Traditional Japanese Literature

by Haruo Shirane

  THE STORIES OF THE RIVERSIDE MIDDLE COUNSELOR (TSUTSUMI CHŪNAGON MONOGATARI, CA. TENTH–FOURTEENTH CENTURIES)

  The Stories of the Riverside Middle Counselor consists of ten short stories, which are not in a fixed order. The exact date of the stories is unknown but is thought to range from as early as the tenth century to as late as the fourteenth century. Only one of the short stories, “The Middle Counselor Who Could Not Cross Ōsaka,” can be reliably dated. According to one record, it was presented by Koshikibu, a lady-in-waiting (nyōbō), at a monogatari contest sponsored by Princess Baishi in 1055.

  The late Heian and early Kamakura monogatari assume a certain detachment toward the content of the Heian monogatari, making them the object of laughter and irony. If aware (pathos) was the pervading tone of the Heian-court monogatari, that of The Stories of the Riverside Middle Counselor and other late Heian monogatari mix in subtle and ironic humor. Significantly, “The Lady Who Preferred Insects” (Mushi mezuru himegimi) begins with the phrase “the lady who was fond of butterflies,” which embodies the opposite of the protagonist. Fondness for butterflies represented the typical good taste of Heian aristocratic ladies, an attitude that here is inverted to reveal the underside of such a world. In fact, almost all the protagonist’s views are either an implicit critique of or a form of resistance to aristocratic aesthetic and social standards, with the protagonist seeking her own individuality and identity in contradiction to these norms.

  The Lady Who Preferred Insects (Mushi mezuru himegimi)

  Next door to the lady who was fond of butterflies lived another lady, daughter of the Lord Inspector. She had been reared with uncommon love and attention. She said: “It is silly of people to make so much of flowers and butterflies. They would do far better to inquire seriously into the nature of things.” Indiscriminately she gathered ugly specimens. “We will observe how they grow and change,” she said, putting her specimens in cages in which she could observe them. “See how serious and intent the caterpillars seem to be.” Her hair tucked out of the way behind her ears all the day long, she would hold them affectionately in her hand and gaze intently at them.

  Her women being afraid of them, she gathered urchins of the lower orders who were afraid of nothing. She had them take out her insects and tell her their names, and when they had none she would invent names for them. It was her view that people should live the natural way. Against all common sense, she declined to pluck her eyebrows, and said that blackening the teeth was troublesome and unsanitary. Smiling an uncompromisingly white smile, she doted on her insects morning and night. Because her women were constantly fleeing, her room was in great confusion. Life was not easy for them. She was forever berating them and glowering at them through her thick black brows.

  “Why can’t she be like other girls?” her parents would say. “But she must have her reasons. It is all very strange. When you speak seriously to her the answers are sensible enough. So it is not that she is merely stupid.” They were quite at a loss.

  “This is all very well. But think what people are saying. They like a girl to be pretty. It does not do to have them say that you are devoted to repulsive caterpillars.”

  “I don’t care in the least. Things make sense only when you observe and watch them develop. People are silly. A caterpillar becomes a butterfly.” And she showed them how it was happening. “The silk that we wear is made by worms before they have wings. When they take wing it’s all over.” They had no answer.

  Yet she was a lady. She did not address her parents openly. Devils and women were not to be looked upon. She would raise the blinds of the sitting room slightly and set out a post curtain, and thus discreetly receive them.

  Her young women heard it all. “She may love her caterpillars, but they drive us to distraction. How pleasant it must be to work for the lady who likes butterflies.”

  A woman called Hyōei offered a poem:

  Am I to leave before she sees the light?

  A caterpillar is not that forever.

  Laughing, a woman called Kodayū answered:

  Happy they with flowers and butterflies.

  For us it is the stench of caterpillars.

  “How sad. Her eyebrows are genuine caterpillars. And her teeth are naked.” Said a woman called Sakon:

  “So many furry creatures all about—

  we will survive the winter without coats.

  and so, we may hope, will she.”

