The Tales of Ise (Penguin Classics)

by Donald Keene

  Conclusion

  The Tales presents a world that is fresh, charming, unadorned and magical – quite different from the more sophisticated world of the later Tale of Genji. It brings to life Heian court romance and gives a unique insight into it. This is a world where both the deepest and the most humorous aspects of love are expressed through poetry and where pursuing the way of love means being wholly committed to poetic expression. Such a commitment bestows upon the Tales both dignity and elegance, while the wry outsider’s perspective imbues this elegance with poignancy and depth.

  Narihira’s marginalization – so important in the work – paves the way for his abandonment of existing social mores and transformation into a man of exquisite aesthetic sensibility, capable of deep sympathy and kindness, and this transformation in turn contributes to his becoming a master of poetic expression. The prototype of this kind of hero formed the basis of Heian-period literature and the aesthetic of mono no aware (the pathos of things) that would become so central to The Tale of Genji. The figure of the outsider, meanwhile, would become a central trope of Japanese literature and culture, and it is no exaggeration to claim that its first appearance in the Tales was an epoch-making event in Japanese literary history.

  The Tales has long been thought of as an incomplete work, full of enigma and riddles. Since its inception, it has provoked endless discussion, which continues to this day. It poses several challenges to readers, not least because it represents the work of several hands and was composed over a long period. Stylistically, the Tales presents a unique mode of storytelling. On first reading, it appears disjointed and fragmentary, and its subtleties are often difficult to understand. Repeated readings, however, make clear that the work has its own inner logic and consistency in theme, style and subject matter.

  Though not necessarily composed as a textbook on affairs of the heart, the acute observations in the manifold love scenes in the Tales naturally led in the following centuries to its being considered an important guide to the ways of love, and indeed its lessons are just as relevant today as when it was first composed. The Tales presents us with a new way of looking at life and love – an alternative and richer way of living that embraces and transforms our sadness and frailty as human beings. This alone would be enough to guarantee its place as a classic of world literature. But the Tales is also extraordinary for its rich use of irony and humour. It shows us a bygone world of the Japanese aristocracy while revealing itself as a work at the forefront of literary and linguistic innovation.

  In conclusion, there are many ways to enjoy and appreciate the Tales. It is a work of the first importance in world literature, one that is both radical and subversive in style and content and yet, simultaneously, a work of great balance and beauty. It is a seminal work of Japanese literature and culture, as well as being an enduring guidebook on poetic expression related to love. And, above all, it is a timeless encapsulation of the exquisite poetry and aesthetics of the nobility of the early Heian period.

  NOTES

  1. Surnames are generally given first in classical Japanese; thus ‘Ariwara’ is the family name and ‘Narihira’ the given name.

  2. The complicated relationship of the Man’yōshū and the Kokinshū to the Tales is discussed throughout the commentary (pp. 173–300). The influence of Chinese literature and culture is also discussed in the commentary (Episodes 1, 5, 6, 73, 80, 83, 91 and 102, among others), as is the influence of Buddhism (Episodes 39 and 50).

  3. Eileen Kato, ‘Load Allmarshy! Yes we have nō transformations! So lend your earwicker to a zing-zang meanderthalltale!’, in Currents in Japanese Culture: Translations and Transformations, ed. Amy Vladeck Heinrich (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 1–17.

  4. See the commentary on Episode 9.

  5. Examples include the poem in Episode 114, which was actually by Yukihara. Here we have to distinguish between the historical and fictional Narihira – the real individual who did not compose these poems and the fictional one who did.

  6. The crossover core episodes are numbers 2, 4, 5, 9, 17, 19, 41, 47, 48, 51, 69, 76, 80, 82, 83, 84, 87, 88, 103, 107, 123, 125 (underlined episodes show a particularly strong lexical and structural resemblance to the corresponding sections of the Kokinshū).

  7. One of the most outstanding poets of the Heian period, Ono no Komachi is the only woman among Tsurayuki’s Six Poetic Geniuses (rokkasen) – six poets to be reviewed in the preface to the Kokinshū. Probably a lady-in-waiting during the reigns of Ninmyo and Montoku (see Appendix 2, here), she is said to have been a great beauty who treated her lovers cruelly, but this is almost certainly a later legend. Only her twenty-one poems in the Kokinshū and Gosenshū are considered authentic, but a great many more have been attributed to her in later sources.

  8. Unfortunately, none of these versions seem to have survived. Their place in the overall evolution and expansion of the Tales is unknown, but current scholarship sees them as having been variant texts, rather than being closely connected to the original version of the Tales.

  9. Kokushi taikei, vol. 4: Nihon sandai jitsuroku (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Koubunkan, 1966), entry for the twenty-eighth of the fifth month of 880.

  10. Junzo Karaki, Muyōsha no keifu (A Genealogy of the Protagonist of No Use) (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1959).

  11. The words that are used most frequently to refer to love in Heian-period court literature are koi (longing) and omo(h)i (longing, love), both of which describe longing or desire for an absent or distant loved one, but love-induced melancholia is only one of the many facets of love that are explored and celebrated in the Tales.

