Mandarins (30 page)

Late Heian-period Japan saw the rise of such warrior clans and their usurpation in all but name of imperial authority. The characters in the story are Kesa, a court lady married to Minamoto no Wataru, and End
ō
Morit
ō
, a guard in the palace of the retired emperor.

In the original version, Kesa's mother, Morit
ō
's aunt, has lived in the northeast, in the Minamoto enclave of Koromogawa, hence the name by which she is called. She returns to the the Heian capital, where she resides in straitened circumstances with her beautiful daughter. At the age of fourteen, Kesa is wed to Wataru. Three years later, at the dedication of a bridge, Morit
ō
catches a furtive glimpse of her through the bamboo screen of her carriage and is infatuated. Morit
ō
rebukes his aunt for not having given Kesa to him and even threatens to kill her.

Kesa, as suggested by her name, referring to a Buddhist monk's modest
surplice, is a paragon of fidelity and self-sacrifice. In order to save her mother, Kesa yields to her cousin and then, fearful for her husband's life as well, pretends to contrive with Morit
ō
to kill him. Wetting her long hair and tying it up into a knot to make herself resemble a man, she lies in Wataru's bed; Morit
ō
stealthily enters and, intending to cut off his rival's head, slays instead his beloved. When he realizes what he has done, he is mad with grief and remorse. He wanders about with Kesa's head until, renouncing the world, he becomes a Buddhist ascetic.

Morit
ō
is known to history by his priestly name, Mongaku. Later a sometime associate of Minamoto no Yoritomo, the first Kamakura shogun, he is thought to have died in the early thirteenth century.

The story of Kesa's fate has been dramatized many times, notably in Kinugasa Teinosuke's 1953 film
Jigokumon
(
Gate of Hell
). The female role is played by Ky
ō
Machiko, who also appears in Kurosawa's
Rash
ō
mon
.

Japanese Buddhism is replete with tales of black-hearted sinners who, seeing at last the evil of their ways, embark on the arduous path to sainthood. In his retelling of this story, Akutagawa not only alters details but also narrows the focus. Clearly, he is more interested in damnation than redemption, as he probes the complex motives not only of Morit
ō
but also of Kesa—none of which is touched upon in the original version. Here Kesa is driven to adultery not by sacrificial love for others but rather by despair, vanity, and strangely ambivalent feelings toward Morit
ō
. Her mother becomes, in Akutagawa's version, an incidental aunt. The tale thus offers an ironic twist on the star-crossed lover motif, a familiar theme in Japanese lore.

The language, no less than the psychology, is modern, the story containing lexical concepts introduced only after the beginning of the Meiji era. The Sino-Japanese word
ai
‘love', for example, which Akutagawa uses with striking frequency, traditionally referred primarily to affection, attachment, or (in Buddhist terminology) carnal lust. Occurring once in Morit
ō
's soliloquy is the compound
ren'ai
, a Meiji-period coinage referring to romantic love. Morit
ō
and Kesa's musings about their true feelings and motives are thus couched in terms that are clearly and deliberately anachronistic.

In
Romeo and Juliet
, external miscommunication contributes to tragedy. In “Kesa and Morit
ō
,” intense introspection on the part of each character is juxtaposed with a disastrous misunderstanding of the other's thoughts and intentions. In that respect, the story may be seen as a forerunner of “In the Grove” and radical point-of-viewism.

Death of a Disciple (
H
ō
ky
ō
nin no Shi
)

In the late sixteenth century, Nagasaki, the setting of Akutagawa's story, the fortunes of the Christian community were dramatically shifting. In February of the following year, twenty-six believers, seventeen Japanese and nine missionaries were crucified in Nagasaki. It was only in 1873, less than twenty years before the birth of Akutagawa, that the Meiji government finally lifted its anti-Christian edicts. Akutagawa had a strong interest in the predominant faith of the West, as is reflected in many of his stories, even if his view of religion in general was ambivalent.

