by Royall Tyler
Copyright © 1987 by Royall Tyler
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in
Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78406-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Japanese Tales.
(Pantheon fairy tale and folklore library)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Tales — Japan. I. Tyler, Royall. II. Series: Pantheon fairy
tale & folklore library.
GR340.J33 1987 398.2’0952 86-17017
v3.1
FOR LIZ
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION
INTRODUCTION
OAK, MELON, GOURD, ANGEL, FLEA
1. The Giant Oak
2. Melon Magic
3. The Sparrows’ Gifts
4. The Maiden from the Sky
5. The Flea
SURPRISES
6. The Little Spider
7. A Flash in the Palace
8. Salt Fish and Doctored Wine
9. The Tapeworm’s Sad End
10. A Toad to Reckon With
HAUNTS
11. Better Late Than Early
12. The Ravenous Storehouse
13. The Grisly Box
14. The Bridge
15. The Rooted Corpse
16. An Old, Old Ghost
MONK JOKES
17. Syrup
18. Not Quite the Right Robe
19. The Nose
20. Two Buckets of Marital Bliss
21. Home in a Chest
BUDDHIST BEGINNINGS
22. The Emperor’s Finger
23. Japan’s First Gold
24. Gyōgi and Baramon
25. The Old Mackerel Peddler
26. Kōbō Daishi
27. The Kannon in the Pine
GODS
28. Very Kind of Him, No Doubt
29. The Dog and His Wife
30. An Old God Renewed
31. Come to My Kasuga Mountain!
32. Princess Glory
TENGU AND DRAGONS
33. The Murmuring of the Sea
34. Japan Means Trouble!
35. The Invincible Pair
36. Rain
37. No Dragon
PURE HEARTS
38. Things As They Are
39. The Portrait
40. What the Beans Were Saying
41. Mercy
42. Among the Flowers
MUSIC AND DANCE
43. For Love of Song
44. Three Angels
45. Give Me Music!
46. The Weight of Tradition
47. The God of Good Fortune
48. Divine Applause
MAGIC
49. Bring Back That Ferry!
50. The Man-Made Friend
51. The Laughing Fit
52. Small-Time Magic
53. The Little Oil Jar
THE SEXES
54. A Hard Moment
55. A Nice Mug of Molten Copper
56. The Little Bottle of Tears
57. Elimination
58. But She Couldn’t Help It!
YIN-YANG WIZARDRY
59. The Genie
60. One Frog Less
61. The Spellbound Pirates
62. The Test
63. Man’s Best Friend
ROBBERS
64 Genjō
65. The Rashō Gate
66. The Selfless Thief
67. Authority
68. The Wrestler’s Sister
69. To Sooth the Savage Breast
HEALING
70. The Buddha with Lots of Hands
71. The Protector Spirit
72. The Flying Storehouse
73. No Respect
74. The Invisible Man
ESCAPES
75. Dyeing Castle
76. Taken In
77. The Sacrifice
78. The Lure
79. Just Like a Bird
FOXES
80. Enough Is Enough!
81. The Loving Fox
82. Touched in the Head
83. Yam Soup
84 The Eviction
ASCETICS
85. Incense Smoke
86. The Blessing
87. Another Flying Jar
88. The Wizard of the Mountains
89. An Awful Fall
90. The Ricepoop Saint
ODDITIES
91. What the Storm Washed In
92. Sea Devils
93. The Dancing Mushroom
94. The Best-Laid Plans …
95. Real Flames at Last!
96. The Painted Horse
GOLDEN PEAK AND THE ŌMINE MOUNTAINS
97. A Model Demon
98. The River of Snakes
99. The Wine Spring
100. Very High in the Mountains
101. The God of Fire and Thunder
102. The Gold of Golden Peak
TURTLES AND A CRAB
103. The Thunder Turtle
104. The Catch
105. The Grateful Turtle
106. Urashima the Fisherman
107. The Grateful Crab
DESIRE
108. Young Lust
109. The Pretty Girl
110. Mesmerized
111. Red Heat
112. Lovesick
PARADISE
113. Gone, Body and Soul
114. Paradise in the Palm of the Hand
115. No Compromise
116. The Failure
117. Letters from Paradise
118. Not Exactly the Land of Bliss
TENGU, BOAR, AND BADGER
119. One Last Shower of Petals
120. Inspiring, Unfortunately
121. No Fool, the Hunter
122. The Hairy Arm
123. Expert Help
HEALING II
124. Rice Cakes
125. A Memorable Empress
126. Quite a Stink
127. The Master
128. A Simple Cure
LOVE AND LOSS
129. A Beloved Wife, a Bow, a White Bird
130. The Unknown Third
131. An Image in a Flame
132. The Forsaken Lady
133. She Died Long Ago
134. I Saw It in a Dream
SNAKES
135. The Snake Charmer
136. The Tug-of-War
137. As Deep As the Sea
138. What the Snake Had in Mind
139. Red Plum Blossoms
ROBBERS II
140. The Enigma
141. Wasps
142. Without Even a Fight
143. The Temple Bell
144. The Dead Man Wakes
145. Cowed
LOTUS TALES
146. The Bloody Sword
147. A Plea from Hell
