Tales of Moonlight and Rain

by Ueda, Akinari

  SETTINGS

  The chronological and geographical settings of each story in Moonlight and Rain are shown in the table. The names of provinces are accompanied by the names, in parentheses, of the corresponding modern prefectures.

  Three things are striking about the settings. First, they are specific. Second, all the stories except “The Owl of the Three Jewels” take place before the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603. Third, none of the stories is set in any of the three great cities of Akinari’s time—Kyoto (the capital), Osaka (the center of commerce), and Edo (the seat of the shogunate)—where most of his readers lived. In other words, the stories are specifically located at a chronological, geographical, and, therefore, political distance from Akinari’s world. Various reasons can be imagined for this distancing, and it affects the stories in various ways.

  None of the stories is set “in a certain province,” but always in a real place and, with the exception of “A Serpent’s Lust,” at a more or less precisely specified time, not “once upon a time” or its Japanese equivalent, mukashi mukashi. This specificity has the effect of grounding the strange beings and events in the real world, thus lending plausibility to the stories. Specificity also makes the geographical and chronological distancing more effective than vagueness would have done.

  Improvements in highways and other means of transportation—not to mention prosperity and relative freedom from bandits and warlords—made domestic travel in Japan fairly safe and increasingly popular during the Edo period. By contrast, the dangers of travel in the fifteenth century are portrayed in “The Reed-Choked House.” Akinari is known to have traveled widely in Japan, possibly as far as the Kantō region (now greater Tokyo).66 Journeys and far-off destinations thus were subjects of intrinsic interest to the author and his intended audience. The opening words of the first story—“Allowed by the guards to pass through the Ōsaka Barrier, he found it hard to look away from the mountain’s autumn leaves, but he traveled on to Narumi Shore”—put the reader on notice that the narrative is moving away from the capital and toward the provinces. More than a love of travel is involved, however. From the perspective of the capital—and of Osaka and Edo—the provinces were more or less exotic places and definitely less civilized than the great cities. This conventional attitude has a long history in Japan. In The Tale of Genji, even Uji, just a few miles outside the capital, is depicted (with some hyperbole) as a wild, dangerous place. Nor is this attitude unique to Japan. As Campany has written, “From the point of view of a center of urban culture, the ‘distance’ between the center and its periphery is seldom a matter of mere geographical space, or of the calendrical time required for the journey out and back. The peripheral is, from a centrist perspective, the anomalous—the external other.“67 Thus when a story moves away from the capital, the reader is prepared to encounter strange and wonderful things; mysterious happenings are more believable when they occur far from home; and a provincial setting facilitates the Japanese reader’s “suspension of disbelief,” in Coleridge’s phrase.

  Nevertheless, anomalies, even when they occur in distant provinces, represent disorder, and it would not do to suggest that the Tokugawa regime permitted disorder anywhere in Japan—especially in such extreme forms as cannibalism, necrophilia, and sexual relations between humans and nonhumans.68 This is why the chronological settings of the stories, before Tokugawa rule began, is at least as significant as the geographical settings. As a collection of pre-Tokugawa anomalies in the provinces, Moonlight and Rain indirectly draws attention to the orderliness of the Tokugawa era and reinforces the normality of the center, the big city. “The owl of the Three Jewels,” the only story that is set during Tokugawa times, is the exception that proves the rule: it opens with praise for the Tokugawa regime and portrays one of the predecessors of the Tokugawa as having been so bloodthirsty that he was reborn as an asura. The old days, according to these stories, were not nearly as good as the present.

  STRUCTURE OF THE STORIES

  Much of Campany’s analysis of the structure of Chinese anomalous accounts is applicable to the Moonlight and Rain stories.69 He identifies ten typical structural elements, the last three of which are not present in all the stories he studies. I use “The Owl of the Three Jewels” to illustrate these elements in Moonlight and Rain.

  1. Chronological and geographical settings. The opening paragraph hints that “The Owl of the Three Jewels” takes place during the Edo period; this time frame is made explicit later: “more than eight hundred years” after the founding of Mount Kōya. The second paragraph identifies the place: “In a village called Ōka, in Ise.”

  2. Specifier. The story provides “some indication … of the specific situation or string of events …, so that the focus is narrowed to a particular occasion when an event happened. This focusing is usually accomplished in part by introducing a protagonist.“70 In “The Owl of the Three Jewels,” a “man of the Hayashi clan transferred his affairs to his heir, shaved his head …, [and] changed his name to Muzen.”

