Tales of Moonlight and Rain

by Ueda, Akinari

  There are other ways of looking at the organization of Moonlight and Rain.86 The most persuasive is the linking structure described by the prominent Akinari scholar Takada Mamoru.87

  Stories 1–2. The clash of wills between a ghost and a living man in “Shiramine” is followed by the meeting of minds between a ghost and a living man in “The Chrysanthemum Vow.” (The first two stories are also linked by an interest in Confucianism and by the theme of loyalty—Saigyō’s to Sutoku, and Sōemon’s and Samon’s to each other. The intimacy and loyalty that bond Saigyō to his former master, Sutoku, in “Shiramine” anticipate an even closer relationship between two men in “The Chrysanthemum Vow.”)

  Stories 2–3. The fraternal loyalty of a ghost in “The Chrysanthemum Vow” is echoed by the marital fidelity of a ghost in “The Reed-Choked House,” in which the loyal ghost is the woman who waits, not the man who returns. (There is a link by contrast, as well, in that the man who vows to return by a certain date keeps his promise in “The Chrysanthemum Vow,” but not in “The Reed-Choked House.” The parallel between the two stories is even closer if we think of Samon and Sōemon as lovers: the steadfast love between two men in “The Chrysanthemum Vow” is followed by the undependability of a husband in “The Reed-Choked House.” Upper-class men of exemplary character are replaced by a pusillanimous farmer and his devoted wife. Miyagi, the ideal wife, anticipates another idealized wife, with a twist, in “The Kibitsu Cauldron,” and a mockery of the ideal wife plays a central role in “A Serpent’s Lust.”)

  Stories 3–4. The image of water links “The Reed-Choked House” to “The Carp of My Dreams”: the former ends with the legend of a girl who threw herself into the water, and the latter concerns an artist who dreams that he swims about like a fish. (“The Carp of My Dreams” is a lighthearted, peaceful story with a happy ending, a cheerful interlude after the solemnity of “Shiramine” and “The Chrysanthemum Vow” and the pathos of “The Reed-Choked House” and before the darkness of “The Owl of the Three Jewels.” Like Saigyō, in “Shiramine,” Kōgi was an eminent monk, and “The Carp of My Dreams” makes many references to Buddhist teachings. The water motif is picked up again in “A Serpent’s Lust.”)

  Stories 4–5. Kōgi, in “The Carp of My Dreams,” comes back from the strange world of a watery dream to tell his story; similarly, Muzen, in “The Owl of the Three Jewels,” barely returns alive from the strange world of Mount Kōya and a brush with the asura realm to tell others about his experience. Daytime turns to night; fish is replaced by owl. (The stories are also linked by the prominent role that Buddhism plays in each. If Muzen dreams of his encounter with Hidetsugu, the connection becomes even closer. The implicit contrast in “The Owl of the Three Jewels” between the revered Kōbō Daishi and the murderous Hidetsugu—both of them famous historical figures—echoes the contrast between Saigyō and Sutoku in “Shiramine” and anticipates that between Kaian and the mad monk in “The Blue Hood.”)

  Stories 5–6. The story of a cruel man who fell to the asura realm, in “The Owl of the Three Jewels,” is followed, in “The Kibitsu Cauldron,” by that of a betrayed woman whose jealousy turns her into an angry possessing spirit, and this time the man does not survive. (The Shinto context of “The Kibitsu Cauldron,” as well as the amoral spirit of Isora, form a sharp contrast with the Buddhism of “Shiramine,” “The Carp of My Dreams,” and “The Owl of the Three Jewels.”)