  An irritable old woman overheard. “And what are you children babbling about? I don’t think it so fine that the lady next door likes butterflies. Indeed it seems stupid. Who could call a row of caterpillars a row of butterflies? The point is that they shed their skins and become butterflies. Watching it happen is a serious matter. When you take up a butterfly you get that nasty powder all over your hand. And you might get an attack of ague too. Isn’t that reason enough to avoid butterflies?”

  But this view of the matter only added to the shrillness of the criticism.

  The boys meanwhile were kept busy. Knowing that there would be rewards, they brought in all manner of horrid creatures.

  “The fur of the caterpillar is so interesting. Why don’t the poets and the storytellers have more to say about it?”

  The boys brought her mantises and they brought her snails, and sang loud songs about them, and the lady sang the loudest. “Why do the horns of the snail do battle?”

  Thinking the names of her boys rather dull, she renamed them after specimens in her collection: Cricket, Toad, Mayfly, Grasshopper, Centipede.

  Word of all this spread abroad, and there were extravagant rumors. One young man, son of a high courtier, dashing and gallant and handsome as well, said that he had something to frighten her with. He took a cutting from a fine sash and shaped it into a most life-like snake, even contriving that it would move. He put it in a pouch with a scale pattern and a drawstring and attached a poem to it.

  Crawling, crawling, it will stay beside you,

  telling of a heart forever steadfast.

  As if it were nothing, a serving woman brought it to the lady. “There is this pouch. So heavy you can hardly open it.”

  The lady did open it, and the snake raised its head. Though all her women were hysterical, the lady was calm.

  “Praise Amida Buddha, and let it be my guardian through this life. There is nothing to raise such a stir about.” Her voice quavered and she looked away. “It is wrong to admire something only while it is beautiful.” She brought it to her side, but she did after all seem uneasy about it. She jumped up and she sat down again, like a butterfly over a flower. Her voice was like a cicada’s. Beside themselves with mirth, her women left the room. They reported these happenings to her father the Inspector.

  “This is inexcusable. You have left her alone with the creature?”

  Sword in hand, he rushed to her side. The snake was very realistic. He took it up and examined it.

  “He is certainly very clever. He has played this trick on you because you are a scholar and connoisseur of insects and such. You must get off an answer immediately.”

  And he departed.

  “What an unpleasant fellow,” said the women, learning of the contrivance. “But indeed you must answer.”

  The answer was on stiff, inelegant paper. Not yet up to the flowing feminine script, she wrote in the angular masculine one.

  “Perhaps we are fated to meet in paradise.

  Uninviting is this form beside me.

  Until then.”

  A most unusual letter, thought the man, who was a cavalry officer. “I must see her.”

  He consulted with a friend, a certain captain of the guards. Disguising themselves as women of the lower orders, they visited the Inspector’s house at an hour when he would be away. They looked in through a crack in the partition to the north of the lady’s room.

  A boy stood in the undistinguished plantings. “This tree is crawling with bugs. I never saw anything like it. Come have a look.” He raised her blin
d. “The best swarm of caterpillars you could hope to find.”

  “How splendid,” she answered in a strong, clear voice. “Bring them here.”

  “There are too many. See. Right here. Come on over.”

  She emerged with a firm, masculine stride. Pushing the blind before her she gazed wide-eyed at the caterpillar branch. She had a robe pulled over her head. The flow of the hair was good, but, perhaps because it was untended, it had a bushy untidiness. The black eyebrows were rich and cool, though the whiteness of the teeth was disconcerting.

  “She would be pretty if she took care of herself. What a shame.”

  Clearly she neglected herself. Yet she was not at all ugly, and gave an impression of fresh elegance, and a cleanness as of a summer sky. The pity of it all. She was wearing a figured robe of pale yellow, a cloak decorated with grasshoppers, and white trousers.

  She leaned forward to examine the caterpillars. “How very nice. But we can’t leave them out in the sunlight. Come, men. Herd them inside. Don’t let a single one get away.”

  The boy shook the branch and they fell to the ground.