  3. Process. “Some sort of familiar process or type of interaction is set underway—some human activity with a predictable sequence.“71 Muzen “looked forward to traveling here and there in his old age” and sets out on a journey to Mount Kōya with his son.

  4. Hints. The story provides clues that “something anomalous is about to occur.“72 The most obvious in “The Owl of the Three Jewels” are Muzen’s decision to spend the night in front of Kōbō Daishi’s mausoleum and the riveting cry of the owl.

  5. Limen. Campany’s list of liminal markers includes several that figure in “The Owl of the Three Jewels”: travel through mountains, sunset, and a gateway.73 In addition, the extraordinary historical and spiritual associations of Mount Kōya make it, ipso facto, a liminal place, and the mausoleum itself represents liminality.

  6. Pivot. “Something distinctly odd now happens and the reader—usually joined at this point … by the protagonist—becomes unmistakably aware of the strangeness of the situation.“74 Muzen, “taking out his travel-inkstone, … wrote down the verse by lantern light, then strained his ears in hopes of hearing the voice of the bird again, when, to his surprise, he heard instead the stern voice of a forerunner, coming from the direction of the distant temples and gradually drawing closer.”

  7. Climax. “The full force of the anomaly hits home to both protagonist and reader.“75 The climax of “The Owl of the Three Jewels” comes when Jōha identifies Hidetsugu and the other ghosts: “It was so horrible that the hair on Muzen’s head would have stood on end, had there been any hair, and he felt as though his innards and his spirit alike were flying away into space.” The climax continues to the point where the ghosts reveal their true form as asuras and threaten Muzen and his son.

  8. Response. “Some tales … continue by reporting the protagonist’s response” to the climax.76 In “The Owl of the Three Jewels,” Muzen produces the verse required of him and then faints.

  9. Outcome. “In tales in which there is some response by the protagonist, comment is usually made on how things worked out.“77 In “The Owl of the Three Jewels,” Muzen and his son wake up, return to the capital, and seek medical treatment.

  10. Impact. “Very occasionally—especially in Buddhist miracle tales and in stories concerning the origins of cults and temples—further comment is made on reactions by persons other than the protagonist, or on some later situation relevant to the tale. In every case these comments concern the lasting impact made by the narrated event on a person or group of people or on the landscape.“78 “The Owl of the Three Jewels,” of course, concerns the origin of Mount Kōya and the legends surrounding Kōbō Daishi. The story concludes: “One day as he was passing the Sanjō Bridge, Muzen thought of the Brutality Mound [containing the remains of Hidetsugu and his family] and felt his gaze being drawn toward the temple. ‘It was horrible, even in broad daylight,’ he recounted to people in the capital. The story has been recorded here just as he told it.” Thes
e sentences describe the lasting impact of the events at Mount Kōya both on Muzen and on the landscape (in the form of the Brutality Mound). The impact on other people is suggested in the survival of the story as it has been passed down from Muzen.

  The structure of “The Owl of the Three Jewels” thus resembles that of Chinese anomalous accounts. A similar analysis could be made of the other stories in Moonlight and Rain, all of which follow this pattern. It is characteristic of Akinari’s tales that the last three elements—response, outcome, and impact—which are often absent in Chinese stories, not only are present but are developed at length (except in “The Kibitsu Cauldron,” “A Serpent’s Lust,” and “The Blue Hood,” where they are present but abbreviated). The third through seventh elements are repeated several times in “A Serpent’s Lust,” which thus might be regarded as several stories in one. The response section of “On Poverty and Wealth” is exceptionally long, consisting of Sanai’s conversation with the spirit of gold.

  Another way to describe the Moonlight and Rain stories is in terms of the structure of nō plays, as many commentators have noted.79 Indeed, Akinari invited comparisons by using the title of a nō play—Ugetsu—in the title of the collection. Four elements of nō structure can be found in some or all of the stories.

