Eiga monogatari (The tale of flowering fortunes) is among Heian Japan's most important but undervalued texts. Since the McCulloughs’ weighty annotated translation of 1980, no English monograph had been devoted to it until the welcome recent publication of Takeshi Watanabe's Flowering Tales: Women Exorcising History in Heian Japan, in which the author resituates Eiga within the complex of narrative practices of the eleventh century and argues for its profound significance in creating a narrative space for vernacular histories for centuries to come.
A historical tale written in kana, Eiga chronicles the grandeur of court life during the tenure of Fujiwara no Michinaga (966–1028), the most powerful of the Fujiwara regents, grandfather to two emperors, and patron of Murasaki Shikibu. Flowering Tales, however, draws attention to Eiga's concern with those disenfranchised by his success. Watanabe describes Eiga as an “affective history of communal healing” (p. 8), a...
