The Novel

by Steven Moore

  The first-person mode—still rare in Japanese fiction at this time—forced Saikaku to exercise his ingenuity. Instead of a traditional, third-person description of his heroine, he has the agent for the impotent man looking for a concubine display a painting of the type of woman he’s after, which doubles as a flattering portrait of our heroine. And hewing to a woman’s point of view gives greater force to Saikaku’s exposure of the seamy underside of the floating world and of the lives of Japanese women in general. The most striking scene in the novel may be one near the middle (3.2) while the protagonist is a parlor maid to an aristocrat. One night all of the women of the household (including the aristocrat’s wife) gather for a “Jealousy Meeting,” where they vent their frustration with considerable verbal and physical violence. They take turns hurling abuse at a scapegoat: a life-size doll representing every beautiful woman the men in their lives have preferred over them. It’s a bitter, terrifying scene—reminiscent of the spirit-possessions in medieval Japanese novels—and takes a turn for the supernatural when the doll opens her eyes and lunges to take revenge for all the verbal abuse, which freaks everyone out. Aside from this touch of the occult, The Life of an Amorous Woman is a realistic survey of the various options open to a middle-class woman in 17th-century Japan, none of them very appealing. Even though the narrator admits that her nymphomania and unprofessionalism caused most of her problems, she also implies that even if she had stuck to the straight and narrow, she probably would have wound up in a boring marriage screaming in frustration at a doll. As with Yonosuke, it’s unclear how we should take her final reaffirmation of the sensuous life: as a recognition of the superiority of the “one religion” of sex over the eight sects of Buddhism, or as a sign of unrepentant folly. Like Moll Flanders at the end of her long confession, she doesn’t seem all that contrite, and maybe even a little proud of her wild life. But unlike Defoe’s novel, the reader is grateful to have gone along for the ride.94

  Saikaku devoted the rest of his career to writing collections of short stories—except for a forgettable porn novel dashed off near the end of his life called Irozato mitokoro zetai (Households of Three Pleasure Quarters, 1688)—but his two major novels are milestones in the history of Japanese fiction, earning him a place second only to Murasaki Shikibu. Unfortunately, his bold novels were followed by a century’s worth of pale imitations of his work, pastiches of older classics, and every species of lowbrow commercial fiction, none of which have been deemed worthy of complete translation.

  One anomaly is The Animal Court (Hosei monogatari) by the philosopher Ando Shoeki (1703–62). This novella recounts how once during sequential meetings of the four groups of animals—birds, beasts, reptiles and insects, and fish—the animal kingdom decided that mankind was no better than animals. Nor is this intended as flattery or camaraderie: animals can’t help acting as they do (and in fact are fulfilling their natural roles) while humans disregard the “Way of Heaven” to indulge in cruelty, lust, greed, ignorance, and arrogance. Anticipating the leaders in Orwell’s Animal Farm who decide some animals are more equal than others, Shoeki’s animals are shocked that humans establish hierarchies among themselves under the foolish assumption that some consider themselves superior to others. And who do the animals blame for this mistaken notion? “The sages, Shakyamuni [the Buddha], the many great teachers, the monks, and all men of learning,” as one critter complains (60). The animals tear into them all: Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, every sect of Buddhism, Confucianism, Shintoism, and virtually every theological system in Japan’s history. The author’s admirable contempt for theology and abstruse philosophy is undercut, however, by his adherence to eccentric theories and prescientific folklore. Nevertheless, his outrage at widespread exploitation—of humans by other humans but also at animal cruelty—is Swiftian in its disgust, and his willingness to challenge every ism of his day is brave and revolutionary. Despite its monogatari label, there’s no real narrative; at each meeting, animals introduce themselves and vent at how humans imitate their worst traits. The Animal Court is less a novel than a fierce philosophical tract, but it’s one more example of the willingness of Japanese writers to experiment with genre hybridization.