Despite Akutagawa's pseudo-documentary postscript, including his reference to the eighteenth-century
Chronicles of Port Nagasaki (Nagasaki-minato-gusa) The Death of a Disciple
is clearly fiction. (Though, for example, the thirteenth-century
Legenda Aurea
is clearly a real work, there is no edition to which descriptions of Japanese Christians have been added.) In fact, it may not be too much to say that the motifs here, albeit placed in the historical context of Japan's “Christian century,” reflect the influence of those early medieval Japanese folktales that inspired some of the writer's most famous stories. The saintly figure of Lorenzo would be quite at home in the Buddhist tales of
Konjaku Monogatari
. Indeed, he is first described even by the Christians of Nagasaki as a
tend
ō
, a strictly Buddhist term, referring to fierce guardian deities disguised as boys. Akutagawa's comments at the end of the narration may be seen as an imitation (or parody) of the moralizing didacticism with which those stories inevitably conclude. The word translated into English as ‘depravity'—
bonn
ō
—is itself the rendition of a Sanskrit Buddhist term:
klesa
.

In particular, the surprise ending points to a m
é
lange of traditions. In
the minds of the story's first readers, Lorenzo would surely have evoked a non-Christian figure with a nonetheless specifically Christian association: Kannon. A well-known subterfuge of the “hidden Christians” during the centuries of persecution was to use images of this enormously popular bodhisattva (cf. “Fortune”) to represent the Virgin Mary. Kannon, as it happens, was originally male, becoming female along the journey to Japan from India via China. In a story that was surely known to Akutagawa, she is born Miào-Shàn, the daughter of a rich king in Sumatra, who seeks to thwart her in her desire to become a Buddhist nun, even to the point of setting fire to the temple in which she resides. She miraculously puts out the flames but in the end is put to death.

For this story, published in September 1918 (
Mita Bungaku
[Mita Literature]), Akutagawa adopts a form of late medieval Japanese appropriate to the period. Along with Greco-Latin
ecclesia
, there is also a generous sprinkling of Portuguese borrowings. Nearly all have a specifically Christian reference, e.g.
zencho
(from
gentio
) ‘Gentile', and so, unlike such everyday terms as
pan
‘bread' (from
pão
) and
kappa
‘raincoat' (from
capa
), were as archaic or obsolete in Akutagawa's day as they are today. In the Japanese title of the short story, the word for ‘disciple' (
h
ō
ky
ō
nin
), lit. ‘one who serves the Church /the faith', has likewise long since fallen out of ordinary use.

1
This Japanese version of
Guia do Peccador
(
Guide for Sinner
) was apparently published in 1599. The Keich
ō
era extended from 1596 to 1615.

O'er a Withered Moor (
Karenosh
ō
)

Bash
ō
‘banana plant' is the sobriquet adopted by the poet born Matsuo Kinsaku in 1644. In the West, he is doubtlessly the best-known composer of the seventeen-syllable verse form (5-7-5) that has subsequently come to be called haiku. Also widely read, both in Japanese and in translation, is his travel diary of 1689,
Oku no Hosomichi
(
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
).

A native of Ueno, Iga Province (now Mie Prefecture), in central Japan, Bash
ō
had been living in Edo for some eight years when in 1680 he moved to a hut on the outskirts of the city. Hitherto known by the nom de plume of T
ō
sei ‘peach blue', he renamed himself for the banana plant that a student
had given him. In the spring of 1680 or 1681, accompanied by his disciple Enomoto Kikaku, he composed his most famous, oft-cited, structurally ambiguous, and therefore barely translatable poem. About it, written when the melancholic Bash
ō
had begun to practice Zen, enough ink has been spilled to fill more than a pond:

In the autumn of 1684, Bash
ō
began the first of his journeys, first traveling from Edo to Ueno, then to Nara, Ogaki, and Ky
ō
to. The following year, having returned to Edo, he published
Nozarashi no kik
ō
(tr.
Records of a Weather-beaten Skeleton
), from which the last verse cited by Akutagawa is drawn. Having recently lost his mother, Bash
ō
, already forty and never in very good health, was conscious of his own mortality.