  12. Episodes 25, 28, 37 and 42 all depict such volatile, cold-hearted ladies.

  13. See nos. 399, 969 and 978–9.

  14. There is also a connection with the okina character that appears in later Noh plays and folk performing arts as a manifestation of a deity, offering words of congratulation.

  15. There are various examples of this recasting of poems in different contexts. A poem almost identical to the one in Episode 21 that begins with the lines ‘I will disappear / from your life’ is repeated in virtually the same terms in Variant Episodes 5 and 10 (not included here), but within different settings. In Episode 21, it is employed at the end of a sequence of love poems by a woman who, as we learn subsequently, was having secret affairs even while making such protests. In Variant Episode 5, it is employed by the woman to bemoan the tortures of a secret love. In Variant Episode 10, the poem is employed as a variant version of the poem in Episode 9, where the hero sends the poems back to his beloved in the capital. See also Episode 19.

  16. There are numerous poems about the moon (Episodes 4, 11, 69, 73 and 82), snow (9, 17, 67, 83 and 85) and spring (80, 82, 90 and 97).

  Note on the Translation and Text

  The Tales is an extremely difficult work to translate. Contemporary translations and critical editions produced by the leading Japanese publishing houses, such as Shōgakukan and Iwanami, contain a surprising variety of conflicting interpretations of both the prose and the poetry. The poems in particular have multiple and sometimes completely antithetical readings and a long history of diverse interpretation. Textual and semantic ambiguities and variants among received manuscripts often make it impossible to establish with any certainty a correct reading, and among contemporary Japanese scholars there remains a great diversity of opinion. Thus for a significant portion of the original, definitive interpretations are difficult.

  Some examples illustrate typical complications of the prose. Episode 35 contains the word awao, which is thought to mean a knot that easily comes undone. However, based on the words that follow it in the Japanese, it may also be understood in the opposite way, as a knot that is difficult to loosen. In Episode 34, the expression omonashi can be read either as ‘brazen’ or as ‘swallowing his pride’. If the first reading is accepted, the translation would read: ‘He seems to have bared his heart without any sense of shame.’ If the second, then it would be: ‘He seems to
have swallowed his pride and bared his heart.’ No consensus has been reached on the meaning of these and other words and phrases, so the translator must ultimately make a choice. The poems are often no less ambiguous. My commentary on the fifth poem in Episode 21, for instance, gives a detailed analysis of widely divergent interpretations by several leading Japanese scholars.

  The main goal of the translation was to make the Tales as accessible as possible to the contemporary English-language reader. When confronted with multiple interpretations of the same poem and prose section, I have usually chosen the one most widely accepted by contemporary scholars, though sometimes I have selected an interpretation that may have less support among modern scholars but which makes for a more compelling narrative. I have noted the alternative readings in the commentary, however, and indicated when the translation differs from the most widely accepted interpretations.

  Allowing for such ambiguities of interpretation, I have made every effort to keep the translation as faithful to the original as possible, to help the reader savour as far as possible the true flavour of the magical world of the Tales. The translation was checked by several experts along the way, and one of the foremost of these, Tokuro Yamamoto, was always available for consultation on difficult passages. When the text appears vague, as the original sometimes is, the reader can refer to the commentary for supplementary information.

  As noted elsewhere, the Tales has spawned a rich interpretative tradition. In translating the work, I have worked on the principle that traditional interpretations of the Tales should take a secondary role to those of contemporary scholars. The reason for this is that, while traditional interpretations are of historical interest, they are often fanciful and not based on sound philological or scholarly research.

  The most challenging aspect of translating the Tales is certainly the poetry itself. With some exceptions, the poems are less semantically compressed or rhetorically complex than those of Japanese poetry composed in later times, such as the ‘modern’ poetry anthologized in the Shinkokinshū (New Collection of Ancient and Modern Poems; c.1205). Their very lack of rhetorical sophistication contributes to the unrivalled charm and beauty of many of them, although some are perfunctory or occasional compositions of little distinction. Despite their relative simplicity, however, the poems are often oblique and depend on context for their meaning. To give an example, the first poem in Episode 20 seems to say only: ‘Though it is spring, this bough of maple leaves I’ve picked for you glows with the red of autumn.’ What it actually conveys are the poet’s feelings for his beloved which are as passionate as the leaves he sends her are red:

  I send you this to show

  that though it may still be spring,

  the leaves have taken on

  an autumn red

  deep as my love for you.

  (Kimi ga tame / taoreru eda wa / haru nagara / kaku koso aki no / momiji shinikere)

  In the translation, the final line was added to make the meaning clearer and to convey what readers of the time would immediately have understood.

  Much tends to be made of the ambiguity of classical Japanese, but such ambiguity is unlikely to have been experienced by a Japanese reader of the time. Most of what the modern reader finds ambiguous is due to a lack of knowledge of the social mores and historical background of the period, or to ignorance of some aspect of grammar or vocabulary. The contemporary reader would presumably have understood most of the nuances, including the most complex rhetorical structures. For example, when the author of what is arguably the most complex poem in the Tales, the acrostic poem in Episode 9, uses the words ‘hem’, ‘fulling’ and ‘wear’ as associative words (engo – see here) for ‘robes’, a reader of the time would have been expected to understand these and applaud the wit and sophistication of the poet. Few of the words in the Japanese would have been obscure for the original readers and I have endeavoured, in this translation, to make them as comprehensible to the modern reader as they would have been to readers of the time.