  Another hybrid was the dangibon, satirical sermons crossed with fantastic adventures—like Gulliver’s Travels, but funny. The best examples were concocted by a homosexual polymath named Hiraga Gennai (1728–79). This Leonardian genius studied botany, Dutch culture, and color printing technology, invented scientific instruments (the magnetic compass needle, the thermometer, the electric generator), and published a six-volume Classification of Various Materials in 1763. The same year, he whipped out a lengthy novel entitled Rootless Weeds (Nenashigusa), a term for books lacking a factual foundation. The novel opens in Hell, which is becoming so crowded that various contractors and developers are trying to convert the environs of Tokyo into subdivisions of Hell. Amidst this boom, a dead gay monk arrives before the king of Hell, Enma, bearing a portrait of a Kabuki actor specializing in female roles. Previously repulsed by homosexuality, King Enma is smitten by the pin-up, and sends a water spirit up to earth to seduce the actor and bring him down to Hell for the king’s delectation. The selections in Chris Drake’s translation that appear in Shirane’s Early Modern Japanese Literature (463–86) are wonderful, alternating between social satire, erudite digressions (the second chapter provides a history of Kabuki theater), delicate, gay love scenes, and vibrant, detailed cityscapes like the following:

  In a riverside restaurant, cool thin white noodles are shaken dry and heaped high as a snowy Mount Fuji on the Island of Tiny People. A mother with children holds up her wide, hanging sleeve so her children won’t see as they pass a sign advertising Long Life Ointment for lengthening men’s lovemaking. A cautious country samurai notices a man wearing a wide sedge hat suspiciously far down over his face and moves out of the man’s way, gripping the front of his robe and the purse inside. A smooth-talking juggler sends his beans and saké bottles spinning up into the air, and a watermelon seller on the street curses a red shop-lantern nearby for stealing the fresh color from his slices. . . . A low voice chanting a puppet play in an impromptu reed-screen shed is drowned out by “Repent! Repent!” as passing pilgrims pour purifying water over their heads. A fragrance from Igarashi’s Hair-Oil store, followed by the smell of spitted eels broiled in soy sauce. People peep into boxes at moving stereoscopic prints, imagining they’re in other worlds, and the crowd around a glassblower wonders whether icicles have formed in summer. Potted trees revive and suddenly look fresh when a florist sprinkles water on them, while papier-mâché turtles hanging out for sale move in the wind and take on souls. (473–74)

  In the same year Gennai published Rootless Weeds, he also brought out The Modern Life of Shidoken (Furyu Shidoken, 1763), based on the life of a popular streetcorner performer of the time. Like those “moving stereoscopic prints,” most of the novel consists of supernatural travels to imaginary lands, where Gennai was free to criticize corrupt Japanese culture from the safety of allegorical comedy. It recalls not only Gulliver’s Travels but Smollett’s Adventures of an Atom, an English dangibon written almost at the same time as Gennai’s and coincidentally set in Japan. Tantalizing selections of Shidoken can likewise be found in Shirane’s Early Modern Japanese Literature (486–512).

  Some writers during this period preferred the short story over the novel, but even in that genre only one writer stands out, the floating-worldly Ueda Akinari, whose Tales of Moonlight and Rain (Ugetsu monogatari, 1776) has deservedly been translated many times. Others were seduced by the popularity of kibyoshi, what we now call graphic novels. Japan already had a long tradition of illustrated fiction in the form of emaki, or narrative scrolls, but while the color illustrations in those aspired to art, those in kibyoshi were merely black-and-white line drawings. Like today’s graphic novels, they run the gamut from routine adventure and ghost stories to romance, humor, sermons, and urban satire. But the best of them are quite sophisti
cated, displaying (as Adam Kern writes in his definitive study, Manga from the Floating World) “a marked intertextuality, a penchant for wordplay fostered by the use of the phonetic Japanese syllabary (kana) instead of the mixed Japanese-Chinese hybrid (wakan konkōbun), witty repartee, verbal puzzles, scatological humor, and an irreverence toward the usual conventional pieties of those in political or moral authority” (183).

