Hideyoshi and Rikyū

by Nogami Yaeko

  The old man seemed friendly and talkative. But as they talked, he sometimes said “Eh? Eh?” as if Kisaburō had said something, and moved his ears and pole toward Kisaburō. He must have been hard of hearing, Kisaburō thought.

  “Then you’re going home tonight, right?” Smiling, Kisaburō repeated the line, a little more loudly.

  “Yes. I may look old, but my legs are strong.”

  “Well, then, where is it?”

  “Murasakino.”

  “Mu-ra-sa-ki-no.” For a moment, Kisaburō’s vocal cords were more useless than the old man’s eardrums. He moved his face closer to the old man’s ears and the white hair sticking out from behind the hood. “Are you close to Daitokuji Temple?” he asked finally.

  “Yes, yes. The temple is right there. Where are you heading?”

  No home to return to, and nowhere to go. Nothing. “I don’t have any plans.”

  “Eh? Eh?”

  “Why don’t I follow you?”

  In the soft, dim early spring evening, they walked side by side along the Horikawa River. The old tea seller’s pole, balanced on his shoulders, creaked slightly. There was nobody else on the street.

  They could see the back of the many-storied Jurakudai rising up in the dusk through the gaps in the trees along the river. The crescent moon was hanging just above the castle. On top of the three-storied building, a bow-shaped golden fish that resembled a dolphin shone clearly in the sea-colored sky as if it had suddenly leaped out of the tip of the roof.

  But there was only one thing reflected in Kisaburō’s eyes now. Kisaburō had always felt distant from Kokei because the monk was so close to his father. At that moment, Kokei’s sharp warrior’s face was smeared on Kisaburō’s consciousness, as close as the brown stain on Kokei’s left cheek.

  The Life of Nogami Yaeko (1885–1985)

  Nogami Yaeko was born May 6, 1885, in Usuki, Ōita Prefecture, as the eldest daughter of a prosperous brewer. Her family was one of the richest in the region and one of the most prominent supporters of the Liberal Party. As an elementary school student she became the only child member of the literary circle of Kubo Chihiro, a Japanese classical scholar, who gave her private classes on Chinese and Japanese literature and encouraged her to compose tanka poetry.

  At the age of fourteen, Nogami started taking private English lessons. The following year she went to Tōkyō in order to study at Meiji-Jyogakkō, a Christian-oriented girls’ school that emphasized coursework in English and English literature as well as promoting women’s rights and status. Although at that time Japan was starting to Westernize, it was still quite rare for women to receive the type of education that Nogami did.

  While a student in Tōkyō, she met Nogami Toyoichirō (1883–1950), who became her English tutor; they married in 1906. Toyoichirō was a professor of English literature—he was a disciple of the prominent novelist Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916)—and was very influential in the study of Noh drama. He later became president of Hōsei University. With her husband’s connection to Sōseki, Nogami had opportunities to show the novelist her writing. She started to pursue a career as a writer under Sōseki’s guidance.

  Nogami made her intellectual growth a priority, and she received strong support from Toyoichirō. With financial help from Nogami’s parents, he hired two maids to assist her in raising their three sons and taking care of the household. Their sons all went on to become scholars themselves, as did some of their children. In particular, Nogami’s granddaughter Hasegawa Michiko became a scholar of philosophy, receiving the Watsuji Tetsurō literary prize in 1996.

  Sōseki also encouraged Nogami to read European literature so that she could become more familiar with Western culture. This fascination with Western literature showed clearly at the beginning of Nogami’s publishing career, when she translated a number of foreign works, especially children’s literature, into Japanese. A bibliography of her complete published works includes six translated volumes out of twenty-five total. She felt particularly connected to Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya, a major Russian mathematician, and translated her autobiography. That translation was published serially in the feminist magazine Seitō (Bluestockings) in the 1910s.

  One of her favorite books was Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice, on which her novel Machiko (1931) is based. Machiko deals with Marxism in the early Shōwa era (1926–1989), and in it, Nogami describes a young woman—the titular character—who grows up in a bourgeois family but becomes disgusted with their lifestyle and runs off to marry a peasant activist.

  The most successful of her early works was her 1922 novel Kaijinmaru (Neptune, tr. 1957). Based on an incident involving the four-man crew of a fishing boat, the book focuses on the psychological dilemma of whether or not to resort to cannibalism as the men teeter on the verge of starvation. Kaijinmaru was inspired by Dante’s The Divine Comedy, in which Ugolino Della Gherardesca, in jail and starving, eats his own children.

  Nogami received the Yomiuri Literary Prize in 1957 for Meiro (The Labyrinth, tr. 2014), a six-volume novel about the Second Sino-Japanese War that she began writing in 1936 and completed in 1956. The novel follows the course of the war from February 26, 1936, to just before Japan’s defeat. The theme of the novel is political conversion, and in it she depicts how people who enjoyed their wealth and social status survived in this time of fascism.

  Hideyoshi and Rikyū was completed in 1963, when Nogami was seventy-eight years old. It is regarded as one of her monumental novels; in 1966 it earned her the Jyoryū Bungakushō (Women’s Literature Prize), and in 1989 it was adapted into the film Rikyū by director Hiroshi Teshigahara. Nogami had access to a broad network of scholars through Toyoichirō, one of whom was Karaki Junzō (1904–1980). Nogami was intrigued by Karaki’s insightful 1963 study of Rikyū and decided to write on the topic herself. She devoted herself to a full year of research on the history of the era, encouraged by Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960), a philosopher and cultural historian, and Tanikawa Tetsuzō (1895–1989), a philosopher and author of Aesthetics of Tea Ceremony (1945).

