Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900

by Shirane, Haruo, ed.

  LATE YOMIHON: HISTORY AND THE SUPERNATURAL REVISITED

  The early yomihon—those of the late eighteenth century—generally were historical narratives describing the supernatural, the fantastic, and the miraculous. Their elegant style contained many allusions to Chinese and Japanese classical texts. The yomihon of the early nineteenth century, however, were quite different. As the center of literary activity gradually moved to Edo in the Anei-Tenmei era (1772–1789), the yomihon, which had emerged in the Kyoto-Osaka area, increasingly shifted into the hands of professional Edo writers and publishers, reaching its highest level in the Bunka-Bunsei era (1804–1830) with the works of Santo Kyōden (1761–1816) and Kyokutei Bakin (1767–1848).

  Like the earlier yomihon, the nineteenth-century versions focused on history and the supernatural, with many references to both Chinese and Japanese classics, but in contrast to the earlier Kyoto-Osaka yomihon, which usually were collections of short stories, these later works were extended narratives featuring complex plots. They also had a greater emphasis on didacticism, especially on the Confucian principle of “encouraging good and chastising evil” (kanzen chōaku), or on the Buddhist principle of karmic cause and effect, both of which helped sustain their extended narratives. These later yomihon, which often took the form of military conflicts, vendettas, or struggles for clan or house succession, tended to revolve around powerful male heroes, legendary warriors, and supernatural figures. They also borrowed from Buddhist folktales and the tales of the miraculous. Like the earlier yomihon, the later ones were written in an elegant, mixed Japanese and Chinese style and were intended as much for the ear as for the eye. While the nineteenth-century yomihon adapted Chinese fiction to Japanese settings, as the earlier yomihon had, the chief interest was now in extended Ming novels like Water Margin (Suikoden, Ch. Shuihu zhuan), which became a model for many Edo yomihon.

  As a result of the Kansei Reforms in the 1790s, the sharebon were banned, and the authors of sharebon and kibyōshi were punished, so writers and readers had to develop new forms that would avoid censorship. This need was first answered by various Japanese adaptations of Water Margin, beginning with Takebe Ayatari’s Japanese Water Margin (Honchō suikoden, 1773). Between 1799 and 1801, Santo Kyōden, who became a leading yomihon writer, wrote Chūshingura Water Margin (Chūshingura suikoden), which combined the world of the puppet drama Chūshingura: The Storehouse of Loyal Retainers (Kanadehon Chūshingura) with the events and characters of the Ming novel. Chūshingura Water Margin, in the “half-book” (hanshibon) size (roughly 8.5 inches high and 6 inches wide) with relatively small illustrations, became extremely popular and marked the beginning, at least in format, of the late yomihon. In fact, the term yomihon (literally, books for reading) derives from this format, in which the text took precedent over the pictures. In 1813, Kyōden wrote his last yomihon, leaving the stage to be monopolized by his former protégé Bakin. In the following year, Bakin published the first part of The Eight Dog Chronicles (Nansō Satomi hakkenden), his greatest work.

  KYOKUTEI BAKIN

  Kyokutei Bakin (1767–1848), also known as Takizawa Bakin, was born in Edo, the third son of a samurai in the service of Matsudaira Nobunari, a retainer of the shōgun. Bakin’s father died when Bakin was nine years old, and both his older brothers died, so Bakin inherited the family title. He then served the grandson of the Matsudaira lord but was treated so cruelly that he ran away from the lord’s mansion when he was only fourteen.

  From an early age, Bakin had had a deep interest in picture books, haikai, Chinese studies, and Japanese classics and loved jōruri texts and contemporary vernacular fiction. In 1790 he gave up his plans to become an herbal doctor and any hope of reentering the warrior class and began to visit and live with the writer-artist Santo Kyōden (1761–1816), who recognized Bakin’s talent and opened the way for his career as a writer of popular fiction. Under Kyōden, Bakin began writing kibyōshi and then became a clerk for a publishing house that produced Yoshiwara guides, sharebon, kibyōshi, and illustrated kyōka books. When he was twenty-seven, Bakin married a commoner who owned a general goods store.

  Bakin quickly became a prolific professional writer and produced a number of popular works. His Strange Tales of the Crescent Moon (Chinsetsu yumiharizuki), published serially between 1807 and 1811, achieved unprecedented popularity as a yomihon. In this long work of historical fiction about the early medieval Minamoto warrior Tametomo and his mythical involvement in the Ryūkyū Islands royal line, Bakin clearly displayed his Confucian intention to praise virtue and punish evil as well as his lifelong sympathy for marginal or exploited figures.

