Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the connections between the noh Tomoe and the Buddhist temple Gichūji in Shiga Prefecture, suggesting that they are complementary ways of remembering the events and mourning the dead of the Genpei War (1180–1185).

Paper long abstract:

Characters in the Heike monogatari generally belong to one of two groups: men, who fight and die, and women, who survive, remember, make sense of history, and pray for the dead. In the story of Tomoe we find the two sets of functions combined in the same character. She is an accomplished warrior at the service of Kiso Yoshinaka (1154–1184), but also a woman who survives the Genpei War to fulfil the task of retelling what happened in Kiso’s last battle and, by becoming a nun, pray for his rebirth.

The noh Tomoe (a fourteenth century play by an unknown author) situates the heroine, or better, her spirit, in the Awazu Plain in Omi (today’s Shiga Prefecture), the place where Kiso lost his life after ordering her to leave the battlefield. In the noh, Tomoe’s ghost appears to a monk traveling in the area and informs him that her lord is now venerated, in a syncretic way, as a local kami or buddha, and encourages the monk to read sutras for him.

In Ōtsu, the area in which both Kiso’s last battle and the events narrated in the noh supposedly happened, there is a temple called Gichūji. Its funding or revival in the late Muromachi period is possibly connected with the popularity of the noh Tomoe, which appears in the repertory of all five schools. According to legends related to this temple, a beautiful nun, later identified as Tomoe, set up a hermitage near Yoshinaka’s gravesite and held memorial services for him. The temple subsequently fell into disrepair and was rebuilt in the Edo period, becoming one of the poet Matsuo Bashō’s favorite places.

This paper explores the connections between noh and cultural heritage such as temples and graves, showing how they are complementary ways of remembering, mourning, and, in the case of cultural heritage, affirming local identity.