Tales of Moonlight and Rain

by Ueda, Akinari

  The objective of finding elegance in the vulgar dovetails with one of the goals of the scholars of National Learning, the “articulation of links between the mythological past, the recorded history of the aristocratic few, and the daily lives of common folk.“25 This agenda is related, of course, to the rising wealth and influence of the urban classes—primarily merchants and artisans—in the early modern period and their desire to participate in the high culture associated with the court aristocracy. The consequent blurring of the distinction between ga and zoku can be seen clearly in Moonlight and Rain. As a bunjin, Akinari rejected the common, and all the elegant genres are reflected in Moonlight and Rain. At the same time, the peasants (zoku) in “The Reed-Choked House,” for example, are remarkably well versed in waka (ga), and the inclusion of haikai (zoku) in the same context as waka and Chinese poetry (ga) in “The Owl of the Three Jewels” implicitly raises haikai to the same level of elegance. In Moonlight and Rain, then, peasants and haikai participate in the aristocratic tradition as Akinari lifts them—and eighteenth-century Japanese fiction—from the vulgar realm of ukiyo zōshi to the elegant sphere of court poetry and monogatari.26

  The National Learning agenda is reflected in Moonlight and Rain in at least two other ways. First, the philological study of ancient Japanese texts, one of the principal activities of National Learning scholars, influenced Akinari’s choice of vocabulary and phrasing so often that a reader is hard put to count the examples.27 Indeed, the abundance of archaic words and expressions from, and allusions to, the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters, 712), the Man’yōshū, Tales of Ise, the Kokinshū, The Tale of Genji, and other classics is the main reason that Moonlight and Rain is difficult to read. The classical lexicon also serves to associate Moonlight and Rain with court literature. Second, in opposition to the Confucian emphasis on rationalism, scholars of National Learning insisted that many things lie beyond the ability of human beings to understand, analyze, and explain—a belief that was based on an unquestioning acceptance of Japanese mythology.28 While Akinari rejected Norinaga’s uncritical embrace of ancient mythology, he did share the National Learning scholars’ propensity to “celebrate the mysterious wonders of life,“29 which takes an especially vivid form in Moonlight and Rain.

  In synthesizing the bunjin aesthetic and National Learning, Akinari produced a masterpiece in a new genre—the yomihon, a more serious form of literature than its predecessor, the ukiyo zōshi. The term yomihon comes from the genre’s characteristically heavy emphasis on the written text, as opposed to oral narratives and booklets in which illustrations play a central role. The language of yomihon, including Moonlight and Rain, is elegant, somewhat archaic, and often full of allusions to Chinese and Japanese antecedents. In short, the emphasis is on serious reading. The first yomihon writers were Tsuga Teishō, who probably instructed Akinari in medicine, and Takebe Ayatari, one of Akinari’s mentors in National Learning. Teishō’s Hanabusa sōshi (A Garland of Heroes, 1749) is considered the first yomihon. Its prose style is characterized by wakan konkō (a blend of Japanese and Chinese) and gazoku setchū (a blend of elegant and vulgar). Like Moonlight and Rain, A Garland of Heroes consists of nine stories adapted from Chinese sources to Japanese settings and grouped into five books, as does its sequel, Shigeshige yawa (1766). It seems likely that Akinari modeled his collection on Teishō’s.30 Ayatari’s Nishiyama monogatari (A Tale of the Western Hills) appeared in 1768, eight years before the publication of Moonlight and Rain. In contrast to Teishō’s and Akinari’s yomihon, A Tale of the Western Hills consists of ten chapters grouped into three books and concerns a contemporary scandal in the capital. The prose style of Moonlight and Rain combines that of A Garland of Heroes with the elegant, neoclassical prose of A Tale of the Western Hills.31 Tales of Moonlight and Rain is unquestionably the finest of the early yomihon.

  About Tales of Moonlight and Rain

  COMPOSITION AND PUBLICATION

  An advertisement at the end of Akinari’s story collection A Worldly Monkey Who Hears About Everything announces the forthcoming publication of two more works by the same author: Characters of Worldly Mistresses and “Shokoku kaisen dayori” (Tidings from a Cargo Ship in Various Provinces).32 Worldly Mistresses, published the following year, repeats the advertisement for “Tidings from a Cargo Ship,” adding “Sekenzaru kōhen” (A Worldly Monkey, Part Two) to the title, and announces a forthcoming work to be called “Saigyō hanashi utamakura somefuroshiki” (Saigyō Stories: Poetic Sites Bundled in a Dyed Cloth). The context and the titles suggest that both “Tidings from a Cargo Ship” and “Saigyō Stories” were to have been ukiyo zōshi like A Worldly Monkey and Worldly Mistresses, but neither “Tidings from a Cargo Ship” nor “Saigyō Stories” was published. In their place came Tales of Moonlight and Rain in 1776, with a preface dated 1768, the year after the publication of Worldly Mistresses.

