Tales of Moonlight and Rain

by Ueda, Akinari

  11. On bunjin, see, for example, Lawrence E. Marceau, Takebe Ayatari: A Bunjin Bohemian in Early Modern Japan (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2004), pp. 1–21; Mark Morris, “Buson and Shiki: Part One,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 44, no. 2 (1984): 381–425, and “Group Portrait with Artist: Yosa Buson and His Patrons,” in Gerstle, ed., 18th Century Japan, pp. 87–105; and Patricia J. Graham, Tea of the Sages: The Art of Sencha (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998).

  12. Inoue Yasushi, Ugetsu monogatari ron—gensen to shudai (Tokyo: Kasama Shoin, 1999), p. 3.

  13. For fuller discussions of Akinari’s ukiyo zōshi, see Young, Ueda Akinari, pp. 16–33; and Keene, World Within Walls, pp. 372–375.

  14. Young, Ueda Akinari, p. 79.

  15. On the debate, see Young, Ueda Akinari, pp. 78–87.

  16. On ga and zoku in the eighteenth century, see Nakano, “Role of Traditional Aesthetics.”

  17. Young, Ueda Akinari, p. 109.

  18. Excerpts from A Record of Daring and Prudence are in Fessler, “Nature of the Kami,” pp. 8–15.

  19. Graham, Tea of the Sages, pp. 22, 87–90, 92.

  20. Barry Jackman, trans., Tales of the Spring Rain (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1975; New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). See also Young, Ueda Akinari, pp. 128–139.

  21. Quoted in Nakano, “Role of Traditional Aesthetics,” p. 127.

  22. Marceau, Takebe Ayatari, p. 103.

  23. Nakano, “Role of Traditional Aesthetics,” p. 129.

  24. Nakano, “Role of Traditional Aesthetics,” p. 128.

  25. Totman, Early Modern Japan, p. 366.

  26. On Akinari’s desire to change zoku into ga, see also Morita Kirō, Ueda Akinari bungei no kenkyū (Osaka: Izumi Shoin, 2003), pp. 583585. Akinari was not the first bunjin to make this transformation in fiction. In his preface to Nishiyama monogatari (A Tale of the Western Hills), Kinryū Keiyū (1712–1782) praised Takebe Ayatari (also a bunjin) for his ability to “achieve ga while adhering to zoku” (Nakamura Yukihiko, Takada Mamoru, and Nakamura Hiroyasu, eds., Hanabusa sōshi, Nishiyama monogatari, Ugetsu monogatari, Harusame monogatari, Nihon koten bungaku zenshū, vol. 48 [Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1973], p. 251). Keiyū’s preface and Nishiyama monogatari have been translated by Blake Morgan Young: Takebe Ayatari, “A Tale of the Western Hills: Takebe Ayatari’s Nishiyama Monogatari,” Monumenta Nipponica 37, no. 1 (1982): 77–121.

  27. Young, Ueda Akinari, p. 88.

  28. Totman, Early Modern Japan, p. 363.

  29. Totman, Early Modern Japan, p. 363. See also Keene, World Within Walls, p. 388.

  30. Morita, Ueda Akinari bungei no kenkyū, p. 59.

  31. Nakamura Yukihiko, introduction to Hanabusa sōshi, in Nakamura, Takada, and Nakamura, eds., Hanabusa sōshi, Nishiyama monogatari, Ugetsu monogatari, Harusame monogatari, pp. 37–38; Shirane, ed., Early Modern Japanese Literature, pp. 563–564.

  32. Details in this paragraph come from Young, Ueda Akinari, p. 32; and Morita, Ueda Akinari bungei no kenkyū, p. 57.

  33. Morita lists nine persuasive reasons in Ueda Akinari bungei no kenkyū, p. 58. Takada Mamoru argues that the whole collection was completed in 1768, in “Kaisetsu” for Ugetsu monogatari, in Nakamura, Takada, and Nakamura, eds., Hanabusa sōshi, Nishiyama monogatari, Ugetsu monogatari, Harusame monogatari, pp. 46–48.

  34. Morita, Ueda Akinari bungei no kenkyū, pp. 58–59.

  35. The nō play Ugetsu has not been published in English translation.

  36. Reider, Tales of the Supernatural in Early Modern Japan, p. 138. On the influence of Chinese fiction in the eighteenth century and Akinari’s sources, see the extensive notes and commentaries throughout Uzuki Hiroshi, Ugetsu monogatari hyōshaku, Nihon koten hyōshaku zenchūshaku sōsho (Tokyo: Kadokawa, 1969), and, in English, Marceau, Takebe Ayatari, p. 12; Keene, World Within Walls, pp. 375–378; and Zolbrod, trans. and ed., Ugetsu Monogatari, pp. 61–72.

