David Bialock's Eccentric Spaces, Hidden Histories is a complex and wide-ranging study by one of the most interesting thinkers on premodern Japan. This thick volume traces a set of cultural and narrative practices from the eighth through the fourteenth centuries. Over time, their interconnected development reveals the shifting relationships between modes of asserting authority in ritual and narrative, as they relate to notions of space, both geopolitical and symbolic. The author highlights the ongoing vitality of Daoist conceptualizations of space and kingship, notions used variously over the period to support, subvert, and reconfigure ideas about the state in early culture and its records. The Daoist text stands as one “hidden history” that brings into relief the developmental trajectory and broader implications of historical narrative from the earliest chronicles through the medieval Heike monogatari.

Eccentric Spaces, Hidden Histories is divided into three sections. The first focuses on Nara and early-Heian manifestations of yin-yang five agents theory in ritual practices as articulated in texts that helped shore up the authority of the early tennō. Especially in his analyses of Man'yōshū (chapter 1) and Kaifūsō (chapter 3) poems, Bialock stresses the range of possible meanings suggested by their graphic (rather than phonetic) representations. His analyses reveal the poets’ lively engagement with yin-yang theory and argue that its continental role in justifying rulership was also at play in the early Nara courts. His work builds on recent studies aimed at redefining the wakan dialectic and the vitality of continental forms generally speaking, concerns central throughout the study.

Chapter 2 looks at pivotal early moments in the changing relationship between these and other (particularly Buddhist) thought patterns, especially Temmu's establishment of the Yin Yang and Medical Bureaus. Bialock suggests that this is when the very symbols used to define the tennō as Daoist sage ruler and immortal—foundational in earlier generations—split off from the tennō and were delegated to yin-yang professionals whose practices were prescribed and carefully regulated under an increasingly Buddhist regime. However, in redefining such practices, the tennō risked losing personal control over them, thus enabling them to be used instead as modes for criticizing sovereign rule.

Chapters 4 and 5 (part 2) focus on the ensuing fragmentation of a capital- and tennō-centered cultural assemblage. Chapter 4 opens with a discussion of the Yamato-takeru and Jimmu tennō narratives in Kojiki, Nihon shoki, and Hitachi fudoki, stressing the significance of the origins and meaning of speech in all these works. Bialock argues that the Fudoki’s Yamato-takeru story—admittedly spoken “in the language” (p. 127) of the Yamato court—represented an alternative mode for articulating movement, which he hints is an early incarnation of “nomadic speech,” in the sense of Gilles Deleuze: speech with an unstable subjectivity, capable of multiple, shifting, even contradictory positions. In the early Heian period, nomadic speech and behavior were increasingly seen as threats to the central order. As the tennō became a locus of potential defilement, the threatening forces of the nomadic and peripheral needed to be mediated.

This situation in effect collapsed the tennō’s authority described in the earliest histories, giving rise to new historiographical modes reflecting the power of the nomadic, epitomized by Ōkagami (chapter 5), which here receives its most interesting treatment in English so far. By historically situating the narrative context of Ōkagami’s Urin'in enlightenment lecture and emphasizing the nomadic character of the multiple speaking voices in the text, Bialock convincingly argues that “Ōkagami registers the moment when wandering reciters gain figural custody of historical narrative” (p. 156). This enables him to tie Ōkagami to older historiography by virtue of its title (as a “mirror,” kagami) and purported goals, even as it deploys nomadic speech and uncanny liminal speakers to tell history. As the site where the nomadic becomes the voice for rendering history, Ōkagami is the linchpin in Bialock's argument linking the medieval Heike monogatari, a “war tale,” to ancient histories. In tracing this strand of historical narrative practice, Bialock deftly and convincingly situates the medieval tale in its richer role as a vibrant and influential history.

The medieval Heike corpus comes to the fore in part 3. Chapters 6 and 8 focus on a set of Heike narratives, speaking to the changing meanings of space, authority, and ritual in medieval society and politics, while chapter 7 provides a “thick description” of the context in which the Heike was created and circulated. Bialock's exploration of alternative versions of important Heike narratives found in the Genpei Jōsuiki and Engyō-bon variants, enhanced by his lengthy and lively translations, represents a significant contribution to Heike studies.

These final chapters draw attention to the ambivalent and sometimes conflicting views of the shape of the realm and its relationship to the continent, both between and within individual Heike variants. Especially revelatory are Bialock's treatments of the Taira Shigemori (chapter 6) and Kiyomori (chapter 8). He notes that, in contrast to the familiar Kakuichi-bon account, other variants celebrate and foreground the maritime commercial world of the Taira, creating a heterodox space that challenges the conventional juxtaposition of the continent and Japan. Here his argument demonstrates the vital importance of alternative narrative modes and spatial configurations for the Heike as history: we see Kiyomori as an alternative tennō, possessed with the demon-quelling authority of ancient sage kings, yet deriving authority and power from alliances with peripheral groups, while governing from the heterodox capital of Fukuhara and operating in the context of maritime trade and cultural exchange with the continent.

Here Bialock skillfully weaves together the often contradictory tendencies found in medieval narrative—the prominence of Buddhist law (buppō) in configuring the polity, the polyvalence of a realm at once centered at Heian-kyō and configured as a peripheral island kingdom, and a nonimperial ruler from a geographically peripheral class—and situates them in relation to earlier works of historiography. The result is nothing short of ground breaking: it opens rich new perspectives on ancient and medieval historiography and constitutes a significant reappraisal of the Heike corpus. His complex argument guides the reader on a demanding path through a broad swath of cultural history, but the payoff is grand. Bialock convincingly reveals the hidden histories underlying the Heike narrative by resituating the work in the “eccentric spaces” that are vital to the texts and contexts of the Heike and its world.