  Why the preface bears the date “Meiwa 5, late spring” (the Third Month of 1768) has been the subject of considerable research and discussion, since the preface and the stories were first published eight years later. There are good reasons to think that a preface that Akinari had drafted in 1768, as part of the “Saigyō Stories” project, was followed by eight years of studying, writing, and revising before the tales in Moonlight and Rain reached their present form.33 Another possibility is that Akinari used the date of 1768 so that his work would appear to be contemporaneous with A Tale of the Western Hills, the preface of which is dated “Meiwa 5, spring, Second Month.“34

  Moonlight and Rain belongs, of course, to a different genre—yomihon—from A Worldly Monkey and Worldly Mistresses and, presumably, their planned sequels. Nevertheless, the titles of the unpublished works contain tantalizing suggestions of connections with Moonlight and Rain. First, both titles—“Tidings from a Cargo Ship in Various Provinces” and “Saigyō Stories: Poetic Sites Bundled in a Dyed Cloth”—anticipate the prominence of travel in Moonlight and Rain (in all but the last of the nine tales) and the location of all the stories in the provinces (as opposed to the great cities). Second, “Saigyō Stories: Poetic Sites Bundled in a Dyed Cloth” anticipates Moonlight and Rain in two additional ways: Saigyō, the beloved poet-monk of the twelfth century, appears in the first Moonlight and Rain story, “Shiramine”; and “poetic sites” (utamakura), place-names used frequently in poetry and listed in handbooks of poetic composition, are mentioned in almost all the tales, with special prominence in “Shiramine,” “The Carp of My Dreams,” “The Owl of the Three Jewels,” and “A Serpent’s Lust.” In short, “various provinces,” “Saigyō,” and “poetic sites” in the titles of the unpublished ukiyo zōshi are important elements in Moonlight and Rain. There can be little doubt that Moonlight and Rain grew from the germs of “Tidings from a Cargo Ship in Various Provinces” and “Saigyō Stories.” The resulting yomihon is a work of far greater psychological depth, narrative sophistication, and historical and philological awareness than A Worldly Monkey and Worldly Mistresses, and it incorporates two new elements: the adaptation of Chinese stories and the strange or anomalous.

  TITLE

  The title Ugetsu monogatari (literally, “rain-moon tales”) comes from the phrase “misty moon after the rains” in the preface. It alludes to the nō play Ugetsu, in which Saigyō appears, as he does in “Shiramine,” and in which rain and the moon are central images.35 Commentators have also pointed to a passage in “Mudan deng ji” (Peony Lantern), a story in Qu You’s Jiandeng xinhua (New Tales After Trimming the Lamp, 1378), one of Akinari’s principal sources for “The Kibitsu Cauldron,” which suggests that mysterious beings appear on cloudy, rainy nights and in mornings with a lingering moon. In any case, educated East Asian readers would probably guess immediately that a book containing the term “rain-moon” in its title would deal with the strange and marvelous.

  SOURCES

  Much has been written about Akinari’s use of Chinese and Japanese sources in Moonlight and Rain—more than sixty Chinese sources, according to Noriko T. Rei
der, and more than a hundred Japanese.36 (For the titles of important sources, see the introductions to the tales.)

  Akinari used his sources in several ways. For some tales—“The Chrysanthemum Vow,” “The Carp of My Dreams,” “The Kibitsu Cauldron,” and “A Serpent’s Lust”—he borrowed the story line of a Chinese work, always with significant modifications that ease the transition to a Japanese setting. Further, many scenes and situations in the tales echo those in Chinese or Japanese sources. Examples include the description of Katsushirō’s house when he returns from the capital in “The Reed-Choked House,” which echoes the “Yomogiu” (The Wormwood Patch) chapter of The Tale of Genji; the depiction of the temple at Yoshino in “A Serpent’s Lust,” which echoes the “Wakamurasaki” (Lavender) chapter of Genji; and the arrival of Kaian at the village in “The Blue Hood,” which echoes chapter 5 of Shuihu zhuan (Water Margin, fourteenth century), attributed to Shi Nai’an and Luo Guanzhong. Akinari also borrowed words and phrases from his Chinese sources and from the Japanese classics he studied, especially the Kojiki, the Man’yōshū, Tales of Ise, and The Tale of Genji. Finally, he seems to have structured individual stories along the lines of Chinese tales and in imitation of the structure of nō plays, and the organization of the collection as a whole seems to be influenced by the nō.