  One of the most accomplished of these graphic novelists was Santo Kyoden (1761–1816), three of whose works Kern translates/reproduces in his book. Those Familiar Bestsellers (Gozonji no shobaimono, 1782) is a kind of Battle of the Books satire on the current Japanese publishing scene, in which personifications of various competing genres clash, specifically the old-fashioned books of Kyoto versus the hip, trendy ones issuing from Edo. The ancients try to turn the moderns against each other until characters representing The Tale of Genji and the Tang Poetry Anthology step in at the end and criticize them all. As Kern’s extensive notes indicate, the novella is filled with complex literary allusions and wordplay; the scolding Genji character, for example, is called “The Chiding Prince.” There are even more literary allusions in Kyoden’s Playboy, Roasted à la Edo (Edo umare uwaki no kabayaki, 1785), in which a rich young fop named Enjiro, his head turned à la Don Quixote by love songs and romantic Kabuki plays, tries to earn a reputation as a philandering playboy by paying geisha to spread flattering rumors about him, then staging a mock double suicide that goes comically wrong. The strangest of Kyoden’s graphic novels is The Unseamly Silverpiped Swingers (Sogitsugi gingiseru, 1788), which literalizes the Eastern folk belief that lovers divided in this life might join each other in the next by committing a double suicide. The protagonist has two heads (one male, one female) joined to a single body, a medical impossibility but pregnant with satiric possibilities. Collectively named Oinosuke at first, its parents sell her/him to a Kyoto sideshow, where they do well enough to move to Edo and take on separate names, Hanbei (male) and Onatsu (female), and become a famous geisha. Each has a separate lover, and all four agree to a quadruple suicide before a Western doctor intervenes and surgically separates them. A satire on both romantic fiction and the androgyny of Kabuki actors (heroines were played by males), it is also a dazzling linguistic display as Kyoden mirrors the main plot with “inversions, reversals, chiasma, duplications, uncanny similarities, repeated onomatopoetic and mimetic phraseology, parallel syntax, and his-and-hers matching subplots” (Kern 434). I’m not much of a fan of graphic novels—my appreciation is limited to those of Edward Gorey and Dame Darcy—but these are extremely clever works aimed not at kids but at sophisticated, educated adults.

  The kibyoshi craze died out in the first decade of the 1800s, just when the full-length novel became popular again, specifically love stories (ninjobon), historical romances (yomihon), and comic novels (kokkeibon).95 The latter was revived by a prolific kibysohi writer/illustrator named Jippensha Ikku (1765–1831) with a long, serial novel entitled (in its only English translation) Shank’s Mare (1802–9). Guidebooks with a narrative element had been popular since the seventeenth century – in addition to Tales of the Floating World, Asai Ryoi wrote Tokaido meishoki (Famous Sights of the Taikado [1659], referring to the highway between Tokyo and Kyoto) – and in fact the first installment of Shank’s Mare was entitled “Travels in the Floating World” (Ukiyo dochu hizakurige). For the third installment, Ikku changed the title to Tokaidochu hizakurige (Travels on the Tokaido), which the Japanese fondly shorten to Hizakurige.

  It’s little more than the comic adventures of two amiable dolts named Yaji and Kita, who decide to escape their problems in Edo and make a pilgrimage to the great shrine at Ise, not because they’re religious but because of its reputation as a tourist attraction. In serious literature, a journey is a metaphor for self-discovery, but here it’s just an excuse for puns and pratfalls. Like an Abbott and Costello movie, the novel is a series of talky skits in which Yaji and Kita are conned out of their money, tricked by clever courtesans, or exposed as the fools they are. There’s a heavy helping of scatological humor—our heroes unintentionally drink urine on more than one occasion, and there are juvenile jokes about smelly loincloths and the like—along with a number of farcical sexual adventures. A few of the knockabout episodes are mildly amusing, and the realism is a century ahead of Western fiction, but the real appeal of the novel is Ikku’s road version of the urban floating world. The open road offered an exhilarating sense of freedom, and in a society as casual about sex as the Japanese were (if their novels of the period are to be believed), this included unlimited opportunities for sex with strangers, as the narrator notes with Whitmanesque gusto at the beginning of book 6:

