Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900

by Shirane, Haruo, ed.

  “And suppose you do find a lord who employs you. You have the ability of a hawk, but they feed you ground rice and fish paste and throw millet seeds for you on the ground. It’s only a matter of time until you get out of the cage and fly away. If you’re strong enough to fly up to the clouds but you serve a lord in some low position for a pittance just to make a living, you’re actually weaker than seed-eating sparrows and larks. A hawk never eats seeds, even when it’s starving. And it does not deceive its lord and pretend to be loyal in order to fill its stomach. Instead, it quickly leaves the world behind.

  “But retiring to mountains or forests isn’t the only way to withdraw. The greatest withdrawal of all is to the heart of the city. There is no single way to achieve this. People withdraw by doing many things—being professional diviners or practicing herbal medicine or writing Chinese or Japanese poetry. The poet Dongfang Shuo had so much wit he could admonish the emperor, but he withdrew to serve at the palace gate.

  “I have tried to teach you to experience and understand all there is to know about human feelings all over the world and, at the same time, to live beyond the world in the realm of humor. But look at you. You let yourself become attached to things and have been carried away by your emotions toward them. You’ve gotten yourself in trouble again and again. Go to the world the way you go to a public bath. There’s a lot of dirt there, but you don’t go there to get dirtier. Wash away dirt with dirt! After you come out of the bath and rinse yourself a final time, you’re always clean, aren’t you?

  “If you remember this when you mix with the world, you’ll never get dirty, even if the grimy people next to you are stark naked. It’s the same with the lotus. Swamp mud and dirty water never stain it. You can’t blacken what isn’t black. But people grow attached to things and become infatuated with them, hurting themselves and destroying their families. I’m not talking only about men losing their heads over courtesans. Clinging to anything always causes harm. You’ve been all over the world. Surely you saw this for yourself.

  “Humans everywhere recognize the Five Relationships between ruler and subject, parent and child, husband and wife, older and younger brother, and friend and friend. And not only humans. Ruler and subject bees fly separately; grown crows feed their parents to show their gratitude; and young doves honor their parents by perching three limbs below them. Roosters lower their wings and love hens, and even freely mating cats follow the way of conjugality. And in pictures, younger mice even climb up on abacuses with their older brothers and sisters. Dogs wag their tails and socialize. Sardines and young mullet swim in schools. All these follow the way of comradeship. Nothing between heaven and earth compares with the teaching of the sages.

  “Itō Jinsai in Japan therefore quite justifiably wrote that the Confucian Analects is the greatest book in the universe. And the Analects say one should act in accordance with how evident the Way is in the world at any particular time. For example, Confucius warned those who followed his teachings not to drink wine or eat dried meat from the market. But in Japan the situation is different. Japanese scholars eat Echigo salted salmon, Suō salted mackerel, dried ear shells, dried sea slugs, and similar plain food, and they drink sweet saké brewed for festivals and do not insist on brewing their own. This is because Chinese drink wine and not saké, like that brewed in Ikeda and Itami in Japan. And China is mainly an inland country, so most people don’t eat dried fish or shellfish. In China people eat dog and pork, so Confucius’s teaching takes on a different meaning there. The Analects also say the virtuous man always includes ginger in his meals, yet in Japan it’s not the custom to flavor raw fish or shellfish with ginger.

  “Many Japanese Confucian scholars are truly frogs who know nothing outside their own small wells. They slavishly copy everything Chinese and refer to Japan as a nation of ‘Eastern Barbarians.’79 Or they make forced comparisons and propose that the sun goddess Amaterasu was actually Count Tai of Wu. They advertise that they teach the double way of literary and martial arts and fart out all sorts of nonsense, but if they actually had to receive their rice stipends calculated in the small measures of the Zhou period, when the sages lived, they would surely hate the sages.

  “Someone once remarked that you could tell a badly governed country by its large number of laws and rules. Likewise, teachings appeared because the world was in disorder, just as herbal cures are discovered after diseases appear. Unlike in Japan, the Chinese emperor is basically nothing more than temporary hired help. If they don’t like him, they change him. They freely argue that the realm does not belong to any one ruler, but to the whole people, and they take the emperor’s realm from him right away. It was only after the country had fallen into lawlessness that the sages appeared and disseminated their teachings. But in Japan, benevolence and righteousness have been spontaneously followed. Peace has prevailed even without sages.

