Professor Roberta Strippoli (Associate Professor, University of Napoli L’Orientale) will take us on a journey across Japanese history, exploring the interplay of literature, gender, and cultural heritage by tracing a famous episode from The Tale of the Heike, Japan’s most celebrated medieval epic, and its many afterlives.

Characters in the Japanese warrior narrative The Tale of the Heike (13th–14th century) 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 (1180–1185) to fulfil the task of retelling what happened in Kiso’s last battle and, by becoming a nun, pray for his rebirth. This talk explores the connections between The Tale of the Heike 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.

This event is free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the Asian Studies Program and co-sponsored by the Department of Chinese and Japanese, the Medieval & Renaissance Studies Program, and the Women, Feminist, and Queer Studies Program.