  Stories 6–7. The lascivious husband of “The Kibitsu Cauldron” is followed, in “A Serpent’s Lust,” by a lascivious and jealous serpent-woman who, like the jealous wife of “The Kibitsu Cauldron,” tries to kill her husband. (The reference to serpent-women in the first paragraph of “The Kibitsu Cauldron” anticipates “A Serpent’s Lust.” Both Shōtarō, in “The Kibitsu Cauldron,” and Toyoo, in “A Serpent’s Lust,” are led by a servant girl to meet a mysterious lady at a house that turns out to be something other than what it first appears to be. In both stories, one or more wise old men tries to help: in “The Kibutsu Cauldron,” he is a yin–yang master, while in “A Serpent’s Lust,” the first is a Shinto priest; the second, an overrated Buddhist monk; and the third, a Buddhist sage. Pervasive water imagery in “A Serpent’s Lust” echoes that in “The Reed-Choked House” and “The Carp of My Dreams.”)

  Stories 7–8. The destructive power of lust is an issue in “The Blue Hood,” as in “A Serpent’s Lust,” but the focus shifts from a serpent-woman to a previously upright monk who becomes a fiend, and the weak husband is replaced by a Zen “priest of great virtue.” (Buddhism returns as a central concern, as in “Shiramine,” “The Carp of My Dreams,” and “The Owl of the Three Jewels.”)

  Stories 8–9. “The Blue Hood” is linked to “On Poverty and Wealth” by the important role of Chinese verse—the lines with which Kaian leads the mad abbot to enlightenment, and the prophetic lines bestowed on Sanai by the spirit of gold.

  Stories 9–1. The last story in Moonlight and Rain, “On Poverty and Wealth,” is linked to the first story, “Shiramine,” since both involve a philosophical dialogue between a human and a nonhuman, and the gold spirit’s prediction of a happy future for the nation echoes, and contrasts with, Sutoku’s grim predictions of war. (Another parallel between the first and last stories is that “Shiramine” alludes to the Hōgen, Heiji, and Gempei conflicts, while “On Poverty and Wealth” reviews the struggles of the Warring States and Azuchi–Momoyama periods before predicting peace and prosperity under the Tokugawa. Tributes to the Tokugawa are included in the “Preface” and “The Owl of the Three Jewels” as well.)

  At least two other patterns in the structure of Moonlight and Rain are noteworthy. First, anomalous beings and events grow more dangerous as the collection progresses and then less threatening again. They present no danger to Saigyō, Samon, Katsushirō, and Kōgi, in the first four stories. In the fifth, however, Muzen is nearly killed, and Shōtarō dies in the sixth. The danger recedes slightly in the seventh story, in which Tomiko is killed but Toyoo escapes, and the eighth, in which Kaian is threatened but survives because of his great virtue. Danger is not an element in the ninth story. The other notable pattern is the contrast between a steadfast character and an undependable, erratic, or vicious one. The motif is established in “Shiramine,” with Saigyō’s unshakable loyalty and Sutoku’s thirst for revenge, and is repeated in all the stories except “The Carp of My Dreams” and “On Poverty and Wealth.” Further, the loyalty that Samon and Sōemon show for each other in “The Chrysanthemum Vow” contrasts with the weakness of the central male characters in “The Reed-Choked House,” “The Kibitsu Cauldron,” and “A Serpent’s Lust,” and the theme is driven home with the warning in “The Chrysanthemum Vow”: “Bond not with a shallow man.”

  About the Translation

  Tales of Moonlight and Rain has already attracted an impressive company of translators and adapters, and yet it is a truism that English translations of the work have been inadequate. Takada understated the problem: “Readers of Ugetsu Monogatari in translation may not be able fully to grasp the classic beauty of the … original’s literary style, its elegant phraseology, and its precise mode of expression, replete with concatenations yet without redundancy.“88 To reflect adequately in translation the style and tone of the original text is a tall order. Akinari was a great master of Japanese, but few of us who translate from Japanese are great masters of English. His prose is terse, elliptical, sinewy, highly literary, allusive, scholarly, dignified, elegant, and sometimes obscure—never slack or insipid. His is a neoclassical, self-conscious, quirky style, with many usages borrowed from archaic Japanese texts and Chinese sources, resulting in a rich, dense text that is meant to be read slowly and savored. I have tried to let the text speak for itself as directly as possible, rather than embroidering it with interpretations and explanations. Some of the existing translations strike me as wordy and insufficiently dignified, because they have gone too far in accommodating the Western reader and so fail to convey the tone, pac
e, and elegance of the original. Leon M. Zolbrod wanted his translation “to read as if the original were written in common English.“89 In this, he echoed Dryden: “I have endeavoured to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age.“90 Commonsensical as it sounds, this is an impossible goal.91 In any case, Akinari certainly did not write in common Japanese.