  “China preoccupied itself with culture and was invaded by the Mongols, and now, under the Manchus, when the whole country is wearing pigtails, the submissive fools still try to pretend they are the Great Qing. Japan has always had its share of evil men, such as Taira no Kiyomori or Hōjō Takatoki, but none ever tried to become emperor himself. In Japan loyalty is fierce, and even young children speak out rudely against their elders if they hear them slighting the emperor. This is why Japan, unlike other countries, has an unbroken imperial line. Please understand me. I am not saying that Chinese ways and methods are bad. Rather, the teachings of the sages must be modified to suit local customs in order that they not cause harm.

  “Japanese think the people living on the Island of Tiny People are like bugs, and the giants put Japanese in freak shows. The Chest Hole People think hole-less people are deformed, and various countries have different ideas about the proper proportion of arms to legs is. In India people show respect by baring their right shoulders and placing their palms together, while in Japan people follow Ogasawara-style decorum. Both Indians and Japanese act courteously, even though their behavior differs.

  “The principles of the sages are like carpenters’ measures. All carpenters use the same measuring rods, but they build their houses in many lengths and sizes, according to the number of people who will live in them. Likewise, the Way of economics responds flexibly to the times, correcting customs, making up for scarcities, and reducing surpluses. You can’t play a koto if the bridges are glued down and won’t move. And you can’t use a ladle as a ruler.

  “In recent years, however, some Confucianists have published economic theories that are as useless as trying to practice swimming in a dry field. Among ordinary people, these ridiculous theories produce only astonishment. Ignoring Confucius’s warning against trying to govern when you aren’t in a position to do it, these forgetful scholars expound on the Way of the sages like sumo wrestlers climbing into the ring without wearing their loincloths. Other scholars teach the Way in order to make a living, and they reach shallow, distorted conclusions. They gaze at heaven through narrow tubes and attempt to cast great iron bells with bamboo blowpipes. Many reach momentous conclusions with whatever they happen to have at hand and believe they are suddenly turning into sages, as if two or three inches of the tail end of a yam were miraculously turning into a magnificent eel. They are so proud of themselves that they believe their coming will be announced to the world if not quite by fiery horses and phoenixes then at least by stained or chipped versions. In the hands of these farting Confucianists who substitute an attachment to the Way for an understanding of it, even the teachings of the sages often cause confusion.

  “Clinging and sticking to anything results in great harm. While you were traveling to many countries to learn more about human feelings, you visited the imperial Chinese palace and soon forgot about everything except making love with the court women there. That certainly got you into big trouble. Finally your fan was burned, but even that didn’t stop you from believing that sexual love was the highest form of human happiness. That’s why I sent you to the Island of Women. As a
performer man there, you saw with your own eyes that sexual pleasure can lose its glamour and even become fatal.

  “Life in the floating world really is like a dream. Look at yourself. You still believe you’re young. Yet while you were out there wandering around in all those countries, seventy years passed. Here, let me show you.” The sage took out a mirror and held it up. Moments before, Asanoshin had been a young man, but the figure he saw in the mirror had changed, as suddenly as the legendary Urashima Tarō, into a man in his eighties. He was thin; his face was covered with wrinkles; his jaw jutted out; his sidelocks and beard had fallen out; and his head was shaved like a monk.

  Astonished and confused, Asanoshin looked around him. The air in every direction was filled with music and a radiance so pervading that it could belong only to a buddha. Then he saw something descending toward him on a purple cloud. A few moments later it stopped in his right hand. When Asanoshin examined it, he found it was a wooden object carved in the shape of a large mushroom.

  “What you have in your hand,” the sage said, smiling at Asanoshin, “is the merciful bodhisattva Kannon. Once the life of the condemned warrior Kagekiyo was spared when the Kannon manifestation of Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto miraculously appeared at the execution ground in Kagekiyo’s place. And on the Island of Women, the Kannon of Asakusa Temple in Edo changed herself into a wooden mushroom and stood in your place, saving you from dying, as you surely would have, with all the other men.80 Repay the bodhisattva now for her kindness. Hurry back to your country and change your name to Shidōken, using characters that mean ‘Seeker of the Way.’

