Ueda akinari tales of moonlight and rain pdf

TALES OF MOONLIGHT AND RAIN

Ueda Akinari

Columbia University Press New York

tales of moonlight and rain

Translations from the Asian Classics

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tales

of

moon l igh t

a n d

ra i n

Ueda Akinari

A Study and Translation by anthony h. chambers

C O L U M B I A U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S N E W Y O R K

Image has been suppressed

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

Copyright © 2007 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ueda, Akinari, 1734–1809.

[Ugetsu monogatari. English]

Tales of moonlight and rain : a study and translation by Anthony H. Chambers.

p. cm. — (Translations from the Asian classics)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-231-13912-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 0-231-51124-8 (electronic)

I. Chambers, Anthony H. (Anthony Hood)

II. Title. III. Series.

PL794.8.U3413 2006

895.6'33—dc22 2006015127

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Frontispiece: Tosa Hidenobu, portrait of Ueda Akinari (1786). (Tenri Central Library, Nara)

Acknowledgments vii

I n t ro du c t i o n 1

The Early Modern Period in Japan 2

About the Author 3

Bunjin, National Learning, and Yomihon 8

About Tales of Moonlight and Rain 11

About the Translation 34

Ta l e s o f M o o n li g h t a n d R a i n 45

pre fac e 47

B o o k O n e

Shiramine 51

The Chrysanthemum Vow 75

B o o k two

The Reed-Choked House 91

The Carp of My Dreams 110

contents

B o o k t h re e

The Owl of the Three Jewels 121

The Kibitsu Cauldron 139

B o o k f ou r

A Serpent’s Lust 155

B o o k five

The Blue Hood 186

On Poverty and Wealth 202

Bibliography 221

vi contents

Haruo Shirane provided the initial spark by asking me to translate three stories from Ueda Akinari’s Tales of Moon- light and Rain for his Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900, and then suggesting that I translate the whole collection. Deborah Losse, Lawrence E. Marceau, and Donald Richie deserve special thanks for their encour- agement and suggestions. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University provided time for the work by giving me a year’s sabbatical. Even with time, the study and translation would have been impossible without the pathbreaking work of earlier scholars and the compilers of the marvelous reference works we all depend on. Thanks go also to my incomparable circle of friends and colleagues, who sustain me emotionally and intellectually.

Michael Ashby read the first draft and made countless perceptive comments. I am also indebted to Jennifer Crewe, Anne McCoy, Irene Pavitt, and the rest of the staff at Colum- bia University Press. The anonymous readers recruited by the press offered encouragement, pointed out errors, and provided valuable advice. Any problems that remain are, of course, my own responsibility.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The translation is dedicated to all my teachers, especially, Ch’en Shou-yi, who introduced me to the study of East Asia; Makoto Ueda, who introduced me to Akinari; Robert H. Brower, who tutored me in Japanese court poetry; and Edward G. Seidensticker, my principal mentor over the years.

viii acknowledgments

tales of moonlight and rain

Tales of Moonlight and Rain (Ugetsu monogatari), nine sto- ries by Ueda Akinari (1734–1809) published in Osaka and Kyoto in 1776, is the most celebrated example in Japan of the literature of the strange and marvelous. It is far more, however, than an engrossing collection of ghost stories. Japanese scholars regard it, along with Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji, early eleventh century) and the stories of Ihara Saikaku (late seventeenth century), as among the finest works of fiction in the canon of traditional Japanese literature. The reasons for this esteem have to do primar- ily with Akinari’s elegant prose—a model of literary Japa- nese enriched by Chinese borrowings—and with his subtle exploration of the psychology of men and women at the extremes of experience, where they come into contact with the strange and anomalous: ghosts, fiends, dreams, and other manifestations of the world beyond logic and com- mon sense.

Tales of Moonlight and Rain exerted a powerful influ- ence in the twentieth century. Many novelists—including Izumi Kyoka (1873–1939), Tanizaki Jun’ichiro (1886–1965), Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892–1927), Ishikawa Jun (1899– 1987), Enchi Fumiko (1905–1986), and Mishima Yukio

INTRODUCTION

2 introduction

(1925–1970)—were avid readers of the collection. Two of the tales inspired Mizoguchi Kenji’s cinematic masterpiece Ugetsu monogatari (1953; known to Western viewers as Ugetsu), which is widely regarded as “one of the greatest of all films.”1 Deeply rooted in its eighteenth-century cultural context, Tales of Moonlight and Rain is nonetheless a work of timeless significance and fascination.

