[Furai Sanjin shū, NKBT 55: 37–93, translated by Chris Drake]
THE MODERN LIFE OF SHIDŌKEN (FŪRYŪ SHIDŌKEN DEN, 1763)
Under the pen name Fūrai Sanjin, Hiraga Gennai published The Modern Life of Shidōken in 1763, the same year he published Rootless Weeds. The protagonist is modeled on another star of popular culture, the lecturer and showman Fukai Shidōken (ca. 1680–1765), who performed on a street corner in Asakusa in Edo, but the content is almost entirely fictional. The first chapter describes the divine birth of Asanoshin (as the son of the Kannon bodhisattva at Asakusa), his entry into a Buddhist order, and his encounter with a beautiful woman who takes him to a utopian place. When he awakens from this dream, a Daoist hermit, a pedagogically inclined sage-wizard called Fūrai Sanjin (whose name deliberately echoes the author’s), instructs him to leave the order and to teach the masses through humor and the vulgar, and gives Asanoshin a feather fan that enables him to fly.
The Modern Life of Shidōken has been compared with Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and other imaginary travel literature that became popular in Europe during the eighteenth century. In this period of sakoku (the bakufu policy of national seclusion), Gennai drew his views of other lands from a variety of sources, including the Muromachi-period (otogi-zōshi) tale Yoshitsune’s Visits to Various Islands (Onzōshi shima watari), in which the legendary Yoshitsune wanders to various foreign lands; Chinese-based encyclopedias like Terajima Ryoan’s Illustrated Encyclopedia of China and Japan (Wakan sansai zue, 1713), which describes strange peoples from the Chinese tradition; and information about the West derived from Chinese translations. In The Modern Life of Shidōken, Gennai transposes various contemporary circumstances onto the landscape of other lands. In “pointing out the holes” (ugachi) in contemporary society, showing the backside of the bakufu-domain system, and condemning, among others, Confucian scholars, Buddhist priests, and the ignorance of the populace, he creates a sharp and humorous satire. The story about the Land of the Chest Holes, for example, is a satire of the bakufu-domain system in which a man without samurai blood (a man without a chest hole) could not be recognized for his abilities. The dangi (satiric sermon) element, which appears in the form of interwoven debates and lectures, is stronger than it was in Rootless Weeds and moves the dangibon genre in a new direction by taking the form of a biography and a travel narrative through many countries.
Asanoshin Meets the Sage (chapter 1)
In the precincts of the Asakusa Kannon Temple in Edo, there is an utterly unique and fearless man named Shidōken. He advertises himself as a reciter of old warrior tales together with commentary, but he holds a strange wooden object shaped like a mushroom and beats it on his low desk to the rhythm of his tales. His bawdy, humorous stories are so zany and impossible they’re like trying to wipe your rear with your ear, and he makes people laugh so hard they dislocate their navels. Sometimes he clenches his toothless gums; sometimes he shakes his head with its waves of cascading wrinkles; and sometimes he stares coldly down at his fellow humans and denounces them in whatever scathing terms come into his mind. Then, though he’s a thin, haggard man of almost ninety, he’s suddenly making the movements and speaking the words of young kabuki actors of women’s roles. He captures them so intricately he is truly a marvel to behold.
The message he preaches is a mixed Shintō, Confucian, and Buddhist broth served with a spicy Daoist fish salad, ice soup, and deep-fried lightning. His groundless, nonsensical stories make the most unhappy babies laugh, and even hired men who carry sandals around for their employers know that “Idiot Monk” refers to Shidōken. There’s no other Buddhist monk like him, and there never has been.
Once Edo had two human monuments: the kabuki actor Ichikawa Danjūrō II66 and old man Shidōken. But when Danjūrō died, it left Shidōken the most famous person in all Edo. You see him depicted everywhere—woodblock prints of him, clay dolls of him, and illustrations of him even on festival lanterns and hairdressers’ paper-covered sliding doors. He’s admired so intensely that people now think of him and laugh whenever they see a mullet’s wrinkled head or a large mushroom.