  “Put them on this.”

  She offered a white fan on which someone had been practicing Chinese characters. He did as ordered.

  The two young men looked on in amazement. The master of the house was a learned man, and he had quite a daughter. More, perhaps, than he could manage.

  A boy espied the pair. “A couple of handsome young men [are] hiding behind that shutter. An odd-looking couple they are too.”

  “How awful,” said Tayū. “There she is, chasing after those bugs of hers, completely exposed to the world. I must warn her.”

  Outside the blind as before, the lady was in a great stir getting caterpillars from leaves.

  “Come inside.” The woman was afraid to go near. “Someone might see you, way out there.”

  “What difference does it make?” said the lady, sure that this was merely a device to distract her.

  “You think I’m lying? I’m told there are two fine young men behind that shutter. See, out there in back.”

  “Go have a look, Cricket.”

  “It’s true,” said the boy, running back.

  Putting some caterpillars in her sleeve, the lady hurried inside.

  She was neither too tall nor too short. Rich hair fell to the hem of her robe. Because the edges were untrimmed, it did not fall in perfect tresses. Yet it was good after its fashion, and rather charming.

  Even someone less favored, thought the cavalry officer, could easily pass muster. She may not seem very approachable, but she is pretty and elegant, and there is a certain distinction even in her eccentricities. If only she did not have that peculiar hobby. It would be a pity to run off and not even let her know he had seen her. Using the juice from a grassy stem for ink, he set down a poem on a fold of paper:

  Having seen the fur of the caterpillar,

  I wish that I could take it for my own.

  He tapped with his fan and ordered a boy to deliver it. The boy gave it to Tayū, saying that it was from the gentleman over there, for the lady.

  “Frightful.” Tayū was loud in her complaints. “I know who it’s from. That cavalry man. Because of those stupid bugs you let him see you.”

  “When you look into the nature of things, there is nothing in the world to be ashamed of. This life of ours is a dream. Who can tell what is good in it and what is bad?”

  What was a person to say? The women were in despair.

  The young men waited, thinking there would surely be an answer. Presently, to their disappointment, all the boys were called inside.

  There seems to have been at least one woman who saw the need for an answer. It would not do to have them wait in vain.

  I am not like others. Only having heard

  the name of the caterpillar do I wish to answer.

  To this the cavalry officer replied:

  Like the fur of the caterpillar, possibly,

  there is no other who matters so much as a hair.

  Laughing, he departed.

  We will learn more of the lady in the next chapter.

  [Translated by Edward Seidensticker]

  THE MIRROR OF THE PRESENT (IMAKAGAMI, CA. 1170)

  By the latter part of the twelfth century, The Tale of Genji had become the object of serious scholarship and commentary, particularly for those interested in Japanese poetry. But it stood in an uncertain position as a monogatari or work of fiction, which had long held a low position in the hierarchy of genres. “The Progress of Fiction” is the final chapter of the historical tale The Mirror of the Present and is cast in the form common to all works of the “mirror” series: an aged person, encouraged by an audience of inquisitive pilgrims, gives a rambling, firsthand account of times long past. The narrator of The Mirror of the Present is a toothless and doddering woman more than 150 years old, who as a young girl had served as a lady-in-waiting to Murasaki Shikibu. While gathering fern shoots near her home, she encounters a band of pilgrims returning from the temple at Hatsuse, who, upon learning her age and identity, begin to ask her questions. Toward the end of the day, one of the pilgrims laments the severity of Murasaki Shikibu’s punishment for having written her “insinuating and suggestive” monogatari, and the work closes with the old woman’s attempt to defend the writings of her former mistress. The ensuing conversation is an excellent epitome of the arguments for and against fiction that were rehearsed in a multitude of treatises on The Tale of Genji throughout the medieval period.

