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Paper short abstract

The Taiheiki legitimates violence by making death morally legible, shifting between Confucian judgment and impersonal causality until the court army/court enemy device breaks. “Exemplary death” is forged through charisma, regalia-sovereignty, and postmortem labor; when these fail, meaning unravels

Paper long abstract

This paper argues that the Taiheiki adjudicates violence, granting it legitimacy by rendering death morally legible. In high-pressure scenes—battle, capture, execution, and the management of bodies—the narration alternates between Confucian evaluation (virtuous rule, loyalty, praise/blame) and impersonal causality (karma, fortune, chance), assigning responsibility while insisting that outcomes routinely exceed human intention. I show how the kangun-chōteki (court army/court enemy) binary operates as a moral sorting device—and isolate the scenes where that device breaks down. At those points, “exemplary death” appears not as a stable virtue but as an effect of narrative labor, secured through three mediations: charisma that binds followers, regalia-centered sovereignty that sacralizes stakes, and postmortem labor that disciplines corpses, heads, rumor, and memorialization so death reads as sacrifice rather than waste. When these mediations hold, the dead become exemplary and politically usable; when they falter, the narrator’s authority wavers, stacking moral verdict, providential logic, and accident without closure. These breakdowns illuminate how the Taiheiki simultaneously authorizes and destabilizes the Wars of the Northern and Southern Courts (Nanbokuchō no dōran), holding ethical accountability and forces beyond human control in productive tension.