How was Shidōken able to achieve all he did? The story begins many years ago. His father was a trusted administrator in a daimyō lord’s Edo mansion. Loyal, trustworthy, and of good lineage, his name was Fukai Jingoemon. Even though he had reached forty, Jingoemon still had no male heir, and so he grieved. Together he and his wife made a pilgrimage to the temple of the merciful bodhisattva Kannon in Asakusa, and there they remained, showing reverence for twenty-one days and offering a fervent prayer on the final night. At dawn on the twenty-first night, they saw a dream in which a golden mushroom came flying through the air from the south and entered the navel of Jingoemon’s wife. Soon she discovered she was pregnant, and later she bore the baby boy who would come to be known as Shidōken. Since their son was a special blessing from the Asakusa Kannon, the elated parents took the first two syllables of Asakusa and named the child Asanoshin.
Asanoshin’s parents brought him up with the greatest care and love. At his first New Year’s, they gave him a small magical arrow set to protect him against demons and disease. With the prayer that he continue the family line eternally into the future, they placed sacred green leaves beside the rice cakes they put before their home altar to the gods. They conscientiously prayed at every other festival during the year. On the Children’s Festival on the fifth of the Fifth Month, for example, they put up a streamer painted with two pine tree gods, an old man and an old woman, as a prayer that their son live a very long life. It was the same blind love that parents everywhere show for their children.
When Asanoshin was three, his parents carried him to the Asakusa Temple to show him to Kannon and give their thanks to her. After that, they let his hair grow long. Then when he was five, he put on his first tiny formal clothes. Time passes like a bullet, and Asanoshin was soon seven and then eight, so he entered a private school and began studying calligraphy. Parents always lose their objectivity when they look at their own children, and when Asanoshin’s parents saw the letters bent like cow horns that their son had drawn in black ink on his dirty practice papers, they were effusive in their praise. Soon Asanoshin had progressed to reading out loud, “The Great Learning is a book bequeathed by Confucius. It is the gate to virtue through which all beginners pass,” and then he was reading the whole book. His concerned parents had someone go with their son as far as the school gate and then meet him there when he was finished. The boy received a far from ordinary education.
Asanoshin was very bright, and when he began to understand what was happening in the world, he displayed the cleanliness, responsiveness, and good behavior required by Confucius in the Analects in ways that showed he was quite mature for his age. He studied the martial arts, and he also received a thorough training in flower arrangement, tea ceremony, kickball, indoor archery, Chinese poetry, waka poetry, renga and haikai linked verse, and all the other arts.
Shidōken gives a performance. From the 1763 edition.
Shidōken’s parents see a miraculous dream at the Kannon Temple in Asakusa in which a mushroom-like object enters Shidōken’s mother. They sit below a pillar on which worshipers have pasted small posters as prayers. The large hanging lantern is dedicated to the temple by the Yoshiwara courtesan Chōzan.
When Asanoshin turned fifteen, however, his parents began to worry about him. They were sure a child this intelligent, especially one given them by a bodhisattva, was bound to die young. Miraculously, they had also been blessed with two younger sons, so they decided to ask Asanoshin give up the world and become a Buddhist monk. That way he would surely live a long life, and he would also be able to pray for his ancestors’ souls and help them reach the Pure Land paradise. When Asanoshin’s parents told their son of their wish, he said he felt bound to honor it, even though he personally had no desire to become a monk. And so Asanoshin went off to live in the Kōmyōin, the temple where his ancestors had worshiped for g
enerations.67
The youthful Asanoshin thought hard about his situation. He had not wanted to become a monk, but he believed his parents had surely been led by the Buddha to make their request, so he made up his mind to master the intricacies of Buddhist doctrine, become an outstanding monk, and help people all over the country escape their suffering and achieve enlightenment. Every day from morning till night Asanoshin studied the sutras and meditated, whether he was moving, standing still, sitting, or lying down. He let nothing interfere with his studies, and even if someone invited him to go see the summer fireworks over the Sumida River, he refused, since he had already realized that worldly pleasures were as fleeting and unsubstantial as any fireworks. And when people were thronging noisily to see the cherry blossoms at Asukayama in Ōji, Asanoshin merely recited Saigyō’s poem:
The cherries’
only fault:
the crowds
that gather
when they bloom.68
Asanoshin remembered how diligent scholars in ancient China, having no lamp oil, read by the reflected luminescence of snow or by the light of fireflies they’d caught, and he, too, sat each day below the window in his room, with bamboos rising just outside, copying out sutras on his desk and becoming friends with authors of the past.69
One bright spring day Asanoshin was gazing at some peach trees in the temple garden, which were now in full bloom. As he gazed on and on, absorbed in the blossoms, he remembered a poem about a man who entered a peach grove and reached a timeless realm of Daoist immortals.70 Just then, a swallow that had built its nest in the eaves flew in through the window and landed on Asanoshin’s desk. Not wanting to startle the bird, Asanoshin sat motionless, watching it. As he stared, the bird laid an egg on the desk and then flew off. Asanoshin decided to try to put the egg in the bird’s nest if he could find it, but when he picked it up, it cracked in two, and out came a tiny person. It looked like a woman. Asanoshin wondered whether she wasn’t a divine being like the tiny woman Kaguya-hime, whom an old bamboo cutter found inside a bamboo trunk in the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. As Asanoshin stared at the woman, she grew larger and larger and was soon human size. Surely, Asanoshin thought, she must be the most beautiful woman in the world. Her face was radiant, her eyebrows deep black, and every feature was perfect. When she looked at Asanoshin and smiled at him, his mind seemed to melt, and he felt as if he were drunk.
The woman stepped softly out into the garden. Then she turned around and gestured to Asanoshin to follow her. When he did, she took his hand and gently led him to a small hill. There, between some rocks under the blossoming peach trees, was a small cave. Asanoshin followed the woman into the narrow passage. From above, the cave had looked only five or six inches wide, but once they had gone inside it, he saw it was wide enough to let a person through. When they had gone about sixty feet inside it, they began to walk across level ground, and Asanoshin could faintly hear dogs barking and roosters crowing. Then he saw many kinds of trees and plants growing everywhere. Nearby he saw plum trees blooming in spring and heard warblers in their branches, while farther on he saw early summer bellflowers blooming white on a hedge beneath the cries of a nightingale in the sky. Then he saw a lonely male deer crying out for his mate among bright autumn leaves. And then, as a cold winter wind blew, a flock of plovers cried out amid snow flurries. Flowers and fruits of every season appeared together. The sand was a different color in this land, and water in a stream made unbelievably pure sounds.
Asanoshin followed the woman for some time. Then he detected an indescribably delicate scent and the sounds of wind and stringed instruments, and soon they had reached a great jeweled palace. The ground around it was covered with grains of gold and silver, the stairs were of lapis lazuli, and the railings were of agate. Asanoshin hesitated, but the woman told him to follow her. She walked down a hall past many, many rooms, finally ushering Asanoshin into one of them. After he went inside, beautiful women appeared, bringing him tea and various cakes. They were even more elegant than the woman who had appeared from the egg. Wearing intricately embroidered robes, they entered and left continually, serving fine wine and rare dishes. They gave Asanoshin a very warm welcome, playing and singing recent popular songs, taking his hand, and rubbing his feet. Asanoshin began to enjoy himself, and before he knew it he had drunk too much wine. Soon he drifted off to sleep on the lap of one of the women.
When Asanoshin awoke, he found no trace of the beautiful women, the feast, or the palace. He wondered if he had been dreaming and looked around him. He saw nothing but evergreen trees and heard only a rushing stream. He obviously wasn’t in the temple garden. Perhaps, he thought, he’d been possessed by the spirit of a fox or badger. As the dazed Asanoshin looked around, one of the clouds above him dropped down, and out of it came a mysterious shape. It seemed to be a man. He wore a robe of leaves and had a cap on his head. In his left hand was a staff of goosefoot wood, and in his right he held a feather fan.
“Excellent!” the figure said, beckoning to Asanoshin. “I need to teach you something, so I used my ascetic powers to bring you here. There’s no need to be suspicious.”
When the figure came closer, Asanoshin saw that although he looked like an old man, his face was radiant. He couldn’t have been more than thirty. His black hair, long beard, and clear eyes made him look dignified yet not overbearing. Asanoshin got down on his knees and bowed respectfully.