  Translators of Moonlight and Rain who attempted to “[leave] the reader alone as much as possible and [move] the writer toward the reader“92—in other words, to “naturalize” Akinari’s prose into modern English—have vitiated the text. In my translation, I have tried to leave Akinari alone as much as possible without doing violence to my mother tongue. I have looked for ways to convey in English the distinctive qualities of Akinari’s prose more successfully than some of my predecessors have done, even though I am aware of my limitations as an English stylist and of the ultimate impossibility of a close approximation. Akinari’s original (as opposed to the modern, edited texts on which we base our translations) presents each tale as a steady narrative flow, uninterrupted by paragraphs or quotation marks and only occasionally guided by punctuation. One effect of this presentation (which was common at the time) is to blur the distinction between narrative and dialogue: early editions give the impression that both narrative and dialogue are told in the voice of the narrator. I considered dispensing with quotations marks and other modern techniques for setting off dialogue, but finally decided that this would make the translation too odd and remote for the tastes of most readers. For the same reason, I have also used English tenses, despite the advice of those who emphasize the inherent differences between Japanese and English narrative.93 Probably these compromises will satisfy no one, but I hope that my translation will bring readers of English a little closer to the tone, texture, and excitement of Akinari’s masterpiece.

  Some readers may think that I have accepted Vladimir Nabokov’s advice to provide “copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers.“94 In the case of Moonlight and Rain, I believe that extensive notes are desirable to explain exotic references and to demonstrate the rich intertextuality of the stories. Even so, the notes are far from exhaustive. I have emphasized sources that readers are most likely to be familiar with, such as The Tale of Genji, and secondary material in English. I hope that the notes will be sufficient for the scholarly reader and not too tedious for the casual. Information that is immediately useful for understanding the text is provided in footnotes; longer notes, of interest primarily to students and scholars, appear at the end of each story. Truly comprehensive notes can be found in Uzuki Hiroshi’s indispensable Ugetsu monogatari hyōshaku. Many of my notes paraphrase Uzuki’s.

  Rather than inflating the footnotes further, I have provided an introduction for each story, with information on its title, characters, places, time, background, and affinities. I have presented this information in a format commonly used in nō texts, partly because it is a convenient arrangement and partly because Tales of Moonlight and Rain reminds me of a collection of nō plays.

  For English equivalents of court titles, I am indebted to William H. McCullough and Helen Craig McCullough’s A Tale of Flowering Fortunes.95

  Personal names and ages are given as in the original: family name precedes given name, and the calendar years in which a character has lived are counted, rather than the number of full years elapsed since the day of birth. The premodern Japanese calendar consisted of twelve lunar months, of which the first three coincided with spring, the next three with summer, and so on. The Seventh Month, therefore, corresponds not to July but to the first month of autumn.

  The translation is based on the text, notes, and commentary in Uzuki’s Ugetsu monogatari hyōshaku. I have also referred to Ueda Akinari shū, edited by Nakamura Yukihiko;96 Hanabusa sōshi, Nishiyama monogatari, Ugetsu monogatari, Harusame monogatari, edited by Nakamura Yukihiko, Takada Mamoru, and Nakamura Hiroyasu; and the introductions, translations, and notes in Wilfred Whitehouse’s “‘Shiramine’: A Translation with Comments” and “Ugetsu Monogatari: Tales of a Clouded Moon,” Dale Saunders’s “Ugetsu Monogatari, or Tales of Moonlight and Rain,” Kengi Hamada’s Tales of Moonlight and Rain: Japanese Gothic Tales, and Leon M. Zolbrod’s Ugetsu Monogatari: Tales of Moonlight and Rain. The translation would not have been feasible without the tireless efforts of Japanese scholars who have made the text as accessible as it is.

