Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

by Osamu Dazai

  5. The Full Moon Festival is held on the fifteenth night of the eighth month according to the lunar calendar. Occurring as it does in late summer, the occasion essentially is regarded as a “Harvest Moon” festival, with various vegetables and fruits selected as offerings to the moon.

  6. “River bums” is a reference to the origins of Kabuki in a dance performed in the dry bed of the Kamo River in Kyoto in 1603. The performers were a troupe made up mostly of women who danced under the direction of a female attendant of Izumo Shrine name Okuni.

  7. During the Insect-Expulsion Festival, bells and drums are used to frighten away the insects that damage the rice plants.

  8. The theme of the ballad of Ranchō is a common one in Edo literature—a husband’s love for a prostitute and his wife’s attempt to persuade her rival to give up her claim.

  9. Hakama are formal Japanese trousers for men; they are sometimes called a “divided skirt” due to their shape.

  10. The period when the narrator of Memories is first exposed to “democratic ideas” would be shortly after the end of World War I in 1918. Japan underwent severe economic problems following the war, allowing liberal and Marxist doctrines to find fertile ground.

  11. The “well-known novel by a Russian author” is Tolstoy’s Resurrection.

  12. A tatami mat, a kind of rush mat serving as a floor covering in a traditional Japanese house, measures about three by six feet.

  Undine

  1. See note 2 of Memories.

  2. A tengu is a demon of grotesque appearance, especially conspicuous for its long nose or beak. The tengu derives from a mountain god associated with large trees, and its evil doings include the abduction of children.

  3. The adzuki bean was introduced early to Japan from China. The red color of the beans is considered auspicious, and they are often served on happy occasions.

  Monkey Island

  1. With respect to this paragraph, it should be pointed out that Dazai’s own father was a landlord who employed tenant farmers to work his lands. With its reference to “white gloves,” the paragraph seems to pick up on the portrayal of Victorian society suggested in the previous use of such language as “heavy snakeskin canes” and “gaudy feathers.” It must be admitted that “belly-button” remains a cryptic usage in the passage; perhaps it is meant to suggest somewhat comically just how uncertain the monkey’s grasp of human society actually is.

  On the Question of Apparel

  1. For a lively description of the incident at Ataka Barrier, see Ivan Morris, The Nobility of Failure (New York: New American Library, 1975), pp. 89-94.

  2. An odenya is a rather plebeian sort of establishment specializing in oden, a kind of stew, and serving saké and beer as well.

  3. Tabi are socks, usually of white cotton, made with a division between the big toe and the other four toes to accommodate the thong of the sandals or wooden clogs with which tabi are generally worn.

  4. A haori is a loosely fitting jacket.

  5. Geta are wooden clogs either worn barefoot or with tabi.

  6. Kurume refers to cloth dyed according to the ikat method. This method is used principally in Chikugo and Kurume, towns on the southern island of Kyushu.

  7. A yukata is a light summer kimono, and a tanzen is a large, padded kimono worn in cold weather.

  8. According to Japan’s mythology, Ninigi was the grandson of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu and was sent down from heaven to rule the Japanese islands in 660 B.C. The Fire Festival commemorates the fact that Kono-hanasakuya set fire to her parturition hut while giving birth to Ninigi’s children as a means of proving they were indeed his. For a fuller account of the circumstances of this event, see Donald Philippi, trans. The Kojiki (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1968), pp. 144-47.

  9. Paul Verlaine (1844-96) was a French symbolist poet whose “Chanson d’automne” became one of the most celebrated of the verse translations by Bin Ueda (1874-1916) in his epochal volume, The Sound of the Tide (1905).

  A Poor Man’s Got His Pride

  1. The Eight Hells are those in which the sinner is subjected to the punishment of flames and heat. There is also a contrasting set of hells in which cold is the medium of chastisement.

  The Monkey’s Mound

  1. Ihara Saikaku (1642-93) was a writer of popular fiction, especially noted for his koshokubon, or amorous works. Five Women Who Loved Love is a well-known example of this genre.