  37. On intertextuality in The Tale of Genji, see Haruo Shirane, The Bridge of Dreams: A Poetics of The Tale of Genji (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987), esp. pp. 17–23. On honkadori, see Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner, Japanese Court Poetry (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961), pp. 14–15, 286–291.

  38. Most modern readers depend on footnotes, but Akinari’s intended audience would have recognized many of his borrowings without an editor’s assistance.

  39. Reider, Tales of the Supernatural in Early Modern Japan, p. 90.

  40. Robert Ford Campany, Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China, SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 270–271.

  41. Uzuki, Ugetsu monogatari hyōshaku.

  42. Keene, World Within Walls, p. 383.

  43. Keene, World Within Walls, p. 379.

  44. In the subtitle of Hamada, trans., Tales of Moonlight and Rain.

  45. In the subtitle of Zolbrod, trans. and ed., Ugetsu Monogatari; and the title of Reider, Tales of the Supernatural in Early Modern Japan, p. 1.

  46. Reider, Tales of the Supernatural in Early Modern Japan, p. 7.

  47. According to Rania Huntington, “Use of the term ‘supernatural’ in the Chinese context is problematic, because foxes and ghosts were not seen as distinct from the natural world” (Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003], p. 2, n. 3).

  48. Young, Ueda Akinari, pp. 48–50; Fessler, “Nature of the Kami,” passim; Reider, Tales of the Supernatural in Early Modern Japan, pp. 46–52.

  49. Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 63. See also Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973).

  50. Books on Chinese literature that are useful in a study of kaidan include S. Y. Kao, ed., Classical Chinese Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic: Selections from the Third to the Tenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Judith T. Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993); and Campany, Strange Writing. Zeitlin defines “the strange” as “a cultural construct created and constantly renewed through writing and reading; moreover, it is a psychological effect produced through literary or artistic means. In this sense, the concept of the strange differs from our notions of the supernatural, fantastic, or marvelous, all of which are to some extent predicated on the impossibility of a narrated event in the lived world outside the text. This opposition between the possible and the impossible has been the basis of most contemporary Western theories of the fantastic, most notably Tzvetan Todorov’s influential study” (Historian of the Strange, p. 6).

  51. Pat Fister, “Tengu, the Mountain Goblin,” in Stephen Addiss, ed., Japanese Ghosts and Demons: Art of the Supernatural (New York: Braziller, in association with the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1985), p. 105.

  52. For the text of one of these edicts, see Fister, “Tengu,” p. 110.

  53. Ōtsu-e (Ōtsu prints) were hand-colored woodblock prints sold as souvenirs to travelers in Ōtsu, on the edge of Lake Biwa, in Shiga Prefecture.

  54. Juliann Wolfgram, “Oni: The Japanese Demon,” in Addiss, ed., Japanese Ghosts and Demons, p. 94.

  55. Campany, Strange Writing, pp. 237–271.

  56. Campany, Strange Writing, p. 266.

  57. Campany, Strange Writing, p. 250.

  58. Campany’s “human/animal” (Strange Writing, p. 251).

  59. Campany’s “apparent/real” (Strange Writing, pp. 253–254). Since “A Serpent’s Lust” is adapted from a Chinese story, it is not surprising that it fits Campany’s description perfectly: “an apparent woman or man … seduces the opposite-sex protagonist of the tale, then transforms into her or his ‘true form’—so
me species of animal” (Strange Writing, p. 254).

  60. Campany, Strange Writing, pp. 259, 260.

  61. Campany, Strange Writing, p. 265.

  62. Campany, Strange Writing, p. 261.

  63. Campany, Strange Writing, pp. 263–264.

  64. Campany, Strange Writing, p. 264.

  65. Campany, Strange Writing, pp. 321–328.

  66. On Akinari’s travels, see Young, Ueda Akinari, pp. 10, 16, 70–74, 76.

  67. Campany, Strange Writing, p. 9.

  68. One of the social functions of fantastic literature, according to Todorov, is that it allows for the treatment of forbidden themes, among which he lists necrophilia (Fantastic, p. 158). The same could be said for the function of setting a story at a geographical and chronological distance.

