In Hell (chapter 1)
In ancient China, which none of us has ever seen, the wife of a drowned man expressed her unbearable grief in a poem39 we still read:
Husband, don’t cross that river!
But at last you wade out.
In the current you fall and die.
Ah, you, what shall I do?
And then in the Sixth Month of 1763, a kabuki actor of women’s roles, Ogino Yaegiri, also went into a river and died. Conflicting rumors abound, and no one knows anything for certain about his drowning.
This woodblock print (ca. 1757) portrays Segawa Kikunojō II (1741–1773), a noted kabuki female impersonator, popularly known by his haikai name Rokō (written to the right). Kikunojō appears here as a courtesan, holding a long tobacco pipe and wearing a kimono marked with the Segawa family crest and tied with a sash in front. The chrysanthemum and butterfly patterns on the robe allude to Kikunojō’s alternative crest. Kikunojō became so popular that his style of tying a sash came to be known as the “Rokō knot” and was imitated by the women of Edo. A hokku, “Weary of a blizzard, the sight of a plum blossom in the cold” (kanbai no / fubuki wo itou / sugata kana), which praises Kikunojō, appears to the left, next to his name. The name of the ukiyo-e artist Ishikawa Toyonobu (1711–1785), known for his prints of beautiful women, appears next to Kikunojō‘s right foot. (Courtesy of the Tobacco and Salt Museum, Tokyo)
Careful inquiry shows, however, that Yaegiri was no Qu Yuan,40 who indignantly wrote, “Could I let my pure whiteness be soiled by the world’s dirt?” and then jumped in the Miluo River. Neither was he like the diver in the nō play Fisherwoman who lost her life retrieving a jewel from the Dragon Palace on the ocean floor. It all began in the other world, halfway between paradise and hell, at the court of the most august king Enma, supreme judge of newly dead souls. This great king rules over three thousand worlds, together with nine lesser kings and countless retainers who oversee numerous agencies and departments.
In the human world, warriors, farmers, artisans, and merchants all were very busy pursuing the separate occupations appropriate to each class. Enma’s palace had once been a place of leisure, but now it, too, was bustling. In recent years human minds had been growing more and more twisted, and people were committing all sorts of crimes. The number of offenders Enma had to condemn to hell was rising daily, with no limit in sight, and the great king faced a crisis. There was no longer enough land left in hell as we had known it.
Profiteering developers and shady contractors took advantage of the land shortage and fought with one another to be first to present their petitions, privately meeting the officials in charge and gaining approval for their projects through flattery, fraud, and bribery. They searched along all the roads through the trillion buddha lands this side of paradise to find desolate, unused wasteland, and they cleared land at the very edge of hell, extending to the eggplant fields in the merciful bodhisattva Jizō’s territory. Some contractors dug lakes hundreds of miles wide and boiled redwood dye in them to make the water look like the steaming blood in the traditional hell, while others constructed artificial mountains and planted sharp seedlings on them to make them resemble the old Mountain of Swords which dead souls had to cross. Since there no longer were enough rank-and-file hell guards to pound and mash all the convicts in mortars, contractors built waterwheel devices to do the job, and in the Hell of Burning Heat they installed a large bellows.
To supplement the Hell of Shrieks, the Hell of Great Wailing, the Hell of Continual Dismemberment and Rememberment, the Hell of Hot Cables, the Hell of Unending Pain, and other traditional properties, the developers opened various new areas that they called Hells of Unlicensed Hookers.41 Claiming that the old woman by the River Between Worlds who strips newly dead souls of their last belongings couldn’t possibly oversee all the new hells herself, the developers got officials to pardon and recall the old woman in Asakusa who cracked open visitors’ heads, the old female demon who ate passersby in Adachigahara, the old woman moneylender in the Sakaichō theater district in Edo who rented out boys and female prostitutes dressed like traveling nuns, and all the other old women who had abused their sons’ brides or hated their stepchildren.
