Lecture: Terute’s Reflections: The Heroine as Archetype, Itinerant Entertainer, “Composer” and Tourist Attraction in Variant Oguri Narratives

March 28, 2000

Lecture: Terute’s Reflections: The Heroine as Archetype, Itinerant Entertainer, “Composer” and Tourist Attraction in Variant Oguri Narratives
Susan Matisoff (Professor and Chair, Dept. of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California, Berkeley)
403 Kent Hall, Columbia University (116th St. & Amsterdam Ave.)
6:00 PM

Oguri is a narrative first captured on paper around 1630. One example of the sekkyô-bushi genre, this sprawling tale ranges across space both in the geographical sense (from Kyoto to Ibaraki, Gifu, Kumano and back) and beyond, to the underworld court of King Emma. Orikuchi Shinobu saw the relationship between its central characters—Oguri, Terute and her father Yokoyama—as an archetype manifest as early as the Kojiki. Later scholars’ theories relate aspects of the tale to realities of local history and to its transmission by women itinerants (aruki miko). After fading from prominence through much of the twentieth century, the Oguri narrative, and Terute in particular, have re-emerged as objects of local boosterism, and as the subject of new theatrical creations such as Umehara Takeshi and Ichikawa Ennosuke’s Oguri “Super Kabuki” collaboration. This lecture will focus on the heroine Terute, refracted from various angles.
Co-sponsored by the University Seminar on Buddhist Studies