  Naturally one is curious about the people who are travelling the same roads, and those whose fates are linked together at the public inns do not always have their marriages written in the book of Izumo. They are not tied by convention as when they live in the same row of houses, but can open their hearts to each other and talk till they are tired. On the road, also, one has no trouble from bill-collectors at the end of the month, nor is there any rice-box on the shoulder for the rats to get at. The Edo man can make acquaintance with the Satsuma sweet-potato, and the flower-like Kyoto woman can scratch her head with the skewer from the dumpling. If you are running away for the sake of the fire of love in your heart, you can go as if you were taking part in a picnic, enjoying all the delights of the road. You can sit down in the shadow of the trees and open your little tub of saké, and you can watch the pilgrims going by ringing bells. Truly travelling means cleaning the life of care. With your straw sandals and your leggings you can wander wherever you like and enjoy the indescribable pleasures of sea and sky.96

  Each of the novel’s eight books begins with stately prose like this before descending into snappy dialogue and one-liners.

  Since Ikku was writing cheap entertainment for money rather than literature for the ages, he doesn’t bother justifying some discrepancies—vagabonds Yaji and Kita seem to have an inexhaustible supply of money even though it’s stolen or conned out of them on numerous occasions—nor does he take advantage of the metafictional possibilities of one episode (book 5, part 2) where Yuri pretends to be the famous author Jippensha Ikku and is feted by the literati of Ueno until word comes that the real Ikku has just arrived; Yaji and Kati skedaddle out of town before the author and his comic creation can meet, which would have been fun. Because of the popularity of his saké-swilling buffoons, Ikku started plagiarizing material from other authors to keep the show on the road, and in fact after concluding book 8 in 1809 (the portion available in translation), he gave in to popular demand and churned out another thirty-five installments over the next 13 years, as well as a prequel. Eight was enough, giving the floating world of readers a raunchier version of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers and anticipating the freewheeling genre of the modern road novel.

  Jippensha Ikku’s commercial success was resented by a fellow kibyoshi writer named Takizawa (aka Kyokutei) Bakin (1767–1848), who disapproved of Ikku’s vulgar style and subject matter. Bakin took the comparatively higher road of yomihon, didactic historical novels with supernatural flourishes, and modeled after medieval Japanese war novels like The Tale of the Heike and The Tale of the Soga Brothers, but also Chinese novels like The Water Margin. Described by one critic as “a kind of Sir Walter Scott of the Tokugawa period,”97 Bakin is best known for a long novel set in the twelfth century entitled Chinetsu yumiharizuki (Strange Tales of the Crescent Moon, 1807–11) and especially for the longest novel in Japanese literature, Nanso Satomi hakkenden (Chronicles of the Eight Dog Heroes of the Satomi Clan of Nanso), which he began in 1814 and which filled 106 volumes by the time he finished in 1842.98

  The only complete translation of one of his novels—and one of the first Japanese novels to appear in English—is Kumo no taema amayo no tsuki (The Moon Shining through a Cloud-rift on a Rainy Night, 1808), which New Yorker Edward Greey translated in 1886 as A Captive of Love.99 The Japane
se title refers to Bakin’s low opinion of human nature, expressed in a note following chapter 15: “Human nature is very perverse. Like the moon shining between the clouds on a stormy night, the good impulses of some people seldom last long enough to benefit the world.” The English title focuses on the protagonist, a renegade Buddhist monk named Saikei whose original good impulse to become a priest is perverted by his love for a “deer-eyed koto-player” named Hachisuba (7).

  Set in the 14th century, A Captive Love is a complexly structured tale of supernatural retribution. In the beginning, an irreligious hunter named Amada Buhei kills a deer of five colors—obviously a sacred animal—the original sin that generates the main plot. His shocked wife dies, and nine years after Amada sells the deerskin he goes mad; in his last moment of lucidity before dying, he encourages his son to become a priest to atone for his sin. Given the religious name Saikei, the boy leads an exemplary religious life until age 19, when women begin complimenting his looks; “a strange feeling began to possess him, that in becoming a priest he had forfeited all that makes existence charming” (2). He resists the charms of the world for another seven years until the day he spots Hachisuba in a dress of five colors—the reincarnation of the deer his father had killed. The alluring koto player disappears (and soon marries a samurai) before Saikei can learn more about her, so he renounces his vows but not the trappings of a priest, figuring he can get by as a religious huckster while searching for Hachisuba.