The Early Modern Period in Japan

In 1603 Japan began to settle into a long era of relative calm and prosperity after a century of disastrous civil war (War- ring States period [Sengoku jidai], 1467–1568) and nearly forty years of gradual pacification and unification (Azuchi– Momoyama period) under the successive warlord-unifiers Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582), Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536– 1598), and Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616). The Tokugawa shogunate—the military regime established by Ieyasu— governed Japan for 265 years, an era that is commonly referred to as the Edo period, after the site of the shogun’s capital, or the Tokugawa period. The emperor and the court continued to hold ultimate, though symbolic, authority in Kyoto during these years, but real power was wielded by the Tokugawa bureaucracy until it collapsed in 1868 and the Meiji emperor moved from Kyoto to Edo, which was then renamed Tokyo.

Cultural historians refer to the years from 1603 to 1868 as the early modern period and have divided it into three parts on the basis of cultural and political developments: early (1603–1715), middle (1716–1800), and late (1801–1868).2 The first blossoming of early modern literature came toward the end of the seventeenth century, particularly with the work of three major figures: the fiction writer Ihara Saikaku (1642– 1693), the poet Matsuo Basho (1644–1694), and the drama- tist Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1724).

introduction 3

The period we are most concerned with here, the eigh- teenth century, can be regarded as the time when Tokugawa culture reached its high point.3 The stability of the country under Tokugawa rule (among other factors) made possible a flourishing of artistic activity by and for commoners, who previously had enjoyed only limited access to high culture.4 The man now recognized as the outstanding Japanese author of fiction in the eighteenth century was such a commoner, Ueda Akinari. By the time he began writing, a good educa- tion was no longer the monopoly of the court aristocracy, the samurai class, and the clergy: literacy rates were comparable to those in Europe,5 and education had spread to large num- bers of affluent residents of the great cities of Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo.6 As a commoner, Akinari wrote primarily for an audience of other well-educated urban residents.

About the Author

Ueda Senjiro was born in 1734 in Osaka, then the commercial center of Japan.7 Akinari, the name by which he is known, is a pen name that he began to use in the early 1770s. His mother, Matsuo Osaki, was the granddaughter of a peasant from Yam- ato Province who had gone to Osaka to become a merchant; the identity of his father is not known. In his fourth year, he was adopted by a prosperous merchant named Ueda Mosuke. Surviving a severe bout of smallpox that left several of his fin- gers malformed, the young Akinari had a comfortable child- hood and received a good education, possibly at the Kaitokudo, one of the most prominent of the new schools chartered by the government to provide “an appropriately practical Confu- cian education” to the children of the merchant and artisan classes.8 The curriculum would have included the Confucian canon—the Four Books (Lun yü [Analects] of Confucius, Da xue [The Great Learning], Zhong yong [The Doctrine of the Mean], and Mengzi [Mencius]) and the Five Classics (I jing [The Book

4 introduction

of Changes], Shu jing [The Book of Documents], Shi jing [The Book of Songs], Li ji [The Book of Rites], and Chun qiu [Spring and Autumn Annals])—and Japanese classics, especially waka (thirty-one-syllable court poems), Ise monogatari (Tales of Ise, ca. 947), and The Tale of Genji.

Akinari’s earliest surviving literary efforts are haikai verses included in several collections published in 1753 and 1755. Although composing haikai (playful, humorous) poetry, an outgrowth of renga (linked verse), began as an amusing pas- time, it had evolved into a serious pursuit by the eighteenth century. Akinari continued to write haikai throughout his life—even if he did not take it as seriously as did some of his contemporaries9—and the pursuit brought him into contact with important literary figures in Osaka and Kyoto, includ- ing the painter and haikai poet Yosa Buson (1716–1783), and with proponents of kokugaku (National Learning or Nativist Study), which emphasized the philological study of ancient Japanese literature.10

