readers wish to be real, even if fictional. They are not just the product of their authors' imagination, but are rather the sum of human wisdom, personal experiences and cultural history.

Despite being fictional, literary texts often represent a valuable source that offers answers to people's questions, giving shape to their aspirations and desires. Even if a monogatari is neither a "fact" nor a "history", it is presented by its narrator as a "truth". This ends up conditioning the shared memory of its readers, acquiring a sort of reliability by its own.

We know that rulers in Japan relied on historical texts as a tool to inform and orient their political actions, but what value did they ascribe to literary texts? In this presentation I will consider the case of Emperor Kōkaku (r. 1780-1817) and his reuse of the Genji monogatari. I argue that Kōkaku used the Hana no en (Banquet of Flowers) chapter as a document to inform his attempt to restore the court of emperor Murakami (r. 946-967) with its buildings, rites, and cultural events.

This hypothesis is based on three evidences:

1) After the destruction of the palace in the Great Fire of Tenmei (1788), Kōkaku rebuilt it imitating the shape and size it had during the Heian period. He planted a cherry tree in front of the new Shishinden and held a "banquet of flowers", that has as its only precedent the one held by Murakami, and that inspired the episode in the Genji monogatari.

2) In 1790, Kōkaku chooses to move into the new palace on November 22th, the very same day Emperor Murakami did the same, also restoring the custom of gyōkō (imperial procession).

3) Kōkaku recovered the title of Tennō-gō that had fallen in disuse after Murakami.

If the hypothesis that Kōkaku used the Genji monogatari as a model to restore the imperial palace is confirmed, this demonstrates how literary texts - exactly as other forms of cultural heritage - played an important role to re-creating an imagined cultural past and a shared identity.