As hell gradually expanded, the shady developers came to officials with still more petitions. “I would like to become a landlord in one of the new hell blocks,” proposed one. “But the payments42 I get for manure from the houses of the hungry ghosts aren’t going up at all. Those famished ghosts just aren’t allowed to eat anything. So I beg you to raise the special seasonal tenant fees to two hundred coppers per festival.” Another sought contracts to procure tongue-pulling tongs, iron cudgels, and fiery wagons. “And you won’t need to order new cauldrons,” he stated. “I can collect all the old abandoned cauldrons without bottoms in traditional hell and have them recast for you. I can also provide you with the wicks you force your convicts to use to try to dig up bamboo roots. If you let me buy up odd pieces from candle makers, your savings will be dramatic.” The speculators knew even a very small project would eventually grow like a piece of dust into a whole mountain during the minimum of a million eons that hell would be around.
One entrepreneur asked to be granted a monopoly on handling clothes taken from the newly dead before they crossed the River Between Worlds. In return, he guaranteed, whenever hell guards lost at dice, he would give them very low interest rates on the tiger-skin loincloths they pawned with him. “If implemented,” said petition after petition, “your benevolence will spread downward for the betterment of all hell”—as if the profits were for others. Even in hell, they say, money talks. It’s a very canny place.
King Enma was so busy making the final decisions on all these projects and other official matters that he no longer had any free time. One day some devil magistrates, preceded by guards holding up lanterns marked with the first character for “hell,” came to him with still another criminal. Gazing down from a distance, Enma could see the man was a Buddhist monk of about twenty. Pale and thin, he was in handcuffs and an iron collar. Tied to his waist was something wrapped in fine crepe.
“And what is his crime?” Enma asked.
The registrar god standing beside the throne walked out before the king. “This monk,” he said, “was an acolyte in a temple in Edo in the land of Japan in the southern sector of the universe. He fell helplessly in love with Segawa Kikunojō, a beautiful actor who plays young women’s roles in kabuki plays in Sakaichō, one of their theater districts. In order to buy private meetings and sleep with this actor, the monk stole money from his own master. Then he took all the scarlet brocade curtains from the sacred halls and statues. They ended up fluttering in a secondhand market! And then he caused the precious image of Amida Buddha carved by the holy man Gyōki43 to manifest itself, surrounded by bodhisattvas and purple clouds, in the storehouse of a pawnshop. The monk loved the young actor much too much. He couldn’t keep his hips shut, things came out, and the situation went from bad to worse. Finally the other monks locked him in a room in the temple. The monk realized he could never meet Kikunojō again, and the actor’s soul didn’t come visit him in his dreams, so he fell very ill. His longing was too strong for his body, and he left the other world and came here. But even in his death throes he never forgot the actor’s picture. He still refuses to let go of it. That thing at his waist is a portrait of Kikunojō done by one of their leading artists, Torii Kiyonobu.
An official wearing double samurai swords and a developer inspect a newly installed apparatus in hell for mashing condemned souls. In Gennai’s time, similar devices had actually been developed for hulling rice and crushing herbs. From the 1763 edition.
A dead acolyte monk is led directly to King Enma’s court for judgment. Since it is a complex case, the acolyte is not being tried by the three magistrates sitting in the building (upper right).
“Just because the monk was young and hot-blooded doesn’t excuse his crime of deceiving his master, who was like a father to him. Each
of his crimes is written right here on this iron plate. On the other hand, all monks these days pretend to be pious but spend most of their time chasing women. Or eating duck meat, which they refer to as a ‘god,’ and onions, which they call ‘Shintō priests.’44 Compared with that, loving a young actor seems like a lesser crime. How about giving him an easier route over the Mountain of Swords? And he likes young men, so he must like pots.45 How about letting him off with a soak in a boiling cauldron?”