  “Then go to Asakusa and gather audiences in the precincts of the Kannon Temple there by telling humorous stories, all the while pointing out the many holes and gaps and hidden backsides in the world and sternly warn people against falling into these faults and habits themselves. If women are present while you tell all your suggestive stories, your listeners will get very excited. And Buddhist monks are proud and conceited. So criticize monks and women and get them to leave as soon as you can. All right then. Please come along with me.”

  Asanoshin, suddenly old, holds onto the staff of the sage above him and flies to Asakusa. He looks back in the direction of a seven-star constellation (part of Hydra) marking the southern sky, the direction of the Island of Women.

  As the sage began to fly off, Shidōken grabbed hold of his staff. He seemed to be flying behind the sage, but the next thing he knew he was sitting dazed on a low platform in a simple shed walled with hanging reed screens in a corner of the large Asakusa Kannon Temple compound. People of all ages were coming inside. As soon as they were seated on their stools, Shidōken took his wooden mushroom and began beating with it rhythmically on his low desk. Ton-ton ton-ton ton-ton, tototon-ton tototon-ton. “It’s time,” he began, “to hold on and ride on a high-flying story you’ll never believe.”

  [Fūrai Sanjin, NKBT 55: 155–220, translated by Chris Drake]

  A THEORY OF FARTING (HŌHI-RON, 1774)

  This comic allegorical essay, which Gennai wrote toward the end of his career, belongs to the dangibon genre in that it includes a humorous debate between a believer in the artistic achievements of the Farting Man and a samurai who condemns that activity as immoral and dishonorable. “A Theory of Farting” is also considered to be an outstanding example of kyōbun (literally, crazy prose), or comic prose, the prose equivalent of kyōka (literally, crazy Japanese poetry), or comic waka. This genre, which was pioneered by Hiraga Gennai, Yomono Akara (1749–1823), and other kyōka poets, used vernacular prose for satirical and comic purposes. Of particular interest is the degree to which the Farting Man reflects Gennai’s own position as a partial outsider who constantly pointed out the limitations and contradictions of the samurai class and sought out new frontiers and new “ways” (professions). For mid-eighteenth-century audiences, Gennai’s achievements in botany generally were little more than a curiosity, but in his view, this profession had value precisely because he pursued it to perfection and did not rely on traditional authority or historical precedent, which tended to corrupt most artistic and scholarly “ways.” In this regard, “A Theory of Farting” is a satire of both contemporary samurai and Confucian values and the system of artistic houses and strictly codified traditions.

  Some fools survive a serious illness by taking ginseng and then go hang themselves when they can’t pay for it. Other men love potentially poisonous blowfish soup yet manage to reach old age. Some housemaids get pregnant their very first time, while some hired men buy streetwalkers every night, never get syphilis, and still have noses. Ah, to put it a bit grandiosely, ah, is it all simply the will of heaven? And whether something interests people and becomes popular—is it due only to the luck of the moment? Surely it also depends on how imaginative your basic concepts are.

  When the kabuki actor Ichikawa Danjūrō II81 was alive, he invented striking new makeup, costumes, staging, and interpretations for the roles his father had created. Nakamura Tomijūrō, on the other hand, develops novel dances for his women’s roles; Nakamura Nakazō constantly discovers new ways of acting men’s parts; and Yamashita Kinsaku II plays women realistically and with great charm. Ōtani Hiroji III articulates well and projects his powerful voice, and Arashi Sangorō II gets far inside the characters he plays and expresses their emotions. Onoe Kikugorō went from Edo to Osaka and captivated the city, while Segawa Tomisaburō left Osaka, changed his name to Kikunojō III, and awed Edo.