Akinari never made his living as a writer, however. He married Ueyama Tama in 1760; they enjoyed a happy mar- riage but had no children. Akinari’s adoptive father died in 1761, leaving to Akinari the family business and the respon- sibility for supporting himself, his new bride, and his adop- tive mother, to whom he was devoted. They lost their busi- ness and all their belongings to a fire in 1771, after which Akinari turned to the study of medicine, probably under Tsuga Teisho (ca. 1718–ca. 1794), one of many intellectuals of the time who combined scholarship, writing, and medicine. Akinari worked as a physician in Osaka until 1787, when he retired from medicine and occupied himself with scholar- ship, teaching, and writing. How he supported his family during these years is unclear; he may have lived on accumu- lated savings, and he may have earned some money from teaching Japanese classics.

Along with his friend Buson and his sometime mentor Takebe Ayatari (1719–1774), Akinari was a classic example of

introduction 5

the eighteenth-century bunjin—a nonconformist, indepen- dent artist, typically a painter and writer, who, though not a member of the aristocracy, devoted himself or herself to high culture, stood aloof from commercial or political profit, and felt disdain for the “vulgarity” of contemporary society.11 What the bunjin of the mid-Edo period shared was “avoiding the ‘vulgar’ (zoku) and placing themselves on heights beyond the reach of the ‘vulgar.’”12 The bunjin ideal was inspired in part by the Chinese wen-jen (written with the same charac- ters as bunjin, signifying a person of letters) of earlier times, and one aspect of the eighteenth-century bunjin’s avoidance of vulgarity involved the study of Chinese culture, including vernacular Chinese fiction. This was true of Akinari.

Akinari’s first works of fiction, however, owe little to Chi- nese models and much to the ukiyo zoshi (books of the floating world) tradition of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, with its typically lighthearted, satirical treatment of the foibles of ordinary people. Akinari produced two col- lections of stories in this genre, Shodo kikimimi sekenzaru (A Worldly Monkey Who Hears About Everything, 1766) and Seken tekake katagi (Characters of Worldly Mistresses, 1767), which turned out to be the last significant ukiyo zoshi.13 Aki- nari quickly turned his attention to other interests.

One of these was National Learning. Akinari had begun a serious study of the Japanese classics, especially waka, before 1760. A few years later, he studied with Ayatari and then with Kato Umaki (1721–1777), a disciple of the great nativist scholar Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769). This led him to abandon the ukiyo zoshi tradition in favor of writing fiction that is far richer and more serious, as well as treatises on such classics as Tales of Ise; the Man’yoshu (Collection of Myriad Leaves, ca. 759), the oldest anthology of Japanese poetry; and the Kokin- shu (Collection of Ancient and Modern Poems, 905), the first imperially commissioned anthology of waka. His studies also embroiled him in a famous scholarly debate, which contin- ued over a number of years and on various subjects, with the

6 introduction

most noted of the National Learning scholars, Motoori Nori- naga (1730–1801)—a confrontation that Blake Morgan Young has characterized as “a clash between the rustic’s blind faith and the urbanite’s critical scepticism,” Norinaga, who lived in Ise, being the rustic.14 Their disagreements ranged from phonology to mythology. Norinaga’s arguments depended on his absolutely literal reading of ancient Japanese compendia of myth and history, while Akinari insisted on a more inter- pretative, empirical approach.15

Akinari’s studies of ancient Japanese literature merged with bunjin ideals, especially the avoidance of vulgarity and the fascination with Chinese fiction, to shape the solemn beauty of his masterpiece, Tales of Moonlight and Rain. The nine stories in this collection frequently allude to, quote from, and borrow words and phrases from Japanese classics and Chinese fiction and rise above zoku—even though most of the characters in the stories are commoners—to achieve the aesthetic ideal of ga (elegance, refinement), which had been associated with Kyoto court culture.16 No one doubts Akinari’s authorship of Moonlight and Rain, but he signed the work with a pen name and never acknowledged that he had written it. Although the collection is the principal basis for his fame, he probably would have preferred to be remem- bered for his waka, his studies in National Learning, and his expertise in a form of tea ceremony.