“As a child,” the sage said, “because you showed much talent, your parents, infatuated with Buddhism, forced you to become a monk. What a waste! Like throwing away gold into the mud. I felt I had to save you, so I brought you here. Buddhists talk about paradise and hell in order to teach ignorant old women and wives about nirvana, but they have nothing to teach the wise. Humans are made up of yin and yang, and life comes into being the same way a spark does when stone and metal are rubbed together. Life continues as long as the firewood burns, but when the fire goes out, nothing is left but burned-up charcoal—yes, that’s right, your body. Yet Buddhists claim that after the fire goes out, it goes on to hell or to paradise. If you think you know where fire goes when it goes out, then please, by all means, believe in hell and paradise!”
Enlightened, Asanoshin clapped his hands together. “Your wise teaching,” he said, “has stripped away my delusions in a single moment. I feel as though I’ve just woken from a dream. As of now, I renounce my Buddhist vows. I will go to live in the world. But I don’t want simply to rot away there. Please teach me what I should do for a living.”
The sage raised his feather fan. “You have trusted me and understood well,” he said. “Now I, for my part, will tell you who I am and how you will live your life. I was born many years ago, at the end of the twelfth century. When I was young I heard all about the battles between the Heike and the Minamoto clans. After a few years the Minamoto shōgun in Kamakura came to rule the country, and people could enjoy peace once more.71 I myself grew up in the country, but I observed things closely and thought about what was happening. In China, the first Han emperor carried nothing but a three-foot sword, and yet he established a dynasty that lasted four centuries, and Zhen She of Zhu said that “you don’t need a good lineage to be a minister of state or a general.” When I looked at all the large and small lords here in Japan, I, too, saw that a lot of them were ordinary servants who started famous clans by grabbing onto the tails of the horses of the shōgun, Yoritomo, and his brother, Yoshitsune.
“But I grew up in an age of peace. It would have been a crime against heaven if I’d tried to make a career out of fighting, so I decided to establish a clan of my own by mastering an art. First I studied tea ceremony. People in the world call tea ceremony an art, but it’s actually a form of business in which rich tea masters and collectors spend thousands of gold pieces for old cups and bamboo spatulas for spooning out powdered tea. And the tea houses make you feel cramped. You have to drink the tea in a small, cramped room, and to get there you have to crawl through a door only two feet high an
d straighten out your shoes after you go in. It’s not something any active, self-respecting man can do. Then there’s flower arrangement. Its proponents say you can capture the feeling of thousands of plants and trees in a single flower pot, yet the way they nail stalks and limbs in place and change their shapes with wires looks very unnatural.
Asanoshin bows to the sage, who stands on a cloud.
“Masters of the game of go spend their time continually lining up and scattering little round stones. Their wisdom never goes beyond the 360 small squares on the board, and after they die and their souls reach the river on the border to the other world, they’re reduced to piling up stone prayer mounds in the riverbed and clinging to the sleeves of the bodhisattva Jizō, begging him for protection from the club-swinging guards from hell. Masters of Chinese chess, meanwhile, claim the game is basically military strategy, but famous generals like Han Xin or Kong Ming never played chess. If you gave a commander’s rod to one these chess masters and had him lead an actual army into battle, he’d be trampled to death by enemy horses, and his knights would jump too far ahead and be killed by enemy pawns.
“Those who practice the way of incense frown significantly and act as if they ruled the whole universe with their noses. They say they’ve reached an exalted state of peacefulness and spiritual bliss, and they boast that distinguishing subtly different scents increases all their powers of perception and thinking, but it’s actually nothing more than a worthless amusement. And when famous incense masters claim that the names of the six main kinds of incense are the names of the countries from which they came, well, their ignorance of the fact that these countries don’t even exist is truly laughable. Practitioners of indoor archery who get five hundred hits out of a hundred shooting at a standing target can’t get near a moving mouse. And then there’s kickball. But even if you become an expert, all you’ll get are an empty stomach and, if you pay enough money to a master, a permit to wear aristocratic robes in elegant colors.
Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900 Page 70