Enma, outraged, answered in anger: “Most definitely not. His crime may look minor, but don’t be deceived! I’m told something called ‘male homosexuality’ can be found all across the human world, and I absolutely cannot allow this kind of thing. The Way of the husband and wife is the natural harmonizing of yin and yang. This is as it should be. A man should never violate another man. It has long been so since the days of ancient China. The Book of Documents clearly warns, ‘Do not keep company with loose boys.’ After King Mu of Zhou loved the Chrysanthemum Boy Sage, people began to talk about the Chrysanthemum Seat.46 There were others of that ilk as well, like Mi Zixia, loved by the duke of Wei, or Dong Xian, the favorite of a Han emperor, or the poet Meng Dongye, who loved another poet, Han Yu.47
“They also appeared in Japan. While Saint Kōbō48 was on a pilgrimage to India in the ninth century, he stopped along the Upper Liusha River in China and exchanged vows of love with Manjusri, the beautiful boy bodhisattva of wisdom. After that encounter, Manjusri became known in Japan as Rear End Monjushiri,49 and Kōbō’s name lives on in shame as the founder of the Way of Loving Young Men in Japan. And a well-known legend claims that the famous warrior Kumagai50 pulled down his enemy, the fetching young Atsumori, and took him right there on the beach at Suma. As a boy, Yoshitsune51 was embraced by a mountain goblin. The ancient Buddhist holy man Zōga loved the young poet Narihira; Emperor Go Daigo had the boy Kumawaka; and the great warlord Nobunaga loved his page Ranmaru. The famous monk Mongaku, who rebuilt the Jingo-ji temple in Takao, lost his head over the boy Rokudai. Later he was rebuked by the shōgun, Yoritomo, for suggesting that the shōgun replace the emperor, but he kept on plotting. Finally he was exiled, and his boy lover was executed. After that, whenever a human was punished for a bad deed that came to light later, people spoke of ‘the tail end arriving.’
“The reason so many men go to heal themselves in the hot springs at Kinosaki and Sokokura is obvious. They’re almost all homosexuals. The Chinese character for ‘hemorrhoids’ combines one part meaning ‘ailment’ with another meaning ‘temple.’ Perhaps that is because in ancient times, homosexuality was practiced only by Buddhist monks. But recently it’s been spreading beyond the temples. All kinds of men have begun to like it. It’s outrageous and the height of wickedness. Issue an order strictly forbidding homosexuality in the human world!”
Councillors repeated “Certainly, your Majesty” to this awesome command. All except Tenrin, the tenth of the ten kings and the manifestation of the merciful Amida Buddha. He walked out in front of Enma’s throne. “It is with the greatest trepidation,” he said, “that I ask Your Majesty to revoke a royal edict, yet if I did not speak my mind I would fill to bursting with my thoughts. As Your Highness has most excellently said, homosexuality is not harmless. Nevertheless, the harm it does is much less than that done by the love between men and women. These two different kinds of love should not even be discussed on the same day. Heterosexual love has a sweet taste to it, resembling honey, while homosexual love is light and uncloying, like water. It has a taste without taste52 that is hard to appreciate unless you experience it and enter into an extremely interesting state yourself. Your Majesty doesn’t know anything about loving young men, so he is like a connoisseur of saké who wishes to prevent others from entering rice-cake shops. Moreover, although it is only a rumor from the human world, there has been talk for some time about this Kikunojō’s being unbearably attractive. It would be a memorable experience just to see what he looks like, even if only in a portrait. For this proposal,” he pleaded, “I ask Your Majesty’s most generous understanding.”
“‘Different people,’” Enma began, obviously displeased, “‘like different things.’ Whoever coined that phrase must have had you in mind. Yet your petition is earnest and impossible to refuse. Go ahead, look at the picture if you want. But I dislike looking at young men, so I’m going to close my eyes for as long as you have the picture out. Hurry. Quickly, quickly!”
After Enma had closed his eyes, they hung the portrait on one of the palace pillars. The young actor was as fresh as the early moon rising through willow branches in spring, as voluptuous as peach blossoms touched by morning haze. Everyone stood transfixed before his indescribably graceful form. The sounds of exclamations continued for some time.
In the human world, they say the most beautiful sight of all is a celestial woman descending through the sky, but that is only because the most distant things seem most attractive. In paradise, sky-flying women are as common as kites, and their fluttering robes might as well be squid legs. Heavenly women are so common that no one considers them beautiful. To compare Kikunojō with one would be to liken Enma’s crown to a hungry ghost’s loincloth. The actor was even more beautiful than he was reputed to be, beyond anything the kings or anyone else in the palace had ever seen. The eyes of the seeing-head demon glistened; the sniffing-head demon began to breathe hard;53 and even the ordinary bull-headed guards and ox-headed torturers wagged the horns on their foreheads and exclaimed in wonder.
When the commotion did not subside, Enma opened his eyes in spite of himself and looked. He was overwhelmed by the actor’s beauty. He had intended to laugh, but now he was staring as if in a trance, unmoving, the mere empty shell of himself. Suddenly he tumbled from his throne. His shocked attendants lifted him up again, and when he had finally returned to consciousness, he sighed deeply.