  1. Michiyuki. Originating in the nō theater and found in other performance and literary genres as well, a michiyuki (going on the road) is a literary convention in which the route, sights, and impressions of a journey are evoked with a litany of familiar place-names, often modified by makura-kotoba (pillow-words) or other epithets. In addition to providing a display of beautiful rhetoric and enriching the audience’s experience by prompting the memory and imagination to envision famous scenes and their associations, a michiyuki guides the reader into a world apart, where unexpected, wondrous beings and events are likely to be encountered. Three of the stories in Moonlight and Rain include conspicuous michiyuki: Saigyō’s poetic journey at the beginning of “Shiramine,” Muzen’s journey with his son in “The Owl of the Three Jewels,” and Kaian’s journey in “The Blue Hood.” A fourth story, “The Carp of My Dreams,” includes a particularly beautiful passage—Kōgi’s tour of Lake Biwa—that resembles a michiyuki, although it does not serve the same structural function.

  2. Shite and waki. A typical nō play has two important characters: the shite (central figure) and the waki ([man at] the side). The shite is preceded on the stage by the waki, who is frequently a traveler or an itinerant monk. The waki arrives at a famous site, where he meets a local person—the shite—whom he questions about the history of the area. As the waki draws out the shite’s story, it turns out that the shite is actually the ghost of a historical figure who is still clinging to this world because of obsessive anger, desire for revenge, or love. Often the shite asks the waki to pray for his or her release from obsession so that he or she might be reborn in Amida Buddha’s Western Paradise. Characters in at least four of the stories in Moonlight and Rain resemble the waki and shite roles, in greater or lesser degrees. Saigyō, in “Shiramine,” corresponds to the waki as his michiyuki takes him to Shiramine. There he encounters the ghost of Sutoku, who corresponds to the shite, and they engage in a mondō (dialogue), a common element in nō plays.80 As in a nō play, Sutoku’s true form is revealed near the end of the story. In “The Chrysanthemum Vow,” Samon resembles the waki insofar as he elicits a story from Sōemon, who corresponds to the shite. Samon ceases to behave like a waki at the end of the story, however. In “The Owl of the Three Jewels,” Muzen corresponds to the waki (and his son to a wakizure [waki companion]) as he travels to Mount Kōya. Hidetsugu’s ghost, of course, corresponds to the shite (and his followers to shitezure), and the fact that Hidetsugu turns out to be an asura encourages the reader to recall nō plays, such as Yashima, in which the shite is an asura. Finally, the itinerant monk Kaian functions as the waki in “The Blue Hood,” and the mad abbot can be thought of as the shite. The Moonlight and Rain stories are not nō plays, of course, and it would be a mistake to press the waki–shite analogy too far, but the resemblance is unmistakable.

  3. Dreams. In some nō plays of the mugen (dream mystery) type, it is conceivable that the waki dozes off at the end of the first part of the play and dreams of his subsequent encounter with a ghost. This possibility exists in “Shiramine” and “The Owl of the Three Jewels.” In “Shiramine,” Saigyō “began to doze” just before Sutoku makes his appearance, and the strange events in “The Owl of the Three Jewels” take place after Muzen and his son have laid out their bedding and as they are trying to go to sleep. The central event of “The Carp of My Dreams” occurs in a dream, but parallels with mugen nō are less obvious in this story than in the other two.

  4. Jo-ha-kyū. The fourth structural element of nō plays that is shared by the Moonlight and Rain stories is the jo-ha-kyū (introduction-development-climax) rhythm—common not only in nō, but in all Japanese traditional performing arts—in which the performance begins slowly, the pace gradually quickens, and a swift, dramatic climax is reached at the end. The development, typically the longest section, also consists of three parts, resulting in five sections altogether. This structure is fairly clear in, for example, “The Blue Hood.” In the introduction (jo), Kaian reaches Tonda and meets his host. In the first part of the development (ha), the host explains Kaian’s odd reception and the problem that has been troubling the village. Kaian responds in the second part of the development, goes to the mountain temple, and meets the abbot. In the third part of the development, Kaian confronts the abbot’s madness. Finally, in the climax (kyū), Kaian returns to the temple a year later and meets the abbot again, resolving the crisis faced by both the village and the abbot. The same analysis could be applied fruitfully to “Shiramine,” “The Owl of the Three Jewels,” “The Kibitsu Cauldron,” and “A Serpent’s Lust.“81

