by Joshua Fogel
The Blue Wolf
WEATHERHEAD BOOKS ON ASIA
WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE,
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
INOUE YASUSHI
THE BLUE WOLF
A NOVEL OF THE LIFE OF CHINGGIS KHAN
TRANSLATED FROM THE JAPANESE BY
Joshua A. Fogel
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY NEW YORK
This publication has been supported by the Richard W. Weatherhead Publication Fund of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.
Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by York University toward the cost of publishing this book.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Translation copyright © 2008 Joshua A. Fogel
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-51791-1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Inoue, Yasushi, 1907–1991.
[Aoki Ōkami. English]
The blue wolf : a novel of the life of Chinggis Khan / Inoue Yasushi;
translated from the Japanese by Joshua A. Fogel.
p. cm.—(Weatherhead books on Asia)
ISBN 978-0-231-14616-6 (cloth : alk. paper)—
ISBN 978-0-231-51791-1 (electronic)
1. Genghis Khan, 1162–1227—Fiction. I. Fogel, Joshua A. II. Title. III. Series.
PL830.N63A86 2008
895.6'35—DC22
2008002981
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].
References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
DESIGN BY VIN DANG
Contents
Translator’s Note
Map
1 Earliest Years
2 The Merkid Massacre
3 Overlordship on the Mongolian Plateau
4 Temüjin Becomes Chinggis Khan
5 Attack on the Jin
6 Fall of the Jin Dynasty
7 The Destruction of Khorazm
8 Return to Mount Burqan
Author’s Afterword (1960)
Dramatis Personae
Translator’s Note
WHAT GREAT FUN IT HAS BEEN translating Inoue Yasushi’s (1907–91) epic novel, Aoki ōkami (The blue wolf)! The Japanese original was published in ten serial installments in the renowned cultural journal Bungei shunjū from October 1959 through July 1960, then published in book form by the journal’s parent publishing company, Bungei shunjū shinsha, in 1960, by Shinchōsha in 1964, and by numerous other presses thereafter. To give an idea of its enormous popularity in Japan, Shinchōsha put the novel through its forty-seventh printing in 1987, and it still appears to be in print and available through online book-ordering services in Japan. Indeed, an Asahi shinbun report for February 28, 2007 indicates something of the extent of the novel’s popularity: during a state visit to Japan by the president of Mongolia, the topic of Aoki ōkami came up in conversation with the Japanese emperor and empress.1
Many of Inoue’s other novels and travelogues have been published in English translation over the past forty years, including The Roof Tile of Tempyō, Confucius: A Novel, Dunhuang, Flood, Journey Beyond Samarkand, The Tea Ceremony, The Izu Dancer and Other Stories, Lou-lan and Other Stories, The Hunting Gun, The Counterfeiter and Other Stories, Wind and Waves, Shirobamba: A Childhood in Japan, and most recently The Samurai Banner of Furin Kazan. One element of his work that has made him popular among ordinary readers as well as specialists in East Asian studies—a rare accomplishment—is the simple fact that, recognizing that he was a novelist and not a scholar of Chinese and Inner Asian (and, of course, Japanese) history and culture, he frequently consulted with leading academic historians about the subject matter of his works in progress. For example, his novel Dunhuang concerns the years in the Tang dynasty (618–907) just prior to that famous cave’s being sealed with many hundreds of manuscripts inside, only to be discovered at the dawn of the twentieth century; Inoue sought advice from Fujiwara Akira (1911–98), a specialist on Dunhuang manuscripts. For Wind and Waves, a novel about the Mongol subjugation of Korea, which was virtually enslaved at the time of the failed conquest missions to Japan, he consulted with Okada Hidehiro (b. 1931), one of postwar Japan’s best known Mongolists. And in writing The Roof Tile of Tempyō, about several Japanese Buddhist acolytes in the early eighth century who make the pilgrimage to China with one of the periodic embassies from Japan to pursue their religious studies, during which several members strive wholeheartedly to convince the great monk Ganjin (C. Jianzhen, 688–763) to return with them to Japan, he sought the advice of Andō Kōsei (1900–70), a specialist in Nara-period Japanese history who wrote a number of books on Ganjin and other aspects of Sino-Japanese religious history in this early era.2 One Japanese Mongolist wrote me that, in his estimation, and perhaps exaggeratedly, Inoue was a genuine “literary giant” (bungō), whereas other, more prolific historical novelists, who appeared frequently in the mass media, were merely “mass market authors” (taishū sakka).3
Does this attention to historical accuracy and authenticity make Inoue’s novels more readable or simply more satisfying? Explanations for his works’ popularity with the Japanese reading public must take into account these concerns as well as his writing style. Inoue has mastered a style that is simultaneously crystal clear—often about events and customs that are anything but familiar to an ordinary reader—and conscientious about historical and cultural detail. This is no mean feat and should not be underestimated—usually an author must dispense with one or the other, often sacrificing history to tell a good story.