148. The Voice from the Cave
149. Incorrigible
150. The Pirate’s Story
151. A Little Lesson
BOYS
152. Heroic Patience, Almost
153. The Pot-Headed Demon
154. Riotous Living
155. The Boy Who Laid the Golden Stone
156. Cherry Blossoms
PARADISE II
157. The Thirst for Paradise
158. The Chanting Skull
159. The Nice Little God Sails Away
1
60. The Unearthly Fragrance
161. A Twinge of Regret
YIN-YANG WIZARDRY II
162. Daddy, Who Were Those People?
163. The Curse
164. The Harmless Haunt
165. In the Nick of Time
166. Astride the Corpse
DEMONS
167. Twinleaf
168. No Night to Be Out Courting
169. Lump Off, Lump On
170. Take a Good Look!
PLENTY
171. Cherish-the-Aged Spring
172. The Bottomless Sack
173. The Solid Gold Corpse
174. A Fortune from a Wisp of Straw
175. “Dog’s Head” Silk
ODD PATHS TO SALVATION
176. A Very Surprised Bodhisattva
177. The Awakening
178. The Little God’s Big Chance
179. Pious Antics
180. The Reprieve
WATER
181. The Water Spirit
182. The Master of Streams and Falls
183. The Dragon Cave
184. Gold from the Dragon Palace
185. The Pond God Takes a Wife
CLOSED WORLDS
186. The Isle of Man and Maid
187. The Snake and the Centipede
188. Through the Water Curtain
189. Cannibal Island
HAUNTS II
190. No Nonsense!
191. Quite a Bit of Nonsense
192. One Mouthful
193. Suddenly, Horse Dung
194. The Monk in White Armor
DREAMS
195. Little White Hairs
196. The Man Who Stole a Dream
197. The Buddha-Ox
198. The Falconer’s Dream
199. Poverty
SCARES AND NIGHTMARES
200. The Nightmare
201. The Double
202. Bewitched
203. The Funeral
204. The Grinning Face of an Old Woman
FOXES II
205. Fox Arson
206. The Fox’s Ball
207. Singed Fur
208. Not Really a Tree at All
209. The White Fox: Four Dreams
BEYOND THE RULES
210. The Telltale Fish
211. A Taste for Fish
212. The Promise
213. The Jellyfish’s Bones
214. The Stinking Hut
PARENT AND CHILD
215. Be Good to Your Mother and Father!
216. Hell in Broad Day
217. The Old Woman on the Mountain
218. Mother
219. Perilous Gratitude
220. The Ugly Son
SOURCES AND NOTES
THE WORKS THESE TALES COME FROM
TALES CLASSIFIED BY SOURCES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
About the Author
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
John Dower introduced me to Pantheon and so began the book. Susan Tyler, my wife, read and reread my drafts, continually making suggestions; discussed countless questions of form and content with me, always offering wise and well-informed advice; and kept me going with batches of cookies. Wendy Wolf, my editor, was always quick and helpful. How can I thank them enough?
A NOTE
ON
PRONUNCIATION
Japanese is easy to pronounce. The consonants work when spoken just as they are written in this book. The vowels sound roughly as in Italian. Each syllable in Japanese gets equal stress (quite unlike Italian) and in principle each vowel is a separate syllable. For example, the name Tadaie is pronounced tah-dah-ee-ay.
O’s and U’s with a macron or long mark over them (ō or ū) are supposed to last twice as long as plain ones — the difference between sOft and sOfa. For example, the name Sōō is pronounced, not “Sue,” but more like “SO, O magnificent one, I have a humble suggestion.”
A few names, like Urin’in, have an internal apostrophe which the reader can ignore since it hardly affects pronunciation.
INTRODUCTION
These tales from medieval Japan are by turns curious, touching, disturbing, funny, gross, and sublime. No doubt they will give everyone who reads them a different impression, but I think first of how civilized they are. There have never been better losers than the Palace Guards in no. 8, who laugh wholeheartedly at their own awful discomfiture; and no warrior was ever wiser than the hero of no. 67. Most people in the stories are quick to laugh or cry but slow to kill or seek revenge, and their gods (with a few local exceptions) are kind.
Nearly all the stories come from tale collections put together between about A.D. 1100 and 1350, though the earliest (no. 106) was written down in the early 700s and the most recent (no. 209) in 1578. Most tell about things that happened in the two centuries between 850 and 1050, a classic period in Japanese civilization.