  Japanese poetry avoids rhyme and depends more on rhythm (onritsu) than on metre, which is quantitative, not accentual. English free verse is thus a very natural choice when translating Japanese classical poetry. Some believe that classical poetry as well as contemporary tanka, which uses the same form as classical waka (see here), should be translated following the syllable count of waka and tanka, in a five-line sequence of 5-7-5-7-7. According to this view, all translations of poems should have the same number of syllables (thirty-one), but this makes for an unnatural and meaningless constriction in English, and I have not done this. However, in order to give a sense of the form of the original, I have used five lines for the poems, with a few exceptions, one being the acrostic poem based on I-R-I-S in Episode 9. Because the word ‘iris’ has only four letters, the acrostic poem could only be four lines.

  Where possible I have incorporated the wordplay and punning of the original, which are all outlined in the commentary. For example, the poem in Episode 98 has the letters for ‘pheasant’ hidden in the poem, as in the original. These are in boldface in the translation, so that the reader can see the kind of wordplay that was so important in the Tales. The poem in Episode 116 has a lovely rhythm in the original, and I have tried to recreate this with repetition in the English version.

  Should imagery in Japanese traditional poetry be translated as similes or metaphors? Translations into modern Japanese in the contemporary commentaries tend to interpret the images as similes using the words yō or no gotoku (‘like’ or ‘as’). In the original, however, this information was often only implied, because the number of syllables was predetermined and it was not always possible to include all grammatical information. Although the words for ‘like’ and ‘as’ are not explicit in the poem, it does not mean that they are not part of the meaning. Nor does it mean that the image should instead be interpreted as a metaphor. It is often preferable to translate such images as similes rather than metaphors, because similes are not as forceful as metaphors and are in keeping with the love of indirection that informs Japanese poetry. In some cases, however, a metaphor is preferable. The criterion I used in choosing between them was which would read best as a poem in English.

  One of the most difficult phrases to translate in the Tales is mukashi otoko arikeri (literally, ‘long ago, there was a man’). Donald Keene once joked to me that he gave up translating the Tales when he realized how difficult it would be to translate this apparently simple phrase, which opens many of the episodes. The words in Japanese conjure up an entire world of both poetry and romance, and for many in Japan it is synonymous with both the Tales and Narihira, the hero. If we read each individual episode in English as depicting ‘a’ man, it means that each episode is about a different man. However, for centuries, Japanese readers have read most of the episodes as being about Narihira (see here), unless another character is mentioned. Because of the ambiguity, the phrase has been translated variously as ‘Back then, this man’, which seems much too colloquial, and as ‘Once there was a man’, which gives the impression that each episode may concern an entirely different man. I have usually translated the phrase as ‘Long ago, the man’ so that most readers will identify him as the same person throughout. Occasionally, ‘a man’ appears, but the reader should generally read all the episodes as being about Narihira unless someone else, such as his brother, Yukihira (see here), is specifically mentioned. We can see the difference between the two in the following translations of the opening of Episode 102:

  Long ago, there lived a man who was not much of a poet but understood well the subtleties of the human heart.

  Long ago, the man, though not much of a poet, understood well the subtleties of the human heart.

  In the first, we might assume that this episode is about someone other than Narihira, because every reader knows that he was an excellent poet. In the second, we know that it is our hero because he is identified as ‘the man’, and we can also recognize the profound irony of the narrator’s
comment when he states that Narihira was not much of a poet – every reader would immediately recognize that the reverse was true.

  None the less, when the expression ‘long ago’ is used, the vagueness of ‘a man’ in the first sentence seems more natural, and combining the vague ‘long ago’ with the definite ‘the man’ is jarring. In such cases, I have made an exception to my general policy and used ‘a man’, as in the opening of Episodes 84 and 102. But readers should still take these as referring to the same man, Narihira, unless otherwise noted.

  For the word irogonomi (see here) I have given differing translations depending on the gender of the protagonist. For women I have translated it as ‘fickle’, as in those who quickly tire of their lovers. For men I have used the somewhat rare word ‘gallant’ in both the positive and negative sense of the meaning. The positive sense is of one who pays court to ladies, a ladies’ man. The negative meaning has the sense of a playboy or paramour. The Tales has examples of both uses: Narihira is a ladies’ man; Itaru (Episode 39) is a playboy.

  Following the example of modern Japanese editions, I have added titles to the episodes although there are none in the original. In addition, some passages in the Tales employ polite language (keigo), and I have used a more formal English in those cases, as can be seen in Episode 76 (indicated here in italics):

  Long ago, the Empress of the Second Avenue, then still known as the consort mother of the crown prince, departed on a pilgrimage to the august shrine of her ancestral deities. As she was bestowing gifts upon those present, an elderly man in service in the Imperial Guard humbly received his gift directly from her carriage.