Over the course of his career, Inoue won numerous literary prizes in Japan, such as the Akutagawa Prize in 1949, and his name was frequently mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature during the long period between its presentation to Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972) in 1968 and to Ōe Kenzaburō (b. 1935) in 1994, the only two Japanese to win this highly coveted award. Few authors of historical fiction, in which Inoue specialized, have received the Nobel.
As he explains in his own afterword, Inoue was drawn to write about Chinggis Khan precisely because there were areas of his character that historians had not explained or simply could not explain. Enter the historical novelist who need not be tied down by the hard-and-fast pull of facticity or the silence from documentation. Where the historical record dries up, the novelist takes over. Inoue wanted to get at the source of what drove Chinggis psychologically to virtually endless conquest and colossal mass murder. Needless to say, we have no contemporary documents describing the Great Khan’s psyche—indeed, for much of the history retold in this novel, the Mongols were preliterate.
This direction might lead one to write a novel of utterly no use whatsoever. Imagine a comparable novel about Napoleon or Hitler, both mentioned by Inoue in his afterword, that explained their penchant for conquest as based on a single psychological source. Many readers might reject it out of hand; at best, it might attract those drawn to monocausal explanations of great events or people. Inoue does manage to penetrate the character of his fictional Chinggis without either completely demonizing him or idealizing him; there is similarly no effort to explain away any of his obviously monstrous behavioral traits by invoking some form of historical relativism. And where the facts are available, Inoue sticks to them. I give but one example. There is a famous story—recounted every year in East Asian survey courses around th
e world—of Chinggis’s plan, once he completed his conquest of the state of Jin in north China, to depopulate the entire area and turn it into a massive pastureland for the nomadic Mongolian people; he is said to have been dissuaded only by the intervention of his aide, the Khitan nobleman Yelü Chucai (1190–1244), who makes repeated appearances in the novel. This story would have made great copy in Aoki ōkami, but to his credit Inoue makes no mention of it, presumably because it has no basis whatsoever in fact.4
The enduring popularity of Inoue’s psychological take on the driving force behind Chinggis Khan, the conqueror, is attested by the nearly four-and-a-half-hour television drama based on the novel, entitled Aoki ōkami, Chingisu Kan no shōgai (The blue wolf: The career of Chinggis Khan). Appearing initially in four installments on Asahi TV in 1980, it was directed by Morisaki Azuma and Harada Takashi, and it starred Katō Gō in the title role.
