This case study deals with origin tales (engi) of deities, shrines, and temples, without treating them as one genre, but rather as texts between genres. For this intergeneric focus, the tales in the mid-fourteenth-century collection Shintōshū, attributed to preachers of the Agui branch of Tendai Buddhism, prove to be a particularly promising object of study. While these tales clearly follow some of the conventions of setsuwa literature, many of them are much longer than usual setsuwa tales, and also differ regarding narrative structure. On a linguistic level, there are striking similarities to gunki monogatari such as the mana-bon Soga monogatari and certain versions of the Heike monogatari. Some of the tales were retold in early modern manuscripts that were transmitted individually, especially in Kōzuke Province (present-day Gunma Prefecture). They could be rewritten in a historiographical mode as the chronicle of a certain shrine or temple, or they could take on the form of narrative recitatives (katarimono) and be modified according to genre conventions of kojōruri or honjimono (a sub-genre of otogizōshi).
The engi recounting how humans become deities (kami) are concerned with time and emotion in various ways. As narratives, they cannot exist without a storyworld in which time progresses. This may account for specific conceptualizations of religious terms, such as of jissha[shin] 実者[神] (wrathful deities in opposition to gonja 権者 or avatars) as a temporal category, contrary to early medieval jōdokyō teachings. The fact that many characters in the stories, even after appearing as kami, express their hope that they will attain enlightenment when Buddha Maitreya descends to this world, also has important implications for the concept of honji suijaku as well as for conceptions and evaluations of time. Moreover, although the tales may be conceived as fiction by modern readers, the use of chronometric information stresses their historicity and seeks to increase their authority, even if the chronometric information itself may be somewhat incoherent. The Shintōshū tales are not only characterized by high emotional intensity both regarding the level of the storyworld and its narrating instance and audience, it is also stated explicitly that emotions are a necessary requirement for characters becoming deities (of course, a strong and continuous emotional state is also a prerequisite for a jissha existence).
The configurations of time and emotions in engi will be investigated using different methods. An examination of Shintōshū within honji suijaku discourse informed by historical discourse analysis may reveal several ways in which Shintōshū is defined by narrativity, and time and emotion in particular, and how this is also reflected in the non-narrative parts of the collection. Furthermore, the engi will be analyzed with regard to various narratological categories. These include the ‘chronotope’ as defined by Mikhail Bakhtin, who has demonstrated that chronotopes are inevitably linked to emotional evaluations, but also concepts of cognitive narratology such as the theory by Meir Sternberg, who focuses on suspense, surprise, and curiosity felt by the reader—i.e., emotions directly related to time.