  69. Campany, Strange Writing, pp. 224–230.

  70. Campany, Strange Writing, p. 224.

  71. Campany, Strange Writing, p. 225.

  72. Campany, Strange Writing, p. 225.

  73. Campany, Strange Writing, p. 225.

  74. Campany, Strange Writing, pp. 225–226.

  75. Campany, Strange Writing, p. 226.

  76. Campany, Strange Writing, p. 229.

  77. Campany, Strange Writing, p. 229.

  78. Campany, Strange Writing, pp. 229–230.

  79. Virtually all Japanese commentators have pointed out affinities between individual stories and nō. In English-language studies, parallels between nō plays and individual stories are noted in Araki, “Critical Approach to the Ugetsu Monogatari,” pp. 61, 62, 63; J. Thomas Rimer, Modern Japanese Fiction and Its Traditions: An Introduction (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 134–136; Washburn, “Ghostwriters and Literary Haunts,” p. 44; and Shirane, ed., Early Modern Japanese Literature, p. 567.

  80. As Washburn points out, Saigyō is far more assertive than is a typical waki in nō (“Ghostwriters and Literary Haunts,” p. 44).

  81. Rimer draws attention to the jo-ha-kyū pacing in “The Kibitsu Cauldron,” in Modern Japanese Fiction and Its Traditions, p. 135.

  82. The parallels of “The Reed-Choked House” and “A Serpent’s Lust” with nō are mentioned in Shirane, ed., Early Modern Japanese Literature, p. 567.

  83. In Tales of Moonlight and Rain, Hamada also assigned titles of his own invention to the stories, which he arranged in this order (with my versions of the titles): “The Reed-Choked House,” “A Serpent’s Lust,” “Shiramine,” “The Owl of the Three Jewels,” “The Kibitsu Cauldron,” “The Chrysanthemum Vow,” “The Carp of My Dreams,” “The Blue Hood,” and “On Poverty and Wealth.”

  84. The grouping of plays into five categories developed in the eighteenth century, according to Earl Miner, Hiroko Odagiri, and Robert E. Morrell, The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 308.

  85. The comparison has been suggested by Zolbrod in the introduction to his translation of Ugetsu Monogatari, pp. 74–75.

  86. Morita summarizes other Japanese scholars’ approaches to the question of structure in Ueda Akinari bungei no kenkyū, pp. 550–554, after offering his own analysis on pp. 535–550.

  87. The rest of this paragraph summarizes Takada’s analysis (with my supplementary comments in parentheses) in “Kaisetsu” for Ugetsu monogatari, pp. 50–53.

  88. Takata, “Ugetsu Monogatari,” p. xxi. Along the same lines, Araki wrote, “Those in the West who have read the Ugetsu monogatari in translation may have felt that some of the tales are curiously composed, and may have questioned their excellence” (“Critical Approach to the Ugetsu Monogatari,” p. 49); Zolbrod argued that “one can hardly claim that the tales have been available [in English translation] in a suitable form for the general public” (Ugetsu Monogatari, p. 82); and Keene noted that “it probably would not occur to anyone reading ‘Shiramine’ in translation that Akinari was a writer of the first quality, considered by the Japanese to be worthy of a lifetime’s research” (World Within Walls, p. 381).

  89. Zolbrod, trans. and ed., Ugetsu Monogatari, p. 83.

  90. John Dryden, “On Translation,” in Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, eds., Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 26.

  91. According to Friedrich Schleiermacher, “Indeed, the goal of translating in such a way as the author would have written originally in the language of the translation is not only unattainable but is also futile and empty in itself’ (“On the Different Methods of Translating,” trans. Waltraud Bartscht, in Schulte and Biguenet, eds., Theories of Translation, p. 50).

  92. Schleiermacher, “On the Different Methods of Translating,” p. 42.

  93. See, for example, H. Richard Okada, Figures of Resistance: Language, Poetry, and Narrating in The Tale of Genji and Other Mid-Heian Texts (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991).

  94. Vladimir Nabokov, “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English,” in Schulte and Biguenet, eds., Theories of Translation, p. 143.

  95. William H. McCullough and Helen Craig McCullough, trans., A Tale of Flowering Fortunes: Annals of Japanese Aristocratic Life in the Heian Period (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1980), vol. 2, pp. 789–831.

  96. Nakamura Yukihiko, ed., Ueda Akinari shū, Nihon koten bungaku taikei, vol. 56 (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1968).