THE WORLD OF THE TALES
Nowadays we associate tales mainly with country people. No doubt villagers told tales in Japan a thousand years ago too, but if the aristocracy had not been equally fond of stories, the ones in this book would never have been written down. People’s ideas about the world then were rather different from ours, and from those of the modern Japanese. It is true, for example, that fox lore still survives in Japan, and that possession by fox spirits is still a factor in a very few people’s lives; but it has been a long time since someone like a regent could encourage such goings-on as those in no. 47. The rumor of a modern prime minister practicing fox magic would be too weird to make sense.
Even time was different then. Day and night were each divided into six “hours” which expanded and contracted as the seasons turned. Since the calendar was lunar, instead of solar like the modern world’s, the “months” followed the moon’s phases. That is why in this book I use the word “moon” instead of “month,” for a “moon” and a solar month are not the same. The New Year came sometime in our February, as it still does in the Chinese calendar today.
There was no fixed reference point in Japanese history comparable to the birth of Christ or the Hegira. Instead, the flow of the years was divided into “year periods,” which might range in length from a year or two to about twenty. Year periods did not correspond to the reign of an emperor or to anything else easy to describe, and they could start or stop at any time. Each had its own name: for example, Shōtai (898–901) and Engi (901–923). No. 171 tells how Yōrō (717–724) got its name. The people in charge of deciding year periods, and of all matters relating to the calendar, were top yin-yang diviners (see below) like the Kamo no Tadayuki of nos. 162 and 165. Of course, all dates in this book have been converted to the modern Western calendar.
People’s names, then as now in Japan, were written with the surname first, but they were a little different in other ways from their modern counterparts. For example, the full name of the regent in no. 47 is Fujiwara no Tadazane. “Fujiwara” is his family or clan name; “no” is a particle like the French de or the German von; and “Tadazane” is his personal name. In other words, Fujiwara no Tadazane means “Tadazane of the Fujiwara [clan].” Similar names are Minamoto no Yorinobu (no. 67) and Tsunezumi no Yasunaga (no. 130). Names like these have about as much meaning as ours do — usually rather little.
The names of Buddhist monks and nuns are distinctive. In these stories a monk has only one name, usually the one he acquired on entering religion. Buddhist names often have some sort of fortunate meaning. In no. 101, for instance, Dōken (“Wise about the Way”) receives in a vision the new name Nichizō (“Sun-store”). Monks’ names sound quite different from laymen’s names, although both are written with Chinese characters, because they are pronounced according to entirely different principles.
THE CAPITAL AND THE PROVINCES
The center of Japan, about the year 1000, was “the Capital”: the city now known as Kyoto. It sprang up in 794 when the emperor moved to the site from Nara (see below), and for centuries was practically the onl
y city in the land. Among its roughly 100,000 inhabitants, those who “really mattered,” both men and women, probably numbered no more than a few thousand, but they gave a sort of glow to all the rest. Thanks to them the Capital, seen from the provinces, was a sort of Parnassus: the home of elegance, wit, romance, learning, the arts — in short, of all civilization. The rest of the population consisted of the lower aristocracy and officialdom, servants of many degrees, craftsmen, petty merchants, guards, priests, Buddhist monks of various kinds, etc. There seems also to have been a twilight zone, not outstandingly large, of assorted ne’er-do-wells and thieves. Government income came from dwindling crown lands; the aristocracy lived off the income from their growing private estates; and religious institutions prospered from pious donations and from their own landholdings. Nothing like a middle class developed until centuries later.
The streets of the Capital were laid out in the same regular grid pattern as the Chinese capital of the time. (Modern Kyoto is still patterned this way, although none of the buildings mentioned in these stories survive.) The major east-west avenues were numbered (First Avenue, Second Ave., etc.), while the north-south ones were named (East Omiya Avenue). Smaller, intermediate streets were also named (Horikawa Street).
The central north-south thoroughfare was Suzaku Avenue. It began at the Suzaku Gate, the central gate in the south wall of the palace compound, and ran down to the Rashō Gate, the central, southern gate into the city itself. The flute-playing demon of no. 167 lived high in the structure of the Suzaku Gate, and the Rashō Gate sheltered the equally musical demon-thief of no. 64.
Naturally the Imperial Palace occupied a commanding position in the city. Located at the north end of Suzaku Avenue, it was actually a complex of buildings inside a large, rectangular walled compound that occupied about three hundred acres. Within the compound were several hundred buildings including the emperor’s personal residence (in a sub-compound of its own), the various halls of government, and many other structures either functional or ceremonial. No. 59, for example, starts with a scene of gentlemen arriving at the palace, apparently for a council to be held near the Great Hall of State. In no. 207, a warrior of the Palace Guard arranges to meet his colleagues by a gate at the northeast corner of the palace compound, while at the next gate south lurks the dastardly toad of no. 10.
Rivers flow on either side of Kyoto, east and west. To the east is the Kamo, which every visitor has seen. Riverside Palace (Kawara-no-in), where Retired Emperor Uda met the ghost (nos. 190, 191), was on the west bank of the Kamo. To the west flows the deeper Katsura River, where two holy men (nos. 116, 161) came to grief.