  Far from trying to hide his indebtedness to Chinese and Japanese precedents, Akinari undoubtedly hoped and expected that his readers would derive pleasure from recognizing his sources and appreciate his ingenuity in adapting them. The borrowings, allusions, and echoes that fill Moonlight and Rain also add richness and complexity to the tales. As with the references to earlier texts in The Tale of Genji and the use of honkadori (allusive variation) in Japanese court poetry, the reader’s awareness of other texts interacting with Akinari’s adds resonance and depth to the reading experience.37 The borrowings also draw the reader into the text and involve him or her in the creative process, as they reward, flatter, and delight the reader who is erudite enough to recognize them.38 Finally, the liberal use of Chinese and courtly Japanese sources lifts Moonlight and Rain, by association, into the elegant realm of Water Margin and Genji, the two works that Akinari mentions at the beginning of his preface, and, in the same way, lifts Akinari himself into the lofty company of his Chinese and Japanese predecessors.

  Even when Akinari’s borrowings from Chinese sources are most direct—in “The Chrysanthemum Vow,” “The Carp of My Dreams,” “The Kibitsu Cauldron,” and “A Serpent’s Lust”—he ingeniously adapted the stories to Japanese settings and enriched them with a psychological complexity that is absent in their Chinese counterparts. Again and again, the reader is struck by the wonderful aptness of the time and place in which Akinari placed his tales. By making Akana Sōemon a samurai in “The Chrysanthemum Vow,” for example, he introduced the themes of samurai loyalty and honor, whereas the character who corresponds to Sōemon in the Chinese story is a merchant who simply forgets the date of his appointment.39 In “The Carp of My Dreams,” Akinari introduced the crucial theme of Buddhist compassion by placing a Buddhist monk at the center of the story and invoked a long tradition of descriptive Japanese literature and art by setting the story at Miidera. In “The Kibitsu Cauldron,” he introduced Shinto elements—prophecy and the role of spirits—by connecting the characters to the Kibitsu Shrine. In “A Serpent’s Lust,” he imbeds the Chinese-inspired story line in the context of Japanese legends about storied places: Kumano, Yoshino, and Dōjōji. In these carefully chosen settings, Akinari’s characters reveal distinctive personalities, unlike the characters in his Chinese sources. As Robert Ford Campany has pointed out, the authors of Chinese anomaly accounts were not concerned with “the ‘inner’ nature (xing ) of intellectual and emotional disposition, nor the structure of the self’s ascent toward perfection through self-cultivation, but precisely humankind’s taxonomic place among other kinds of beings, the nature of its relationships to other kinds.“40 In Moonlight and Rain, by contrast, it is precisely the characters’ inner natures—saga, the reading in Japanese of the character read xing in Chinese—that concerned Akinari, as Uzuki Hiroshi emphasizes in his commentaries.41 Donald Keene makes the same point: “The very fact that one can describe Katsushirō’s character places him in an altogether different category from Chao or Seiroku [who correspond to Katsushirō in the Chinese and Japanese antecedents to “The Reed-Choked House”], neither of whom displays any distinctive traits.“42

  NARRATING THE STRANGE

  Moonlight and Rain has been called a collection of “ghost stories,“43 “gothic tales,“44 and “tales of the supernatural.“45 In Japanese, they are called kaidan; indeed, the edition of 1776 includes the subtitle Kinko [present and past] kaidan. As Reider says, “Kaidan are tales of the strange and mysterious, supernatural stories often depicting the horrific and gruesome,” and the word kaidan means “narrating the strange.“46 No one would argue with “strange and mysterious,” but “supernatural” is probably an inappropriate word, since what is considered to be supernatural in one culture is regarded as merely strange—but natural—in another.47 Belief in revenants, spirit possessions, and other phenomena that we might call “supernatural” was widespread in eighteenth-century Japan and was apparently shared by Akinari.48 If the term “supernatural” is inappropriate, so is “fantastic,” as defined by Tzvetan Todorov, because “the basis of the fantastic is … the ambiguity as to whether the weird event is supernatural or not,“49 and such ambiguity is absent in Akinari’s world. “Strange” and “anomalous,” words that have been used in the study of Chinese stories, are more useful when discussing Moonlight and Rain.50