  The themes or motifs of several of the stories recall specific nō plays as well. “The Owl of the Three Jewels” resembles a shuramono (asura play), such as Yashima, in which the angry ghost of a warrior returns to the scene of his defeat. “The Reed-Choked House” employs the traditional theme of a woman who waits loyally and patiently for her husband or lover—a motif that is common in Japanese court poetry and in nō plays such as Matsukaze (Wind in the Pines) and Izutsu (The Well Curb). “A Serpent’s Lust,” which explicitly alludes to the Dōjōji legend, naturally recalls the nō play Dōjōji and its serpent-woman.82

  STRUCTURE OF THE COLLECTION

  Contemporary publishers of short-story collections commonly put the best—or the most appealing, exciting, or evocative—story first, in order to hook readers and keep them reading. If the publisher of Moonlight and Rain had followed this practice, he might have chosen to begin with “The Reed-Choked House,” “The Kibitsu Cauldron,” or “The Blue Hood,” rather than with the stately, poetic “Shiramine,” which opens the collection as we have it. The organization of Moonlight and Rain is so unlike that with which Western readers are accustomed that Kengi Hamada, in his translation, apparently found it necessary to rearrange the stories to conform more closely to Western tastes, beginning his version with “The Reed-Choked House.“83 In fact, the structure of the collection—the grouping and ordering of the stories—is complex and certainly not random.

  The nine stories are arranged in five books:

  Book One

  “Shiramine”

  “The Chrysanthemum Vow”

  Book Two

  “The Reed-Choked House”

  “The Carp of My Dreams”

  Book Three

  “The Owl of the Three Jewels”

  “The Kibitsu Cauldron”

  Book Four

  “A Serpent’s Lust”

  Book Five

  “The Blue Hood”

  “On Poverty and Wealth”

  This organization recalls two parallels: first, Teishō’s A Garland of Heroes and Shigeshige yawa, which likewise consist of nine stories in five books; and, second, the
five-part jo-ha-kyū rhythm of nō. This structure applies not only to individual plays, but also to the arrangement of the five kinds of plays into a five-play nō program.84

  To some extent, Moonlight and Rain can be compared with a program of nō plays.85 The five types of plays and their sequence in a full program are shown in the table.

  It is tempting to try to apply this program of five plays to the five books of Moonlight and Rain—to say that Book One corresponds to the first category of nō plays, for example—but the analogy breaks down almost immediately, since “The Chrysanthemum Vow” has little in common with a wakinō or kaminō, nor are “The Reed-Choked House” and “The Carp of My Dreams” at all analogous to shuramono. The five books of Moonlight and Rain do, however, parallel the five-part rhythmic structure of the nō program, with a gradual heightening of pace and excitement. The stories in Book One unfold at an appropriately dignified pace, with elevated language and high-ranking characters: an eminent poet-monk and the ghost of a deified former emperor in “Shiramine” and a scholar and a samurai in “The Chrysanthemum Vow.” The excitement picks up in Book Two and continues to grow, as the status of the characters declines, through Book Four. In Book Five, the pace and excitement reach a climax in “The Blue Hood,” and the collection ends with an auspicious prophecy of good times under the Tokugawa government, in “On Poverty and Wealth.” In addition, there are unmistakable parallels between the five types of nō plays and the central characters of some of the stories and the order in which they appear. The ghost of the former emperor Sutoku, in “Shiramine,” can be thought of as a deity, insofar as all emperors were believed to be divine descendants of Amaterasu, the sun goddess, and this one was actually enshrined at Shiramine. The second story, “The Chrysanthemum Vow,” involves the ghost of a samurai, and “The Reed Choked House” focuses on a beautiful woman. With “The Carp of My Dreams” the collection departs from any correspondence with the subject matter of a nō program, but “The Owl of the Three Jewels” resembles a shuramono and draws the collection back toward the nō pattern. “The Kibitsu Cauldron” can be seen as a combination of a katsuramono, kyōjomono, and kirinō, since Isora starts out as a beautiful young woman and ends up as a possessing spirit. Finally, each of the remaining stories focuses on an anomalous creature: a serpent-woman, a necrophiliac and cannibalistic monk, and the spirit of gold. The sequencing of the nine stories does, then, approximate a nō program in its gradually accelerating pace and in the nature of the central characters. While the presence of the jo-ha-kyū rhythm might be explained as the automatic choice of a Japanese artist of the time, the downward progression of characters suggests a deliberate imitation of the nō form.