  In her book A Critical Biography of Nogami Yaeko: From Labyrinth Through Forest, Iwahashi Kunie quoted Nogami on the inspiration for Hideyoshi and Rikyū: “That novel was created from the image of a politician, Nero, and his favorite retainer and artist, Petronius, in Quo Vadis [written by Henryk Sienkeiwicz in 1895]. The confrontation of the two was juxtaposed with Hideyoshi and Rikyū. I think it is natural that many literary critics think that the theme of the novel is that the artist won a victory over authority. But the story I wanted to tell was how Rikyū conquered himself by dying [rather than apologize to Hideyoshi]. Rikyū has a dual nature, and I wanted to convey that Rikyū held to his own artistry without compromising.” (Iwahashi 2011, 151; translated by Mariko LaFleur)

  The death of the historical Sen no Rikyū (1522–1591) is still hidden in a veil of mystery. Why did Hideyoshi, who favored Rikyū as his highest-ranked tea master and trusted confidant, end up ordering him to commit suicide, even going so far as to “execute” his wooden statue? In Japan, historians have put forth a number of theories: sharply divided aesthetics—Rikyū’s simple wabi taste vs. Hideyoshi’s flamboyant taste; Rikyū’s refusal to allow one of his daughters to serve Hideyoshi; Rikyū making an excessive profit by selling and buying tea utensils on Hideyoshi’s behalf; a political plot involving Hideyoshi’s retainers; loss of political support following the death of Hideyoshi’s brother, Hidenaga. Many of these theories appear as themes throughout Hideyoshi and Rikyū. But perhaps the most popular theory among historians is also given emphasis in this novel: that the tension between Rikyū and Hideyoshi came to a head with an incident in which the above-mentioned wooden statue of Rikyū was placed in an upper level of the main gate into Daitokuji Temple in Kyōto—thus requiring Hideyoshi to symbolically pass beneath Rikyū’s feet in order to enter.

  Nogami was also inspired by Karaki Junzō’s idea that Rikyū served as Hideyoshi’s political negotiator, with Rikyū’s status a
s tea master giving him a social connection to high-ranking lords who were also tea ceremony practitioners. Karaki also hypothesized that Rikyū must have criticized some policy of Hideyoshi’s, leading the infamously temperamental military ruler to order Rikyū to commit suicide. To assist this aspect of the plot, Nogami introduces a fictional brother-in-law of Rikyū’s, Yahei, as the direct mechanism of this dynamic: when Rikyū lets slip a criticism of Hideyoshi’s plan to attack China during a casual conversation with Yahei, Yahei unknowingly repeats and spreads the words that will doom Rikyū. Literary critic Hirano Ken suggests that Nogami’s experiences during World War II must have given her insight into how easily a thoughtless word can lead to disaster. Under the Tōjō regime that was in power during the war, anyone who criticized military politics or the war was sent to prison and tortured. Hirano praises Nogami’s innovation in successfully transferring her personal experience to a historical novel.

  Nogami introduces a second fictional character, Kisaburō, the youngest son of Rikyū. Kisaburō takes the role of the prodigal son who, for most of the novel, is deeply critical of his father. During a 1961 interview on an NHK news program, Nogami talked about her vision for Kisaburō. Quoting George Bernard Shaw, she stated that when a child becomes critical of his or her parents, it shows that the child has matured. As the child gets older, his or her expectations for the parents increase, and the higher the expectations, the more severe the criticism.

  Iwahashi quotes an entry from Nogami’s diary written during the time she was writing Hideyoshi and Rikyū: “Almost none of the Japanese writers over seventy can write an authentic work of art. I wish to be an exceptional writer” (Iwasaki 2011, 156). And exceptional she was: she received seven literary awards throughout her lifetime, including the Asahi Prize when she was ninety-six years old.

  Throughout her life she continued to study foreign languages: English, German, French, and Spanish. She wrote in her diary almost every day, and by the end of her life it stretched to two hundred and nineteen volumes. In one defining entry, she wrote, “Today I want to live better than yesterday, and tomorrow I want to live better than today. I will strive to live better and grow until the moment of my death.”

  Her last published full-length novel, Forest, was an autobiographical work set in her alma mater Meiji-Jyogakkō. The main plot of the novel was based on an incident in which the school principal, who was highly respected as a man of religion and a philosopher, was involved in a sex scandal. Eventually the school was forced to close. This incident made her think about the bilateral quality of human nature.

  She died while writing the last chapter of the book, on March 30, 1985, at the age of ninety-nine years and eleven months.

  About the Translators

  Mariko Nishi LaFleur is a Japanese native who has been teaching tea ceremony in Japan and the United States for more than thirty-five years. She has a degree in anthropology from Bryn Mawr College. Her articles and translations have been published in the Japanese Society for the Study of Chanoyu journal and the Chanoyu Quarterly and she has participated in educational films on tea ceremony for the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Aiya Tea Company in Japan. She was trained at the Urasenke tea school headquarters in Kyōto, where she later taught for many years. She has also taught classes in tea ceremony, Japanese culture, and Japanese language at the University of Pennsylvania and other institutions.

  Morgan Beard has been a professional writer and editor for more than twenty years. She has a degree in religion and communication from La Salle University and an advanced teaching certification (jun-kyoju) from the Urasenke tea school. She has been active in teaching and promoting tea culture throughout the Philadelphia area for more than twenty years and currently serves as the chief of administration for the Philadelphia chapter of the Urasenke Tankokai Association.