As a scholar, Akinari distinguished himself through edit- ing and publishing works by Kamo no Mabuchi and his cir- cle. In 1773 he wrote Ya kana sho (or Yasaisho), a commentary on the particles ya and kana, but for some reason he would not allow it to be published until 1787, when it appeared with a preface by Buson. Kaseiden, Akinari’s biographi- cal study of the great Man’yoshu poet Hitomaro (late sev- enth–early eighth centuries), apparently was written in 1781. The astonishing Reigotsu (ca. 1793) was “a comprehensive work in six sections, one each on the names of Shinto dei- ties, the names of Japan’s provinces, noted products of the

introduction 7

various regions, poetry, terminology, and systems of kana orthography,” but only the kana section survives.17 In 1794 he published Man’yoshu kaisetsu, a short study of the ancient anthology, and in 1800 he began a comprehensive commen- tary on the Man’yoshu, which, however, he left unfinished. Kinsa (1804) and Kinsa jogen (1804) bring together favorite poems from the Man’yoshu, with Akinari’s commentaries on them.

Akinari also compiled several miscellanies. Two are col- lections of humorous and satirical stories: Kakizome kigen kai (New Year’s Calligraphy and a Sea of Changing Feelings, 1787) and Kuse monogatari (Tales of Eccentricity, 1791; published 1822), whose title parodies Ise monogatari. Tsuzurabumi (Basket of Writings, 1805–1806), a collection of his prose and poetry, represents the final stage of Akinari’s serious liter- ary work, as he saw it; after it was published, he threw all his manuscripts down a well. Tandai shoshinroku (A Record of Daring and Prudence) was completed in 1808.18

Akinari wrote waka and haikai verse throughout his adult life and was one of the most distinguished waka poets of his time. His personal collection of waka, Aki no kumo (Autumn Clouds), was completed in 1807. He also distinguished him- self as an expert in senchado (the Way of sencha), a form of tea ceremony that employs tea leaves instead of the powdered tea of the better-known chanoyu ceremony. Seifu sagen (Triv- ial Words on Pure Elegance, 1794), his treatise on senchado, is a classic in the field. Pottery implements that Akinari made for the ceremony survive.19

Akinari did not abandon fiction after Moonlight and Rain. In 1808 and 1809, he gathered ten of his stories and essays under the title Harusame monogatari (Tales of the Spring Rain). The collection is uneven, partly because Akinari died before he could polish it to his satisfaction, and per- haps because he wrote more for his own enjoyment than for publication. The pieces in Spring Rain are less tightly structured than the stories in Moonlight and Rain, and the

8 introduction

element of the marvelous and strange is relatively unimport- ant. The language is plainer, and there is much less reliance on Chinese sources. Perhaps even more than the tales in Moonlight and Rain, the stories and essays in Spring Rain attest to Akinari’s studies in National Learning, particularly in the emphasis he placed on naoki kokoro (true heartedness, sincerity, guilelessness), which he apparently held to be the essential nature of the Japanese people. The stories in Spring Rain represent Akinari’s most important fiction aside from Moonlight and Rain.20

In 1793 Akinari and his wife moved from Osaka to Kyoto, where they lived in poverty near the temple Chion-in, on the east side of the capital. His wife died in 1797. Within a few months, Akinari, whose vision had been failing for some time, went blind, but then regained partial vision in one eye. He continued his writing and scholarship as he moved here and there in Kyoto, depending on friends for support, until his death in 1809 on the twenty-seventh day of the Sixth Month (August 8, in the Western calendar), in his seventy- sixth year. His grave is at the Buddhist temple Saifukuji, near the Nanzenji monastery.

Bunjin, National Learning, and Yomihon

The result of Akinari’s synthesis, in Moonlight and Rain, of a bunjin orientation with the National Learning was a new genre: the yomihon (books for reading).