“Now, well, how embarrassing to have that happen in front of you all,” he said. “When I saw the actor just now in the picture, he was so very refined, I was simply overcome. I lost my way, like the monk Henjō54 when he saw a maiden flower. My, my, my. There have been some very famous beautiful women over the centuries, but none compares with this Kikunojō. He has Xi Shi’s eyes, Komachi’s eyebrows, Yang Guifei’s lips, Kaguya-hime’s nose, Feiyan’s supple waist, and Sotoori-hime’s elegant way of dressing—all in one. People in Japan sing about shōguns’ daughters who are like empress trees or young women being like mountain lilies or wild pinks, but next to this actor they’re all just ordinary. Even cherry blossoms and full moons and graceful bodhisattvas can’t equal this young man. No one like him will ever be born again, in either China or Japan. Therefore I hereby resign as supreme ruler of the afterworld. What’s a precious throne worth when I can go to the human world and share a pillow with him?”
Enma’s eyes were glazed, and light-footed with love, he began to leave the palace. Sōtei, third of the ten kings, ran out and grabbed Enma’s sleeve. “Your Majesty’s conduct,” he said scowling, “is most unbecoming. If you abandon your position as supreme ruler of the afterworld and cohabit with humans simply because you feel attracted to one of them, there will be no one to oversee the governance of hell and paradise. And if there is no place where good and evil actions are judged, what doctrine can we use to rule the beings in the three thousand worlds?
“If Your Highness stoops to buying young men, the gold dust covering paradise will soon belong to the Sakaichō theater district in Edo. No matter how much gold we had, it would never be enough. Later Your Majesty would come to regret what you’d done and be reduced to singing children’s songs about money trees. We would have to sell everything, even the golden skin of Shak-yamuni Buddha, the don of all paradise, to scrap-metal dealers. And Jizō, the gentle bodhisattva who cares for dead infants, would become the laughingstock of children in the street, just like the monk Chōtarō in Edo. The sweet-singing heavenly kalavinka birds, why, they would end up in cages in freak shows beside Ryōgoku Bridge. The celestial flying
women would be sold off to prostitution brokers; the old woman guarding the River Between Worlds would be reduced to hawking homemade laundry glue; and the guardian demons of Buddhism would have to use their muscles to carry riders in cheap palanquins. Hell and paradise would collapse in no time at all. Your Majesty is not too old to realize that.
“And supposing Your Highness does copy their latest styles and wears a short bat cloak and long dagger, ties your hair in a long topknot, smokes a silver pipe, and acts in a way that shows you’re looking for young men—no human man would ever agree to meet you, not with that face of yours. When Ichikawa Danjūrō II played Your Majesty in the kabuki play about Kagekiyo several years ago, the humans who saw him shuddered with fear. If Your Majesty tries to go out into the streets dressed like that, you will immediately arouse suspicion and be taken into custody. When the authorities question the local landlords about you, they could say Your Grace is Shakyamuni himself, and the block leaders could swear your Highness is the Great Sun Buddha Dainichi—but unless Your Highness has someone to vouch for him, they will surely put him in among the outcasts. It would be a miserable experience. If that prospect does not deter Your Majesty, then I, King Sōtei, will cut myself open right here before him. I await Your Majesty’s reply.” In the heat of his admonition, Sōtei struck the throne.
Then Byōdō, the eighth king, stood up quietly and came before the throne. “King Sōtei’s warning,” he began, “rivals that of Bi Gan, who reproached a Yin king and had his chest split open, or Wu Zixu, who had his eyes gouged out for cautioning the king of Wu, or Kiso no Chū ta, who reprimanded his lord Yoshinaka and then cut himself open. Recently Your Highness has become very stubborn. Once he makes a proclamation, he refuses to consider changing it. Counseling him is, as Mencius put it, like pouring a cup of water on a wagon-load of burning firewood. No matter how much advice we give, it has no more effect than wind on a horse’s ear or a bee sting on a cow’s horn. It would not show Your Majesty’s wisdom as supreme ruler of all hell and paradise to abandon his position like a reckless young human male simply for the sake of this beautiful Kikunojō, who looks like a man and a woman in one body. If Your Highness absolutely must see him, then send a royal messenger to fetch him for you and bring him here. Could there be anything wrong with that? What do you all think?”
Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900 Page 67