  PREFACE

  The Preface is written in kambun, or Japanese-style Classical Chinese. This practice was common in premodern Japanese texts, especially during the early modern period, when interest in Chinese literature reached new heights. The style afforded an author the opportunity to show that he was both erudite and au courant. Akinari’s publications before Tales of Moonlight and Rain were, however, written entirely in Japanese. Composing the Preface in kambun might have been a way to signal the greater seriousness of the work that follows.1

  The Preface opens with references to two of the greatest classics of Chinese and Japanese fiction: Shuihu zhuan and Genji monogatari. The first, written in the fourteenth century in colloquial Chinese and attributed to Shi Nai’an and Luo Guanzhong (both fl. before 1400), has been translated by Pearl S. Buck (as All Men Are Brothers), J. H. Jackson (as Water Margin), Sidney Shapiro (as Outlaws of the Marsh), and John Dent-Young and Alex Dent-Young (as The Marshes of Mount Liang). Genji monogatari, written in the early eleventh century in colloquial Japanese by Murasaki Shikibu (976?–1015?), has been translated as The Tale of Genji by Arthur Waley, Edward G. Seidensticker, and Royall Tyler. The unhappy fates of Luo and Murasaki, as recounted by Akinari, are based on old legends. In the Confucian view, which held that literature should be didactic and edifying, the authors’ “wrongful actions” consisted of leading readers astray by writing fiction.

  Akinari therefore adopts a modest tone in the Preface, disparaging his “scribbled” stories as “idle,” “flawed,” “baseless,” and unbelievable, especially in comparison with the masterpieces of his two illustrious predecessors. It is tempting, however, to conclude that Akinari’s modesty is ironic; that he wanted his work to be considered in the same league as Water Margin and The Tale of Genji; that he hints at retribution in the present, in the form of his crippled fingers; and that his offspring may well turn out to be deformed.2 Akinari’s choice of one Chinese and one Japanese precedent is appropriate, since he drew heavily on both Chinese and Japanese sources in writing the stories in Tales of Moonlight and Rain. The Preface serves to signal this borrowing to his readers.

  Akinari lauds the Tokugawa regime, which governed Japan during his lifetime, with a reference to “a time of peace and contentment.” He compliments the regime again at the opening of “The Owl of the Three Jewels,” the fifth story, and at the conclusion of “On Poverty and Wealth,” the last story in the collection. Maybe government censors concentrated on beginnings and endings, as many readers do to this day. The mention of wars in three other stories—“Shiramine,” “The Chrysanthemum Vow,” and “The Reed-Choked House�
��—also served to remind Akinari’s readers that they lived in a peaceful era. Akinari’s praise for his rulers was probably sincere.

  Akinari used the pen name Senshi Kijin in none of his other works. Senshi is written with characters that signify “clipping limbs” or “pruning,” but also suggest “clipped fingers,” an allusion to Akinari’s two fingers deformed by smallpox when he was in his fifth year. Kijin can mean “an eccentric,” but here probably signifies “a cripple.” Thus the possible meanings of the pen name range from “an eccentrie who prunes branches” to (more pertinently) “a cripple with clipped fingers.” The pen name also alludes to Qu You’s Jiandeng xinhua (New Tales After Trimming the Lamp, 1378), since the first character, read sen in Japanese, is also the first character in the title of the Chinese story collection.

  Master Luo compiled Water Margin and sired three generations of deaf-mutes. Lady Murasaki wrote The Tale of Genji and fell for a time into a dreadful realm.3 No doubt it was for their wrongful actions that they suffered so. Look at their writings: each depicts many ingenious scenes and stories; their silences and songs are true to life;4 rising and falling, their language rolls smoothly along; and so their work resonates like fine music in the reader’s heart. Even after a thousand years, the events of those times show clearly in the mirror of the present. I, too, have scribbled down some idle tales for a time of peace and contentment. A pheasant cries, dragons fight:5 I know that these tales are flawed and baseless; no one who skims them will find them believable. How, then, can I expect retribution, whether in the form of harelips or flat noses?6 In the late spring of Meiwa 5, on a night with a misty moon after the rains have cleared, I compose this at my window and give it to the bookseller. The title is “Tales of Moonlight and Rain.” Written by Senshi Kijin.

  NOTES

  1. Morita Kirō, Ueda Akinari bungei no kenkyū (Osaka: Izumi Shoin, 2003), p. 61.

  2. This is the view of Uzuki Hiroshi, Ugetsu monogatari hyōshaku, Nihon koten hyōshaku zenchūshaku sōsho (Tokyo: Kadokawa, 1969), pp. 17–18; and Morita, Ueda Akinari bungei no kenkyū, pp. 60–62.