On a far grander scale than the small screen, however, is the release on March 31, 2007 of a major motion picture shot entirely on location in Mongolia, putatively to commemorate the 800th anniversary of the founding of the first Mongolian state: Aoki ōkami, chihate umi tsukiru made (The blue wolf: Till the end of land and sea). The story is based both on Inoue’s novel and on a more recent novel by Morimura Seiichi entitled Chihate umi tsukiru made, shōsetsu Chingisu Kan (Till the end of land and sea, a novel of Chinggis Khan).5 The blockbuster was directed by Sawai Shin’ichirō, a veteran screenwriter and director, and runs over two hours.6
As Inoue was periodically aided by experts in various histories, I too was fortunate enough to have recourse to the assistance of specialists. Although there have been Mongolian, French, and three Chinese translations of this novel, I assiduously did not consult them until the copyediting stage of production. The modern Mongolian rendition is beyond my abilities in any case, but I did not want to be unduly influenced by the French or Chinese translators’ take on the events portrayed. In matters concerning Mongolian toponyms, ethnonyms, and other proper nouns, I frequently consulted with Christopher Atwood of Indiana University. Despite considerable attention by highly trained specialists over the years to many of the details of early Mongolian history, rendering these proper nouns is no mean feat. Like all living languages, Mongolian has changed over the eight centuries since Chinggis lived, and chronolectal difficulties only added to the problem. Chris’s advice made it possible for me accurately to romanize the terms I was reading in Japanese syllabary form. If I have done this correctly, it is all to his credit; where I have failed, it is because I misunderstood or mistranscribed one of his renderings. For the Central Asian terms that appear in the latter chapters, I have relied (at Chris’s advice) on John Andrew Boyle’s (1916–78) translation of the Persian historian Ata-Malik Juvaini’s (1226–83) Genghis Khan: The History of the World-Conqueror.7 My only addition to Inoue’s original text are the (rather simple) names of the chapters; in the original they were merely numbers.
I do not know if Japanese read more historical fiction than Anglophones, but I do know that the percentage of historical novels translated from Japanese into English (vis-à-vis all novels rendered from Japanese into English) is much lower than their comparative numbers in the original language. For example, only two historical novels by Chin Shunshin (b. 1925) and only three or four by the most prolific of all, Shiba Ryōtarō, have appeared in English-language editions. Like films with historical themes and personages, historical novels can be used in teaching with great efficacy, but only if they are approached critically. They help us to imagine the inner workings of historical actors in a way that less accessible academic works cannot. But they are novels, not chronicles. One should no more confuse the Napoleon and the Mikhail Kutuzov (1745–1813) of Tolstoy’s War and Peace with the real men than the men and women surrounding John F. Kennedy (1917–63) with the characters in Oliver Stone’s (b. 1946) film JFK.
Enjoy, enjoy.
Joshua A. Fogel
NOTES
1. See www.asahi.com/national/update/0228/TKY200702280361.html. Thanks to one of the anonymous readers for Columbia University Press who brought this to my attention.
2. Tonkō (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1981), English translation by Jean Oda Moy, Tun-huang: A Novel (Tokyo, New York: Kodansha International, 1978); there are also German, French, and Chinese (three times) translations. Fūtō (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1963), English translation by James T. Araki, Wind and Waves: A Novel (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1989); also French and Chinese translations. Tenpyō no iraka (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1957); English translation by James T. Araki, The Roof Tile of Tempyō(Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1975); also French, German, and Chinese (three times) translations.
3. Personal e-mail communication from Nakami Tatsuo, August 24, 2002.
4. See two fine books by Sugiyama Masaaki: Yaritsu Sozai to sono jidai (Yelü Chucai and his age) (Tokyo: Hakuteisha, 1996) and Dai Mongoru no sekai, riku to umi no kyodai teikoku (The world of Mongolia, an immense empire of land and sea) (Tokyo: Kadogawa shoten, 1992).
5. (Tokyo: Kadogawa Haruki jimusho, 2000), two volumes.
6. As of this writing, the film has not come to North America, and I have not seen it. From an assortment of Web sites, including one launched solely for the film itself (www.aoki-ookami.com), the following roles will be played by the following actors: Temüjin (Ikematsu Sōsuke); Chinggis Khan (Sorimachi Takashi); Yisügei (Hosaka Naoki); Ö’elün (Wakamura Mayumi); Qasar (Hakamada Yoshihiko), Jamugha (Hirayama Yusuke); To’oril Khan (Matsukata Hiroki); Börte (Kikukawa Rei); and Qulan (Ara, a young Korean actress in her first major role).
7. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1958).
1
Earliest Years
THE YEAR WAS 1162. A baby boy was born in the chieftain’s yurt in a settlement of the nomadic Mongols who lived in the grassy plains and forests by the Amur River, which, along its upper reaches, splits into the two tributaries of the Onon and Kherlen rivers. The mother was a beautiful young woman still several years shy of twenty by the name of Ö’elün. As was often the case, at this very time the men of the settlement had all left to launch an attack against the Tatars of a neighboring area, a tribe with whom they had long been fighting. Thus, the only people then residing in the several hundred Mongol yurts were old people and children.
Ö’elün dispatched an old servant to report the birth of her son to the camp of Yisügei, her husband, who was several miles away from the lineage at the time. After the messenger had departed, Ö’elün put her ear to the face of her newborn. The infant had rolled over in his raggedy swaddling. The fingers of his left hand were wrapped around hers so tightly that the women who had just delivered him could not unpeel them. With the instinctive tenacity of a mother attempting to ascertain for herself that the four limbs of the child to whom she has just given birth were all in good working order, Ö’elün tried her best to remove his left hand clasping her tightly. This required considerable attention, without the least violence. When she managed to separate her hand from the child’s, Ö’elün heard the roaring wind rush by above the yurt. Like a solid object but with the volume of a rushing, mighty river, the wind was blowing east to west, and it seemed to shake the earth’s very axis. When it ceased blowing, Ö’elün remembered the height of the pitch-black night sky above the yurt in which she was lying on her back. Countless stars studded the sky, each glistening before her eyes with its own icy light. When the next wind swept over her, though, it was like a black cloth embroidered with the stars came howling, and the stars scattered in all directions, ultimately leaving only the roar of the wind enveloping heaven and earth. While the wind was blowing or the starry sky hung over the roof, Ö’elün invariably was taken with the feeling of her own utter insignificance, lying there alone in her humble yurt.
This very sense of insignificance and powerlessness amid the vastness of nature was surely to be found somewhere in the heart of each of these nomads who, possessing neither fixed houses nor designated plots of lan
d, moved in search of grasslands and owned no soil on which to live sedentary lives. Wherever they went and whatever else they might have been thinking about, in the end this inevitable feeling was like a spell cast over them. For Ö’elün that evening, there was still another, even stronger reason for her feeling of forlorn loneliness. Ö’elün could see an even higher sky through the roof of the yurt that night, and the force of the night wind causing the yurt to sway felt that much wilder.
Having just become a mother, Ö’elün was now troubled by two things. First, would the baby to whom she had just given birth possess the full physique sufficient to satisfy her husband? Second, would the infant have as acute powers of sight and smell as his father to fully satisfy Yisügei?
Ö’elün was able to rid her mind of one of these two concerns. The baby, apparently of his own volition, opened the little fingers of his hand that he had until then entrusted to her palm. He firmly grasped a blood clot the shape of a deer’s anklebone, as if he were holding some sort of military decoration.
Beyond this, Ö’elün had no other worries. From the features of her newborn, one could derive no proof or confirmation that he was the son of Yisügei. In some ways he resembled Yisügei, and in others he did not. By the same token, he certainly did not look like another man, which would have been cause for Yisügei’s distress. In a word, the boy looked like no one at all in particular. That is, except for one person—he did resemble the mother from whose womb he had just emerged.
Ö’elün had no idea whatsoever what Yisügei’s feelings would be when he learned of the birth. Throughout his wife’s pregnancy, Yisügei had remained taciturn and expressionless, as brave men of his lineage always were. Joyous or angry, he would not allow his inner feelings to be visible to anyone other than himself. Ö’elün would be able to learn her husband’s first words when news of the birth reached him. It would not have been altogether out of the ordinary were he to utter, “Kill him!”