Constructing Abe no Seimei: Integrating Genre and Disparate Narratives in Yumemakura Baku\u27s Onmyōji

The Onmyōji series has had an incredible impact on Japanese fiction. It has created an entire genre of material called onmyōjimono and sold 5 million copies counting only the novel series. Despite this, it has been woefully understudied by both Japanese and English speaking scholars. The Japanese scholars that do acknowledge it use it as a springboard to launch a survey of Abe no Seimei in written and performed media throughout history, and the English speaking scholars have limited their analyses to the form that oni take in the narrative. My research has revealed that Yumemakura Baku utilizes a complex set of mechanisms to combine disparate narratives into a cohesive whole, integrating elements of genre and modern literary aesthetics to make old narratives agreeable to modern tastes. In the process he creates a dark and threatening world through which the Heian courtiers must navigate. Abe no Seimei acts as their guide and mediator. Despite holding an official rank within the court he is as otherworldly as the world, filled with supernatural beasts and formless creatures, in which they live. Using the mechanism of Abe no Seimei, Yumemakura Baku reveals to the reader their own tendencies toward prejudice, while constructing a vast world through centuries of written material

Melodrama and the Classic Television Serial

This chapter is concerned with the operation of the melodramatic mode \ud within the classic television serial. It argues that the melodramatic \ud mode is central to the narrative organization and emotional effect of \ud a number of BBC adaptations of the works of Charles Dickens and\ud Elisabeth Gaskell broadcast between 1999 and 2008, and that melodrama \ud is something those programs productively engage with rather \ud than something they oc casionally lapse into or avoid. This challenges \ud the frequent categorization of the classic television serial as a homogenous \ud group of texts lacking either the distinctiveness or artistic merit\ud of their literary source