  The woodcuts that accompany each story are from the edition of 1776. All the translations, including those in the notes, are my own unless otherwise indicated.

  NOTES

  1. Roger Ebert, “Misguided Ambition, Forbidden Passion,” Chicago Sun-Times, May 9, 2004.

  2. See, for example, Nakano Mitsutoshi, “The Role of Traditional Aesthetics,” trans. Maria Flutsch, in C. Andrew Gerstle, ed., 18th Century Japan: Culture and Society (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), p. 124.

  3. Nakano, “Role of Traditional Aesthetics,” p. 125.

  4. C. Andrew Gerstle, “Introduction,” in Gerstle, ed., 18th Century Japan, p. xii.

  5. Gerstle, “Introduction,” p. xii.

  6. Conrad Totman, Early Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 354.

  7. Since a full biography of Akinari is available in English, I offer only an overview of his life here. For a thorough treatment of his life and works, see Blake Morgan Young, Ueda Akinari (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1982). Other useful English-language sources on Akinari include Donald Keene, World Within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Pre-Modern Era, 1600–1867 (New York: Holt, 1976), pp. 371–395; the introductions to Wilfrid Whitehouse, trans., “‘Shiramine’: A Translation with Comments,” Monumenta Nipponica 1, no. 1 (1938): 242–258, and “Ugetsu Monogatari: Tales of a Clouded Moon,” Monumenta Nipponica 1, no. 2 (1938): 549–567, and 4, no. 1 (1941): 166–191; to Dale Saunders, trans., “Ugetsu Monogatari, or Tales of Moonlight and Rain,” Monumenta Nipponica 21, nos. 1–2 (1966): 171–202; and to Leon M. Zolbrod, trans. and ed., Ugetsu Monogatari: Tales of Moonlight and Rain: A Complete English Version of the Eighteenth-Century Japanese Collection of Tales of the Supernatural (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1974); Takata [Takada] Mamoru, “Ugetsu Monogatari: A Critical Interpretation,” in Kengi Hamada, trans., Tales of Moonlight and Rain: Japanese Gothic Tales (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1971; New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), pp. xxi–xxix; Haruo Shirane, ed., Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 563–567; Noriko T. Reider, Tales of the Supernatural in Early Modern Japan: Kaidan, Akinari, Ugetsu Monogatari, Japanese Studies, vol. 16 (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen, 2002); James T. Araki, “A Critical Approach to the Ugetsu Monogatari,” Monumenta Nipponica 22, nos. 1–2 (1967): 49–64; Susanna Fessler, “The Nature of the Kami: Ueda Akinari and Tandai Shōshin Roku,” Monumenta Nipponica 51, no. 1 (1996): 1–15; and Dennis Washburn, “Ghostwriters and Literary Haunts: Subordinating Ethics to Art in Ugetsu Monogatari,” Monumenta Nipponica 45, no. 1 (1990): 39–74.

  8. Totman, Early Modern Japan, pp. 302, 353. On the Kaitokudō, see also Tetsuo Najita, Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan: The Kaitokudō, Merchant Academy of Osaka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

  9. Young, Ueda Akinari, p. 12.

  10. On kokugaku, see, for example, Shirane, ed., Early Modern Japanese Literature, pp. 599–630; and Peter Nosco, Remembering Paradise: Nativism and Nostalgia in Eighteenth-Century Japan, Harvard Yenching Monograph Series, no. 31 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Council on East Asian Studies, 1990).