  2. The Lotus Sutra is a Buddhist scripture that emphasizes devotion as the principal means of salvation.

  3. The Pure Land sect represents a devotional strain in Japanese Buddhism from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries. It advocates faith in Amida, the Buddha of Unlimited Light, as the way to salvation.

  4. Founder of the Nichiren sect of Buddhism, Nichiren (1222-82) entertained doubts early in life about the validity of Pure Land forms of Buddhism. His own religion emphasizes the superiority of the Lotus Sutra expressed in a chant commonly recited by his followers.

  5. Sano Jirozaemon, as dictionaries usually render the name, was a farmer in what is now Tochigi Prefecture. Certain events of his life during the late seventeenth century, especially the slaying of the Yoshiwara courtesan Yatsuhashi, became the basis for a Kabuki play formally titled Kagotsurube Sato no Eizame, but more often referred to by the hero’s name.

  The Sound of Hammering

  1. Ogata Kōrin (1658-1716) was a highly versatile artist who painted both portraits and natural scenes and who also designed textile patterns and utilitarian objects. Among his screen paintings, his depiction of irises is especially admired.

  2. Ogata Kenzan (1663-1743), the younger brother of Kōrin, worked both as a potter and a painter. Despite a difference in temperament—Kōrin was a flamboyant romantic, Kenzan a scholarly recluse—Kenzan created a number of ceramic objects that his older brother helped to design and decorate.

  3. Kyoka Izumi (1873-1939) is noted for his portrayal of the supernatural and the grotesque in a literary style that harked back to the Edo period.

  Taking the Wen Away

  1. Tōson Shimazaki (1872-1943) is probably better known as a novelist than as a poet. However, before he published his first novel, The Broken Commandment (1906), he had already established his reputation as a fine lyric poet, especially with the publication of Seedlings (1897).

  2. The Tales of Uji is an anonymous collection of 197 tales, most likely compiled between 1180 and 1220. The range of works is from simple folktales to stories of religion and the supernatural.

  3. The Chronicles of Japan, or the Nihon Shoki, to give the work its well-known Japanese title, is the first officially sponsored account of the mythic origins and early history of Japan. The chronicle runs from the Age of the Gods to the reign of the Empress Jitō (686-97).

  4. The Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves (Man’yōshū) is the first anthology of Japanese poetry, containing approximately 4,500 works in three distinct forms. The tale of how Urashima passed three years in an underwater realm only to return to his village and find everything changed and himself presently transformed into an old man is detailed in a chōka, or “long poem,” in Book Three of the anthology.

  5. A fudoki, or “gazetteer,” was a compilation of reports in the eighth century on various natural features of a given region in Japan. The Tango Gazetteer survives only in fragmentary form.

  6. The Biographies of the Taoist Immortals is a collection of marvelous tales compiled at the end of the eleventh century by Ōe no Masafusa (1041-1111).

  7. Ōgai Mori (1862-1922) was one of Japan’s greatest men of letters during the latter part of the Meiji period (1868-1912). He also pursued a career in the army medical corps, ultimately rising to the position of surgeon general.

  8. Shōyō Tsubouchi (1859-1935) is best remembered as the first Japanese translator of Shakespeare’s plays and as an advocate of reform of the novel and drama in Japan.

  9. The Dance of Awa is performed as part of the Festival of the Dead in the town of Tokushima,
the capital of a province in Shikoku, formerly known as Awa. The dance is said to have originated in the seventeenth century, when the local lord provided his subjects with too much saké on one occasion.

  10. Shōki is a mythic being of Chinese origin whose principal function is the expulsion of demons. With his bulging eyes, abundant red beard, and large frame, Shoki makes a frightening appearance.

  Crackling Mountain

  1. A figure of popular folk belief, the Kappa is a grotesque, adolescent-like creature that lives in water. When out of its element, the kappa must keep water in a saucer-shaped depression on top of its head in order to maintain its superhuman strength. The creature attacks both animals and people.