  THE EIGHT DOG CHRONICLES (NANSŌ SATOMI HAKKENDEN, 1814–1842)

  In 1814 Bakin began writing The Eight Dog Chronicles, a historical novel of the strange and supernatural set in a time of medieval war. By the time he had completed it, in 1842, the work spanned 106 volumes, making it one of the world’s longest novels. Because Bakin’s eyesight began to fail in 1839, he temporarily stopped writing Eight Dogs but finally was able to complete the work with the help of a scribe. The popularity of Bakin’s yomihon reached unprecedented heights in the late Tokugawa and early Meiji periods. Even though it was severely criticized by the influential Meiji critic Tsubouchi Shōyō for its lack of realism and for its didactic framework of “encouraging good and chastising evil,” the popularity of Eight Dogs continued unabated through the late Meiji period.

  One of the outstanding characteristics of The Eight Dog Chronicles, considered the epitome of the yomihon, is its elegant style, which uses classical diction and Chinese compounds as well as classical rhetorical flourishes such as engo (word associations) and kakekotoba (homonyms), often in a melodious 5–7 syllabic rhythm. At the same time, Bakin sought to create a work on the kind of vast scale found in Water Margin, a narrative that would be the Japanese equal of that great Ming novel. Besides sharing the hallmarks of earlier yomihon—the interest in the supernatural and the use of the principles of rewarding good and punishing evil and karmic causality—The Eight Dog Chronicles stresses the need to overcome attachment and seek enlightenment.

  Bakin’s primary interest, however, was in human psychology and behavior. His favorite Japanese text was the Taiheiki (Record of Great Peace), the mid-fourteenth-century medieval chronicle that describes the war-torn period of the Northern and Southern Courts. He admired the samurai ideals found in such historical and legendary narratives, but he also sympathized with the oppressed and those who had met with misfortune in the past. In The Eight Dog Chronicles, he gives them new life in an imaginary world. The full title of the book is The Chronicles of the Eight Dog Heroes of the Satomi Clan of Nansō (Nansō Satomi hakkenden), which refers to eight little-known fifteenth-century heroes (each with “dog” in his name) who helped the Satomi clan reestablish itself in Awa Province (Chiba) and later expand north to the area known as Nansō, thus establishing its rule over most of the peninsula east across the bay from what later became Edo. Despite its praise for warrior values, the book may be obliquely criticizing Tokugawa corruption, especially under the shōgun Tokugawa Ienari (r. 1787–1837). The Tokugawa shōgunate regarded the Satomi as enemies and confiscated the clan’s lands in 1614.

  The Eight Dog Chronicles revolves around conflicting issues of morality, spirituality, fate, duty, sincerity, filial piety, and chastity, enforced in different ways by Confucian, samurai, and Buddhist values (of detachment, enlightenment, and karmic retribution) and complicated by the simultaneous associations of animality (carnal desire) and virtue (fidelity, self-sacrifice) implicit in the various dog figures. While praising warrior-class and Buddhist values, The Eight Dog Chronicles reveals Bakin’s obvious fascination with carnality and commoner culture, which gives a compelling quality to a wide variety of characters, even those who are morally weak or evil. The book also raises fascinating issues of gender and human-nonhuman relations. The book presents a number of strong female characters, such as the brave young woman Fusehime, who is the spiritual
creator and inspiration of all eight heroes. The Eight Dog Chronicles also contains many suggestions of androgyny, a common late-Edo theme. In the scenes translated here, Fusehime is described as being manlike, and by spreading her seedlike soul beads, she becomes the virtual mother-father of the eight heroes. Yatsufusa, who marries Fusehime, is a male dog possessed by a female soul. Shino, the first dog-hero to appear in the story, grows up disguised as a girl and imitates a female god. Fusehime is faced with the tragic dilemma of attempting both to achieve spiritual purity and preserve her chastity and to accept her destiny of bearing the children of a dog.