  Strange beings abound in Japanese art, folklore, and literature. They include kami (Shinto deities); spirits, deities, and divine beings from other traditions, such as Buddhist and Chinese lore; spirits of humans, living or dead, that can possess other people; revenants; oni (demons and fiends); tengu (goblins); trickster animals, such kitsune (fox) and tanuki (raccoon-dog); and other animals, such as serpents, that have strange powers. All of these, except kami and trickster animals, figure prominently in Moonlight and Rain. The vengeful ghost of the former emperor Sutoku returns to earth as king of the tengu in “Shiramine.” In “The Chrysanthemum Vow” and “The Reed-Choked House,” a faithful revenant fulfills a promise. In “The Owl of the Three Jewels,” vengeful ghosts return as asura (J. ashura or shura), violent human beings who, in Buddhist lore, are reborn as violent demons. “The Kibitsu Cauldron” features the possessing spirit of a jealous woman—first when she is alive and then after she has died. In “A Serpent’s Lust,” a jealous serpent in the form of a woman seeks revenge on her husband. A monk turns into an oni and then miraculously stays alive for a year while meditating, in “The Blue Hood.” “On Poverty and Wealth” features a little man who introduces himself as the spirit of gold. “The Carp of My Dreams” differs from the other stories in that no anomalous being plays a major role; instead, the story deals with the anomaly of a man who crosses the boundaries between human and animal, and between the waking world and the world of dreams.

  Tengu and oni, which have no exact Western equivalents, require some explanation. Tengu are goblins said to live deep in the mountains. In Japanese art, they often resemble birds but sometimes take human form, with wings and a beak or long nose. They were “regarded as harbingers of war” because of their “insatiable desire to be destructive and to wreak havoc upon people’s lives.“51 It is fitting, then, that the malicious spirit of the former emperor Sutoku becomes a tengu to exact his revenge. The Minamoto leader Yoshitsune, who had defeated Sutoku’s enemies, was said to have learned martial arts from a tengu. Tengu were apparently brought under control by the Tokugawa government, which issued commands to them and expected them to obey.52 Oni are usually depicted as grotesque, humanlike beings with horns, fangs, and claws, and clad in a tiger-skin loincloth or, sometimes, a monk’s robes, as in the Ōtsu prints that depict an oni-nembutsu (oni dressed as an itinerant monk).
53 Some oni serve as soldiers in the Buddhist hell, but oni can also be benevolent, as was Ryōgen (912–985), chief abbot of the Tendai sect, who is said to have become an oni after his death in order to protect the Enryakuji temple complex on Mount Hiei.54 Finally, the word oni is often applied to a cruel or frightening person. The mad abbot in “The Blue Hood” becomes an oni in this last sense of the word.

  The categories suggested by Campany in his study of Chinese anomaly accounts help clarify the nature of the anomalies in Moonlight and Rain.55 As Campany says, “Most (but not all) anomalies … occur at or across boundaries“56—for example, between humans and animals or the living and the dead. Two of Akinari’s stories involve “anomaly by transformation,“57 in which a being is metamorphosed across a boundary that normally separates humans from animals and the apparent from the real: “The Carp of My Dreams,” in which a man seems to become a fish,58 and “A Serpent’s Lust,” in which a woman turns out to be a serpent.59 A category not posited by Campany—the boundary between mineral and animal—also figures in “The Carp of My Dreams,” when paintings turn into real fish. Most of the stories in Moonlight and Rain involve “anomaly by contact,” specifically, “contact with the realm of the dead”:60 “Shiramine,” “The Chrysanthemum Vow,” “The Reed-Choked House,” “The Owl of the Three Jewels,” and “The Kibitsu Cauldron,” which also features the vengeful, possessing spirit of a living person, a type not mentioned by Campany. “The Carp of My Dreams” belongs to the category of “contact through dreams.“61 In the last story, “On Poverty and Wealth,” contact occurs between a human being and a spirit.62 Finally, two stories involve “sexual contact with non-human (or non-living human) beings”:63 “The Reed-Choked House,” in which “marital relations established during life continue after death,“64 and “A Serpent’s Lust.” “The Blue Hood” generally follows the pattern that Campany has described for Buddhist tales (for a detailed explanation, see the introduction to “The Blue Hood”).65 In most of Akinari’s stories, then, the anomalies correspond to categories that had been used for centuries by Chinese writers. This is not only because Akinari adapted Chinese stories, but also because Chinese lore had been trickling into Japan, along with Chinese Buddhist and secular texts, for more than a thousand years and naturally influenced the methods of Japanese storytellers.