New articles in this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 United States License. This journal is published by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Japanese Language and Literature Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Japanese jll.pitt.edu | Vol. 56 | Number 1 | April 2022 | DOI: 10.5195/jll.2022.225 ISSN 1536-7827 (print) 2326-4586 (online) A Failure of Vision: Diachronic Failure and the Rhetoric of Rupture in the Taiheiki Jeremy Sather Introduction The Taiheiki 太平記 (A chronicle of great peace, fourteenth century) tells the story of the ninety-sixth emperor Go-Daigo’s 後醍醐天皇 (1288–1339) triumph over the Kamakura shogunate ( 鎌倉幕府 Kamakura bakufu), establishment of the Kemmu Imperium (建武新政 Kemmu shinsei, 1333– 1336), and fall from grace that led to the Wars of the Northern and Southern Courts (南北朝動乱 Nanbokuchō dōran, 1336–1392). 1 Exciting stuff, and yet excitement is not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of the Taiheiki, whose parts never quite merge into a thematic whole. The latter half is so disjointed that Paul Varley facetiously suggests that “the Taiheiki’s title should be changed from ‘Chronicle of Great Peace’ to ‘Chronicle of Great Horror’ (Taihenki).” 2 Rather, the Taiheiki is noteworthy for its lack of thematic cohesion, an absence of definitive authorship, abstruse biases, and bland, formulaic prose. 3 Further, the text offers no explanation of the title, leaving us to ponder its connection to a narrative whose axis is not peace but war. And yet in spite of these weaknesses it enjoyed immense popularity during the Sengoku (1467– 1615) and Tokugawa (1600–1868) periods, when people of all backgrounds sought to draw from it lessons on the nature of warfare and governance. 4 This article has two main arguments. First, the Taiheiki is a failed narrative, one whose attempt to preserve the diachronic historical tradition from which it was born was at odds with the times. In failing to create a diachronic narrative along the lines of other war chronicles such as the Heike monogatari (平家物語 Tales of the Heike), the text also failed to achieve the popularity of other chronicles whose clarity of theme and tightness of narrative imbued them with a significance that rooted itself in the Japanese imaginary. In other words, the relevance of the Taiheiki stemmed from its parts—from episodes such as Kusunoki Masashige’s