  A different kind of tragedy faces Hamaji, the woman engaged to Shino. Eight Dogs generally describes male–female love relationships outside marriage negatively, as spoiling the moral purity of the warrior. In this regard, Eight Dogs was faithful to the Confucian ethics of the ruling samurai class. In the famous Hamaji-Shino separation scene translated here, Shino’s aunt and uncle have declared that Shino, the son of a warrior, and Hamaji, their daughter, are engaged, even though they secretly have no intention of allowing such a marriage. Hamaji naively believes her parents’ promise and thinks that she is as good as married. (The parental word was absolute in an age in which marriage was determined by the parents.) The ideal wife, particularly in a Confucian, warrior-class context, was to show her devotion to her husband, which Hamaji does. But Shino has discovered that the engagement has been made only to keep up appearances while his stepuncle tries to steal his sword, and he knows that accepting Hamaji’s love would force him to break his promise to his father and to return his sword, which his father had been keeping for the Ashikaga ruling clan. Equally important, as a son filial to the spirit of his dead father, Shino is determined to restore the fortunes of his own real family and, to achieve this goal, must leave behind the family into which he has been adopted. This scene brings together two ideals, the traditional warrior-class way of the wife and the traditional way of the warrior, in a moving and revealing conflict.

  CHARACTERS

  (SATOMI) YOSHIZANE, a warrior, governor of Awa, and Fusehime’s father

  FUSEHIME, daughter of Yoshizane, gives birth to the spirits of the eight dog-heroes

  YATSUFUSA (Eight Spots), the dog who “marries” Fusehime

  KANAMARI, Yoshizane’s retainer and Fusehime’s fiancé

  (INUZUKA) SHINO, the first of Fusehime’s eight soul-sons to appear in the book. Like the other seven, he has “dog” in his name (Inuzuka means Dog Burial Mound). The son of an infirm warrior, he rides his beloved dog Yoshirō, is adopted by his aunt and uncle, and is engaged to Hamaji. He receives from his father a priceless sword that his father has been protecting for the Ashikaga rulers since they were defeated in battle.

  HAMAJI, adopted daughter of Shino’s aunt and uncle, who tell people she is engaged to Shino

  In the opening chapters, Satomi Yoshizane, the son of a warrior leader who died aiding the sons of the defeated rebel deputy shōgun Ashikaga Mochiuji, escapes with two retainers just before the fall of Yū ki Castle (in Ibaraki) in 1441. Yoshizane reaches Awa Province and leads a revolt of commoners against their immoral, exploitative ruler by appealing to their sense of justice. The victorious Yoshizane gives back the ruler’s great wealth to the people and becomes the ruler of the area. He promises to save the life of Tamazusa, the sensual wife of the previous ruler, but at the insistence of his adviser, he goes against his word and executes her. Before she is executed, the fearless Tamazusa uses her powers to curse the Satomi clan, declaring that its members will become “dogs of worldly desire.” Tamazusa’s soul soon appears and causes the adviser who argued for her execution to commit ritual suicide. Several years pass, and Yoshizane finds a large male puppy at the foot of Mount Toyama in Awa and names him Yatsufusa (Eight Spots). His mother having been killed, the puppy was nursed by a mother raccoon, later revealed to be the soul of the dead Tamazusa, whose soul passed into the dog. Years later, in 1457, during a siege of his castle, Yoshizane jokingly offers his daughter Fusehime in marriage to the dog Yatsufusa if he kills the besieging general. The dog returns shortly with the general’s head, and Yoshizane becomes ruler of all Awa. The dog then reveals his intention to marry Fusehime. Although Yoshizane wants to kill the dog, Fusehime reprimands him, reminding him that a ruler must always keep his word. Fusehime, unaware that the dog is possessed by Tamazusa’s soul, agrees to go with him to his mountain home.

  Fusehime at Toyama Cave

  CHAPTER 12

  In our present late age, immersed in delusion and attachment, what human can achieve liberation from the material desire of the five senses and step safely from the burning house of attachment? The bell of Jetavana Park, where the Buddha taught, still rings out daily to remind us that all things are impermanent, yet sensual people are not enlightened by it, hearing only the hated sound of the dawn bell telling them they must separate from their lovers after a night of passion.1 And the teak trees that broke into white blossoms when the Buddha died under their branches and entered nirvana, did they not display the truth that all things that flourish must pass away? Yet now people vainly seek only to enjoy the beauty of blossoms and wish that spring, and their own youth, would last forever. How deeply they resent the wind and rain that scatter the blossoms from the branches!