Toward the end of his journey of 1689, as he passed southward through Kanazawa on the Sea of Japan, he sought to meet a fellow poet, Issh
ō
, whom he only knew from correspondence. On learning that he had died at the end of the previous year, Bash
ō
visited his grave, composing another renowned verse, the second of the three cited by Akutagawa.

Bash
ō
resided in Ky
ō
to for two years before returning once more to Edo. Then in the summer of 1694 he set off again for the west but fell ill with dysentery in
Ō
saka and died. The date according to the modern calendar is November 28, 1694. His death verse, cited at the beginning of Akutagawa's story, is nearly as familiar to Japanese as that of the pond, the frog, and the sound of the water.

Though still a revered figure in Akutagawa's time, Bash
ō
had also come under attack by the poet and critic Masaoka Tsunenori (1867–1902), known by his pen name, Shiki. He in turn was a close friend of Akutagawa's mentor, the renowned novelist Natsume S
ō
seki, whose premature death in 1916 at the age of forty-nine clearly contributed to the background of “O'er a Withered Moor,” published in October 1918 (
Shinsh
ō
setsu
[New Fiction]). The story should thus be read not as hagiography but rather as the writer's own intensely personal meditation.

The story makes mention of
haikai
and
hokku
. The former refers both
to what would now be called haiku and to
haikai no renga
‘linked verse', the latter to the initial stanza (5-7-5) of such. As this had long been used as a poem in itself, Shiki advocated the use of a distinct term, hence haiku, which has been generalized in Japan and internationalized abroad.

1
Tabi ni yande/ yume wa kareno wo / kake-meguru
.

2
Sometime between four and five in the afternoon.

3
The Buddhist custom of wetting the lips of the dying (or sometimes of the deceased) survives to the present day. A “plumed stick” (
hane-y
ō
ji
) was used both for administering medicine and, by married women, for applying tooth-blackener.

4
Tsuka mo ugoke/ waga naku koe wa/ aki no kaze
.

5
Nozarashi wo/ kokoro ni kaze no/ shimu mi kana
.

6
In reality, Inenb
ō
outlived his master by nearly fifteen years.

The Garden (
Niwa
)

In Edo-period Japan, there were five main highways, converging in Nihonbashi, near what is now the Imperial Palace in T
ō
ky
ō
. The busiest and best-known of these was the T
ō
kaid
ō
(East Sea Road), celebrated in And
ō
Hiroshige's woodblock prints. All were administered by the central government, whose strict and precise regulations covered everything from road maintenance to traveler accommodations. The great lords of the provinces, obliged by the shogunate to spend alternate years in the capital, journeyed to and fro with large retinues, spending their nights at the best and most prestigious inns of the post-station towns: the
honjin
(‘headquarters').

In the original, Akutagawa identifies the Nakamuras' inn as one of the
honjin
, and while he does not directly name the highway, numerous clues point to Nakasend
ō
(‘Central Mountain Road'), whose semicircular route passed through what are now Saitama, Gunma, Nagano, and Shiga prefectures. First, there is the mention of Princess Kazu (1846–77), who in 1862 was betrothed to Sh
ō
gun Iemochi and sent from the old imperial capital to Edo, now T
ō
ky
ō
, on a long and difficult journey along the Nakasend
ō
, accompanied by a party of ten thousand. Then there is the mention of the
mendicant poet Seigetsu, an actual historical figure. Moreover, the elements of dialogue that appear in the story are all consistent with dialects spoken in the mountainous Ch
Å«
bu region, specifically what is now Nagano Prefecture. The small stream that the second son sets out to dig is, for example, called a
senge
, a local word. The song that the grandmother sings likewise refers to events that took place in this same region.