The distinction between ga and zoku arose from ancient Chinese poetics and was embraced by Japanese artists of the Tokugawa period. As the painter Gion Nankai (1677–1751) said, “ga is neatness, propriety, elegance; zoku is vulgarity.”21 This analysis was applied to all the arts, including painting and literature. From the Japanese point of view, elegant liter- ary genres encompassed Chinese poetry and prose, includ- ing fiction; Japanese court poetry and linked verse; classi-

introduction 9

cal monogatari, such as Ise and Genji; and no dramas.22 The traditional ga–zoku aesthetic was modified, however, by Japanese artists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from a system that distinguished clearly between the courtly and the common, into a quest for elegance in realms that had traditionally been considered vulgar. Thus Basho urged his students to raise their minds “to an enlightened state, [and then] return to zoku,” by which he meant “practicing ga while remaining in the ordinary zoku world of haikai.”23 In short, “Basho raised haikai poetry, traditionally a zoku form, to the world of ga, thereby confounding the traditional dis- tinctions of ga and zoku.”24

The objective of finding elegance in the vulgar dovetails with one of the goals of the scholars of National Learning, the “articulation of links between the mythological past, the recorded history of the aristocratic few, and the daily lives of common folk.”25 This agenda is related, of course, to the rising wealth and influence of the urban classes—primar- ily merchants and artisans—in the early modern period and their desire to participate in the high culture associ- ated with the court aristocracy. The consequent blurring of the distinction between ga and zoku can be seen clearly in Moonlight and Rain. As a bunjin, Akinari rejected the com- mon, and all the elegant genres are reflected in Moonlight and Rain. At the same time, the peasants (zoku) in “The Reed-Choked House,” for example, are remarkably well versed in waka (ga), and the inclusion of haikai (zoku) in the same context as waka and Chinese poetry (ga) in “The Owl of the Three Jewels” implicitly raises haikai to the same level of elegance. In Moonlight and Rain, then, peasants and haikai participate in the aristocratic tradition as Akinari lifts them—and eighteenth-century Japanese fiction—from the vulgar realm of ukiyo zoshi to the elegant sphere of court poetry and monogatari.26

The National Learning agenda is reflected in Moonlight and Rain in at least two other ways. First, the philological

10 introduction

study of ancient Japanese texts, one of the principal activi- ties of National Learning scholars, influenced Akinari’s choice of vocabulary and phrasing so often that a reader is hard put to count the examples.27 Indeed, the abundance of archaic words and expressions from, and allusions to, the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters, 712), the Man’yoshu, Tales of Ise, the Kokinshu, The Tale of Genji, and other clas- sics is the main reason that Moonlight and Rain is difficult to read. The classical lexicon also serves to associate Moonlight and Rain with court literature. Second, in opposition to the Confucian emphasis on rationalism, scholars of National Learning insisted that many things lie beyond the ability of human beings to understand, analyze, and explain—a belief that was based on an unquestioning acceptance of Japanese mythology.28 While Akinari rejected Norinaga’s uncritical embrace of ancient mythology, he did share the National Learning scholars’ propensity to “celebrate the mysterious wonders of life,”29 which takes an especially vivid form in Moonlight and Rain.

In synthesizing the bunjin aesthetic and National Learn- ing, Akinari produced a masterpiece in a new genre—the yomihon, a more serious form of literature than its prede- cessor, the ukiyo zoshi. The term yomihon comes from the genre’s characteristically heavy emphasis on the written text, as opposed to oral narratives and booklets in which illustra- tions play a central role. The language of yomihon, including Moonlight and Rain, is elegant, somewhat archaic, and often full of allusions to Chinese and Japanese antecedents. In short, the emphasis is on serious reading. The first yomihon writers were Tsuga Teisho, who probably instructed Akinari in medicine, and Takebe Ayatari, one of Akinari’s mentors in National Learning. Teisho’s Hanabusa soshi (A Garland of Heroes, 1749) is considered the first yomihon. Its prose style is characterized by wakan konko (a blend of Japanese and Chinese) and gazoku setchu (a blend of elegant and vulgar). Like Moonlight and Rain, A Garland of Heroes consists of nine

12 introduction

Why the preface bears the date “Meiwa 5, late spring” (the Third Month of 1768) has been the subject of considerable research and discussion, since the preface and the stories were first published eight years later. There are good reasons to think that a preface that Akinari had drafted in 1768, as part of the “Saigyo Stories” project, was followed by eight years of studying, writing, and revising before the tales in Moonlight and Rain reached their present form.33 Another possibility is that Akinari used the date of 1768 so that his work would appear to be contemporaneous with A Tale of the Western Hills, the preface of which is dated “Meiwa 5, spring, Second Month.”34