  For the enlightened, the world is a changing, insubstantial dream. Even without enlightenment, can anything be found that is not dreamlike? All the many people in the world subject to delusion may finally find enlightenment when Maitreya Buddha appears many eons in the future and preaches to them from beneath a dragon-flower tree, but in our own age there is no simple way for an ordinary human to cast off attachments and leave the world behind. Those who do manage to achieve enlightenment, however, know the great joy of buddhahood even in a tiger’s lair or a water serpent’s pool. Fusehime was one of these. While she lived through the end of one year and then through spring and fall in a second year in a cave on Toyama Mountain, she completely gave up all worldly thoughts.

  Fusehime was the daughter of Satomi Yoshizane, governor of Awa Province and bearer of a court title. For the sake of her father and for Awa Province, she gave up everything and set off on her father’s large dog Yatsufusa for Toyama, Mountain of Fertility, in the depths of the Awa Mountains, in order to show the people of Awa that they could believe in the truth of every one of their ruler’s words—even when he jokingly promised his daughter to his dog.2 Fusehime went into complete seclusion in the depths of the mountain, and not a single person discovered where she was.

  Above the red clay banks of a rushing river, Fusehime spread stalks of sedge inside a cave and made a place to sleep, and there she spent the winter. Then spring came. Early one morning, as birds called to one another, Fusehime gazed at the flowers growing on the slopes of the high, mist-enfolded mountain and began to think about many things. It must be the Third Month already, she was sure, and girls in villages and towns were celebrating the Girl’s Festival with special dolls. With attractive haircuts, they were also going out in pairs to pick asters, mother-daughter flowers, for the festivities. She remembered how she used to pick flowers with her own mother—dear, dear Mother! The lozenge-shaped rock in the cave that Fusehime liked to sit on reminded her of the large rice cakes she and her mother had made, with mother-daughter grass mixed inside. How delicious they had tasted on the third of the Third Month!

  Fusehime, in a fan-and-cherry-blossom brocade robe, with her sleeves held up with a white cord (tasuki), rides off on the dog Yatsufusa to his mountain home. “The most beloved dog of Satomi Yoshizane” (according to the cartouche) still carries the head of Yoshizane’s enemy in his mouth. The illustration is by Yanagawa Shigenobu I (d. 1832), the favorite disciple of the noted ukiyo-e master Katsushika Hokusai (1760?–1849) and the artist for Tamenaga Shunsui’s Spring-Color Plum Calendar. From the 1816 edition.

  Day after day, the temperature of the moss-covered stone changed, and when it felt warm to her skin, she knew the Fourth Month had c
ome. People in the world were all putting on their early summer clothes, but she had no other robes to change into. In summer, winds blowing through the mountain pines cooled her as they turned back her long sleeves. Her only comb was the wind, and she washed her hair in the sudden showers that fell in the evening, letting it dry after the rain had passed. Her hair had become as tangled as the mountain bushes and vines.

  Then, from under the thick wild grasses, came the cries of autumn insects. In the valley around the cave the leaves of the trees shimmered bright colors in the sun and were woven by the light into a great brocade. Deer lay down in the many-colored mountain beds. Did they realize they could stay in them only briefly? Fusehime was filled with sadness. The loving cries of the deer for their absent mates made her even sadder. And then came the never-ending sounds of cold rains striking the marsh water. Finally, the wild mountain expanses were covered with snow for as far as Fusehime could see. The great boulders lost their sharp edges, and the limbs of the cedars and other evergreens blossomed with white snow.

  Each season brought with it new and moving beauty. But Fusehime sat in her desolate cave and never left it, devoting herself to prayers for a better rebirth in her next life and chanting and copying out the Lotus Sutra. As day followed day, she grew used to the hardships that had earlier caused her so much suffering. She cared nothing about what was happening in the outside world, and she came to feel that even the songs of the birds and the cries of the animals around her were urging her on, as if they were her friends, in her fervent quest for enlightenment. Fusehime had a superbly tough mind.

  Earlier, when her father’s large dog Yatsufusa brought Fusehime on his back to Mount Toyama, deep in the mountains, he came to a cave on the lower slopes above a wide river that wound between Mount Toyama and the mountains around it. The boulders at the cave entrance looked as if they had been cleanly cut with a chisel, and pines and oaks soared upward to the northwest,3 forming a natural fence protecting the cave mouth. The cave opened toward the south and was quite bright inside. Yatsufusa had stopped in front of the cave and gotten down on his forelegs. Fusehime understood immediately and slid gently off the dog’s back. When she looked inside, she saw a torn straw mat and traces of ashes. Someone seemed to have lived here before.