  A strict interpretation of Buddhist moral precepts led to the conclusion that fictions of any sort were a form of “falsehood” (mōgo) and that writing of highly literary or poetic quality was a breach of the commandment against “specious, ornamented language” (kigo). As a tale of “amorous intrigues,” The Tale of Genji was further censured for corrupting morals and exciting the passions. The cumulative force of these several strictures can be gauged by the widespread credence given the legend mentioned by the first pilgrim, that Murasaki Shikibu had been cast into hell for having written Genji and that her readers stood in danger of like retribution.

  Defenders of The Tale of Genji argued not against the basic validity of these charges but for a more subtle interpretation of the precepts on which they were based. One line of reasoning held that Genji, though not “true” in the literal sense, was a moral fable and therefore a form of “expedient truth” (hōben), such as the Buddha had used in preaching to those incapable of grasping more sublime expressions of the Buddhist way. The immoral acts depicted in the novel could thus be seen as serving the same purpose as those related by the Buddha in his parables: to illustrate graphically the true nature and consequences of wrongdoing in order to inculcate in the reader an abhorrence of evil. A strong buttress to this argument was the popular belief in bodhisattvas who appeared in human form in order to “lead men to enlightenment.” The narrator of The Mirror of the Present is one of many to suggest that Murasaki Shikibu was not an ordinary person but an incarnation of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara (J. Kannon).

  Another line of argument used in “The Progress of Fiction” was based on the doctrine of the “Middle Way” expounded by the Indian sage Nagarjuna (ca. 150–250). In its original form this was a complex metaphysical postulate that held, among other things, that all sensory perceptions are illusory, hence all distinctions between true and false, right and wrong, good and evil, and so on, are meaningless. Seeming differences are only seeming; all partake ultimately of a single Absolute. In Japan, however, the doctrine was often interpreted in ways more utilitarian than metaphysical. Objections to literature could thus be confuted by citing, as the old woman does, the passage from the Nirvana Sutra that says “even coarse and insinuating language partakes of Absolute Truth,” or the prayer by the Chinese poet Bo Juyi (772–846) that the “wild words and decorative phrases” (kyōgen kigo) of his poetry might “lead the way to enlightenment.”

  The Progress of Fiction

/>   Yet another of the pilgrims said, “How true it is I do not know, but so often we hear that Murasaki Shikibu, for crafting so insinuating and suggestive a tissue of lies in her Tale of Genji, was in the afterlife doomed to be consumed in smoke, like seaweed in the salt fires. This so upsets me that, vain though it may be to hope for her deliverance, I should like to pray for the repose of her soul.”

  “Yes,” the old woman replied, “that is indeed what everyone says. And yet, in Japan as in China, the writings of the wise have always brought comfort to men’s hearts, and have illumined the way for dimmer minds; and this hardly deserves the name of falsehood [mōgo.] To describe what never did happen, protesting behind a face of innocence that it is actually true; to lead others to think well of evil—to utter any sort of lie [soragoto] is sinful indeed. But is The Tale of Genji really such an empty fabrication? Meretricious or specious you might call it; but these hardly seem the most monstrous of sins. To take the life of any living creature, or to steal even the least of a man’s treasures—these are horrible sins for which the offender may be plunged to the very depths of hell. But I find it hard to imagine that such should be the lot of Murasaki Shikibu, though to be sure I have no knowledge of what retribution she might now be suffering. To stir men’s hearts can, after all, be productive of virtue. And though to excite the passions may perhaps prevent one’s release from the cycle of rebirth, this is hardly so serious a transgression as to send one to hell. It is difficult enough to comprehend the affairs of our own time; but in China the poet Bo Juyi composed a work in seventy volumes which greatly stirred men’s hearts, with its elegant phrases and ingenious conceits—and this man, we are told, is the incarnation of Manjusri.302 Indeed, the Buddha himself, when he preached in parables, invented stories of events that never occurred; and these certainly are not to be regarded falsehoods. For a mere woman to have written such a marvelous book as this, well, it does not seem to me she could have been any ordinary person. More than likely, she was Gadgadśvara or Avalokiteśvara or some other supernatural being, come to us in the form of a woman to preach the Doctrine and lead men to enlightenment.”