Moonlight and Rain belongs, of course, to a different genre—yomihon—from A Worldly Monkey and Worldly Mis- tresses and, presumably, their planned sequels. Neverthe- less, the titles of the unpublished works contain tantalizing suggestions of connections with Moonlight and Rain. First, both titles—“Tidings from a Cargo Ship in Various Prov- inces” and “Saigyo Stories: Poetic Sites Bundled in a Dyed Cloth”—anticipate the prominence of travel in Moonlight and Rain (in all but the last of the nine tales) and the location of all the stories in the provinces (as opposed to the great cities). Second, “Saigyo Stories: Poetic Sites Bundled in a Dyed Cloth” anticipates Moonlight and Rain in two additional ways: Saigyo, the beloved poet-monk of the twelfth century, appears in the first Moonlight and Rain story, “Shiramine”; and “poetic sites” (utamakura), place-names used frequently in poetry and listed in handbooks of poetic composition, are mentioned in almost all the tales, with special prominence in “Shiramine,” “The Carp of My Dreams,” “The Owl of the Three Jewels,” and “A Serpent’s Lust.” In short, “various provinces,” “Saigyo,” and “poetic sites” in the titles of the unpublished ukiyo zoshi are important elements in Moon- light and Rain. There can be little doubt that Moonlight and Rain grew from the germs of “Tidings from a Cargo Ship in Various Provinces” and “Saigyo Stories.” The resulting

introduction 13

yomihon is a work of far greater psychological depth, narra- tive sophistication, and historical and philological awareness than A Worldly Monkey and Worldly Mistresses, and it incor- porates two new elements: the adaptation of Chinese stories and the strange or anomalous.

t itle

The title Ugetsu monogatari (literally, “rain-moon tales”) comes from the phrase “misty moon after the rains” in the preface. It alludes to the no play Ugetsu, in which Saigyo appears, as he does in “Shiramine,” and in which rain and the moon are central images.35 Commentators have also pointed to a passage in “Mudan deng ji” (Peony Lantern), a story in Qu You’s Jiandeng xinhua (New Tales After Trim- ming the Lamp, 1378), one of Akinari’s principal sources for “The Kibitsu Cauldron,” which suggests that mysterious beings appear on cloudy, rainy nights and in mornings with a lingering moon. In any case, educated East Asian readers would probably guess immediately that a book containing the term “rain-moon” in its title would deal with the strange and marvelous.

sources

Much has been written about Akinari’s use of Chinese and Japanese sources in Moonlight and Rain—more than sixty Chinese sources, according to Noriko T. Reider, and more than a hundred Japanese.36 (For the titles of important sources, see the introductions to the tales.)

Akinari used his sources in several ways. For some tales— “The Chrysanthemum Vow,” “The Carp of My Dreams,” “The Kibitsu Cauldron,” and “A Serpent’s Lust”—he bor- rowed the story line of a Chinese work, always with signifi-

14 introduction

cant modifications that ease the transition to a Japanese set- ting. Further, many scenes and situations in the tales echo those in Chinese or Japanese sources. Examples include the description of Katsushiro’s house when he returns from the capital in “The Reed-Choked House,” which echoes the “Yomogiu” (The Wormwood Patch) chapter of The Tale of Genji; the depiction of the temple at Yoshino in “A Serpent’s Lust,” which echoes the “Wakamurasaki” (Lavender) chap- ter of Genji; and the arrival of Kaian at the village in “The Blue Hood,” which echoes chapter 5 of Shuihu zhuan (Water Margin, fourteenth century), attributed to Shi Nai’an and Luo Guanzhong. Akinari also borrowed words and phrases from his Chinese sources and from the Japanese classics he stud- ied, especially the Kojiki, the Man’yoshu, Tales of Ise, and The Tale of Genji. Finally, he seems to have structured individual stories along the lines of Chinese tales and in imitation of the structure of no plays, and the organization of the collec- tion as a whole seems to be influenced by the no.

