Preaching Law and Order in Late Medieval Japan: Lessons from the Hell Realm in Japanese Buddhist Fiction

In Japan, tales of living human travelers to hell may be as old as the notion of hell itself. Such stories seem to have been a staple of Buddhist preaching and storytelling since at least the eighth- or ninth-century compilation of the tale anthology Nihon ryōiki (Miraculous Stories of Japan). Later, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, highly detailed accounts of the tortures of hell circulated in the oral repertoires of street preachers and storytellers, surviving, in some cases, in the vernacular Buddhist fiction of the day. Narratives like Chōhōji yomigaeri no sōshi (Back from the Dead at Chōhōji Temple; composed prior to 1513) and Fuji no hitoana sōshi (The Tale of the Fuji Cave; ca. 1600) present elaborate lists of crimes and their corresponding punishments as de facto criminal codes enforced in the court of King Emma, the lord and judge of the dead, reflecting both a pervasive Buddhist morality and a particularly late-medieval fascination with the rhetoric of law and litigation. In my presentation, I will seek to examine these informal Buddhist criminal codes, consider their role in late-medieval preaching, and discuss their juxtaposition with shogunal authority in what was probably the most widely reproduced work of late-medieval hell-tour fiction, Fuji no hitoana sōshi.