  Places, too, change and thrive as new concepts appear. Pilgrims now throng to the Zenkō-ji temple in Kawaguchi, just north of Edo, to see public unveilings of its secret buddha image.82 In the city, people fill the Asakusa Kannon Temple and the small theaters around it, crowd into the Hachiman Shrine in Fukagawa to see sumō wrestling, and visit the Yoshiwara licensed quarter to watch male and female geisha improvise new farces in the street every fall. In the Kobikichō theater district, Masumi Katō V is now appearing at kabuki performances, demonstrating Katō-style puppet-play chanting there, while in the theaters in Fukiyachō the jōruri chanter Takemoto Sumidayū83 is setting new standards for the Gidayū style. And then there are puppet variety shows, all-boy kabuki plays, mime shows, voice impersonations of famous actors, and Buddhist street preachers. Edo has prospered for some time now and has more kinds of shows than you can count, but reports and rumors about a “farting man” performing near Ryōgoku Bridge were causing heated discussions throughout the city.

  Careful reflection shows that humans are microcosms of the universe. Heaven and earth thunder; humans fart. Yin and yang collide and chafe, sometimes reverberating deeply, sometimes releasing small, high sounds. But somehow the Farting Man was said to go far beyond the traditionally transmitted ladder method of crescendo farting and the prayer-bead technique of continuous farting. People said he produced the lonely cloth-fulling beat made by a kabuki drum, slow kabuki shamisen strumming for scenes in the licensed quarter, music for a felicitous nō dance performed before kabuki plays, three-beat percussive phrases, a koto ensemble version of the song “Seven Plants,” drums, flutes, and gongs from the Gion Festival in Kyoto, dogs howling, cocks crowing, fireworks bursting above Ryōgoku Bridge, and a waterwheel creaking beside the Yodo River above Osaka. The man could perform long shamisen pieces from the kabuki dance plays Young Woman at Dōjōji Temple and Wizard-Child Jidō, short love songs, quiet background shamisen music from kabuki plays, an antiphonal folk song from Ise, and puppet-play chants in the Itchū, Hanchū, Bungo, Tosa, Bun’ya, Handayū, Geki, Katō, and Ōzatsuma styles. He would even do long Gidayū-style puppet plays. On request he would perform Chūshingura or Epiphany at Yaguchi Crossing, one act at a time, both the shamisen and the chanting. Word was that an incomparable master had appeared on the scene.

  When I heard about the man, I knew I had to see him for myself, and I persuaded a couple of friends to go with me to the entertainment district at the west end of Ryōgoku Bridge. Just before we got to the bridge, we turned right and followed the w
ide avenue to a small theater with a high banner you couldn’t miss: “Old Tale Comes True—Man Makes Blossoms Bloom.”84 From the midst of the pushing, jostling crowd of Buddhist monks and lay men and women, we looked up at the sign above the entrance. It showed a strange man with rear end lifted high, behind which were depicted, in various tints of ink, a group of unrelated objects, including the bell from Young Woman at Dōjōji Temple and the black mask from the auspicious Sanbasō dance. The sign seemed to be trying to depict a dream. An innocent person from the country who happened to stroll by and saw the sign would surely imagine the man was dreaming with his rear end. Still muttering, we went inside and saw a narrow red and white striped curtain stretched across the top of the stage. Below, on a low stage, sat the Farting Man and the musicians. He was of medium build and light-skinned, with sidelocks curving rakishly up like crescent moons. Beneath his deep blue summer robe he wore an undergarment of scarlet crepe silk.

  At the entrance to the Farting Man’s show at Asakusa, people discuss the show and look at the sign, which shows the man farting visual icons—such as the ladder and fulling mallet—representing the styles and pieces he performs. The bottom part of the banner says, “Man Makes Blossoms Bloom.” From the 1780 edition.

  The man’s greetings to the audience were clear and unaffected. His opening number, together with the musicians, was a fart version of the Sanbasō blessing dance.85 He progressed rhythmically with nō drums and flutes, toppa hyoro-hyoro, hiih-hiih-hiih. Then he gave off a rooster’s cry at the ruddy eastern sky, bu-bu-buuu-buu. Next came a waterwheel. He loosed a sloshing buu-buu-buu as he did cartwheels and made the exact sounds of water filling the buckets and then pouring out as it pushed the wheel around.