Far from trying to hide his indebtedness to Chinese and Japanese precedents, Akinari undoubtedly hoped and expected that his readers would derive pleasure from recognizing his sources and appreciate his ingenuity in adapting them. The borrowings, allusions, and echoes that fill Moonlight and Rain also add richness and complexity to the tales. As with the references to earlier texts in The Tale of Genji and the use of honkadori (allusive variation) in Japanese court poetry, the reader’s awareness of other texts interacting with Akinari’s adds resonance and depth to the reading experience.37 The borrowings also draw the reader into the text and involve him or her in the creative process, as they reward, flatter, and delight the reader who is erudite enough to recognize them.38 Finally, the liberal use of Chinese and courtly Japanese sources lifts Moonlight and Rain, by association, into the elegant realm of Water Margin and Genji, the two works that Akinari mentions at the beginning of his preface, and, in the same way, lifts

introduction 15

Akinari himself into the lofty company of his Chinese and Japanese predecessors.

Even when Akinari’s borrowings from Chinese sources are most direct—in “The Chrysanthemum Vow,” “The Carp of My Dreams,” “The Kibitsu Cauldron,” and “A Serpent’s Lust”—he ingeniously adapted the stories to Japanese set- tings and enriched them with a psychological complexity that is absent in their Chinese counterparts. Again and again, the reader is struck by the wonderful aptness of the time and place in which Akinari placed his tales. By mak- ing Akana Soemon a samurai in “The Chrysanthemum Vow,” for example, he introduced the themes of samurai loyalty and honor, whereas the character who corresponds to Soemon in the Chinese story is a merchant who sim- ply forgets the date of his appointment.39 In “The Carp of My Dreams,” Akinari introduced the crucial theme of Bud- dhist compassion by placing a Buddhist monk at the cen- ter of the story and invoked a long tradition of descriptive Japanese literature and art by setting the story at Miidera. In “The Kibitsu Cauldron,” he introduced Shinto elements— prophecy and the role of spirits—by connecting the charac- ters to the Kibitsu Shrine. In “A Serpent’s Lust,” he imbeds the Chinese-inspired story line in the context of Japanese legends about storied places: Kumano, Yoshino, and Dojoji. In these carefully chosen settings, Akinari’s characters reveal distinctive personalities, unlike the characters in his Chinese sources. As Robert Ford Campany has pointed out, the authors of Chinese anomaly accounts were not concerned with “the ‘inner’ nature (xing of intellectual and emotional disposition, nor the structure of the self’s ascent toward perfection through self-cultivation, but pre- cisely humankind’s taxonomic place among other kinds of beings, the nature of its relationships to other kinds.”40 In Moonlight and Rain, by contrast, it is precisely the charac- ters’ inner natures—saga, the reading in Japanese of the character read xing in Chinese—that concerned Akinari, as

Image has been suppressed

16 introduction

Uzuki Hiroshi emphasizes in his commentaries.41 Donald Keene makes the same point: “The very fact that one can describe Katsushiro’s character places him in an altogether different category from Chao or Seiroku [who correspond to Katsushiro in the Chinese and Japanese antecedents to “The Reed-Choked House”], neither of whom displays any distinctive traits.”42

narrating the strange

Moonlight and Rain has been called a collection of “ghost stories,”43 “gothic tales,”44 and “tales of the supernatural.”45 In Japanese, they are called kaidan; indeed, the edition of 1776 includes the subtitle Kinko [present and past] kaidan. As Reider says, “Kaidan are tales of the strange and mys- terious, supernatural stories often depicting the horrific and gruesome,” and the word kaidan means “narrating the strange.”46 No one would argue with “strange and mysteri- ous,” but “supernatural” is probably an inappropriate word, since what is considered to be supernatural in one culture is regarded as merely strange—but natural—in another.47 Belief in revenants, spirit possessions, and other phenom- ena that we might call “supernatural” was widespread in eighteenth-century Japan and was apparently shared by Akinari.48 If the term “supernatural” is inappropriate, so is “fantastic,” as defined by Tzvetan Todorov, because “the basis of the fantastic is . . . the ambiguity as to whether the weird event is supernatural or not,”49 and such ambiguity is absent in Akinari’s world. “Strange” and “anomalous,” words that have been used in the study of Chinese stories, are more useful when discussing Moonlight and Rain.50

Strange beings abound in Japanese art, folklore, and liter- ature. They include kami (Shinto deities); spirits, deities, and divine beings from other traditions, such as Buddhist and Chinese lore; spirits of humans, living or dead, that can pos-