<論説>『熊谷家伝記』にみる開発定住と空間占有 : 落人開村伝説の読み解き

Abstract

民俗学・地理学の山村研究は中世の「落人による山村形成」を想定してきた。その根拠の一つとされる『熊谷家伝記』は、一方で創作説がとなえられるほど問題のある「史料」でありながら、事実を反映している可能性を託され、しばしば注目されてきた。しかし本書は編者が説明するように代々の伝記を単に「改書」したものではない。一般の近世期の由緒書と同じく、在地の口頭伝承や文字記録および一般史書の集積と吟味を経たものであり、その開発定住の叙述も編者の判断によって統御されていると考えられる。この点から再読すれば、約二十の集落形成の描写に繰り返しあらわれる「無人の山野の開発定住」・「閉じた小世界」・「潜在的な境界」の三つの構図が、「落人」が正統な先住者にして開発者であり、彼らの開発定住が単なる定着でなく同時に空間占有を伴っていたことを合理化していることに気づく。むしろ本書編纂においては、特定のイエによる社会編成をうまく説明するような「過去の再構成」が行われたと想定すべきであり、落人伝説をもつ他の山村を扱う際にもこの点が考慮されねばならない。

Some mountain villages in Japan have handed down similar legends, narrating " ochiudo", a defeated warrior who had fled his enemies, first settled down there in the medieval period. This story had become an interest for folklorists and geographers and led them to an understanding on the reclamation in the mountainous area by refugees from the .low land in the medieval period. Can we treat such a folklore as something reflecting a fact? It is no wonder that an oral history, once written or edited, tends.to change to be more coherent and acceptable to villagers; The author likes to reexamine the.Kumagai family history written in 1771, describing various events in a mountainous area of central Japan (Figure 1) from the fourteenth century through to the eighteenth century, which became the most important evidence of the origin of the village by "ochiudo, " because of the rarity as historical materials. In this paper, the author pays an attention to its editing process, while the editor of text wrote that he made only a copy of the records written by the successive heads of the Kumagais. Did he use no other source materials and make no intervention to the text? What narrative structure did the editor give to the story? What was obscured? The findings obtained are summarized as follows: first, uneven volume of descriptions for each period in the text (Figure 2 and Table 1) suggests that it was based on various sources such as local folklores, other family histories and popular written-histories collected by himself. Therefore we can suppose that the story shown in the text is a reconstituted narrative which arranges many occurrences both in time and space at the editor's discretion; second, we can find several patterns of the story-telling in the development of villages explaining in the text as shown Figure 3 to 5 and Table 2; (i) while the story tells that an uninhabited land was originally cultivated in the fourteenth century (Figure 3), and also refers a little to a few preceding dwellers, it is thought that "ochiudo" came later and took over preceding dwellers land; (ii) although the text describes as if neighboring occupants and their territories had appeared after the Kumagais had settled down (Figure.4), it can be said that the text stands inside of the Kitmagai family and shuts out the preceding and outside events; (iii) while the text tells that no sooner the family settled down than they fixed a territory which was followed by later settlers (Figure 3), it is better, in fact, to consider that the early-modern boundary dated back to the medieval one, the latter had been more ambiguous before similar demarcations were repeated as shown in the Figure 5. In conclusion, the folklore of "ochiudo" in the text was reconstituted to have a heavy stress on the first settling-down by particular families and on the territoriality to hide the preceding dwellers and their territories. Such a legend had a considerable effect to rationalize a society led by a particular family through a narrative as if the family had been the pioneer in the mountainous area.