Book123

    Free register and download UseNet downloader, then you can FREE Download from UseNet.

    Download without Limit " History/Military Chiushingura or the Loyal League: A Japanese Romance " from UseNet for FREE!

More

Izumo Takeda, Frederick V. Dicken (translator), "Chiushingura or the Loyal League: A Japanese Romance"

The story tells of a group of samurai who were left leaderless (became ronin) after their daimyo (feudal lord) was forced to commit seppuku (ritual suicide) for assaulting a court official named Kira Yoshinaka, whose title was Kozuke no suke. The ronin avenged their master's honor after patiently waiting and planning for over a year to kill Kira. In turn, the ronin were themselves forced to commit seppuku — as they had known they would be — for committing the crime of murder. With little embellishment, this true story was popularized in Japanese culture as emblematic of the loyalty, sacrifice, persistence, and honor that all good people should preserve in their daily lives. The popularity of the almost mythical tale was only enhanced by rapid modernization during the Meiji era of Japanese history, when it is suggested[by whom?] many people in Japan longed for a return to their cultural roots.

While sources do differ as to some of the details, the version given below was carefully assembled from a large range of historical sources, including some still-extant eye-witness accounts of various portions of the saga.

Fictionalized accounts of these events are known as Chushingura. The story was popularized in numerous plays including bunraku and kabuki; because of the censorship laws of the shogunate in the Genroku era which forbade portrayal of current events, the names were changed. While the version given by the playwrights may have come to be accepted as historical fact by some, the Chushingura was written some 50 years after the fact, and numerous historical records about the actual events that pre-date the Chushingura survive. The popularity of the story is still high today. With ten different television productions in the years 1997–2007 alone, the Chushingura ranks among the most familiar of all stories in Japan.

Buy It at Lowest Price on Amazon

Rating:
2.5 out of 5 by Book123