Tales of Moonlight and Rain

Akinari Ueda, Anthony Chambers

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780231511247
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1776, the nine gothic tales in this collection are Japan's finest and most celebrated examples of the literature of the occult. They subtly merge the world of reason with the realm of the uncanny and exemplify the period's fascination with the strange and the grotesque. They were also the inspiration for Mizoguchi Kenji's brilliant 1953 film Ugetsu.

The title Ugetsu monogatari (literally "rain-moon tales") alludes to the belief that mysterious beings appear on cloudy, rainy nights and in mornings with a lingering moon. In "Shiramine," the vengeful ghost of the former emperor Sutoku reassumes the role of king; in "The Chrysanthemum Vow," a faithful revenant fulfills a promise; "The Kibitsu Cauldron" tells a tale of spirit possession; and in "The Carp of My Dreams," a man straddles the boundaries between human and animal and between the waking world and the world of dreams. The remaining stories feature demons, fiends, goblins, strange dreams, and other manifestations beyond all logic and common sense.

The eerie beauty of this masterpiece owes to Akinari's masterful combination of words and phrases from Japanese classics with creatures from Chinese and Japanese fiction and lore. Along with The Tale of Genji and The Tales of the Heike, Tales of Moonlight and Rain has become a timeless work of great significance. This new translation, by a noted translator and scholar, skillfully maintains the allure and complexity of Akinari's original prose.

INTRODUCTION

Tales of Moonlight and Rain (Ugetsu monogatari), nine stories 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 primarily with Akinari’s elegant prose—a model of literary Japanese 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 common sense.

Tales of Moonlight and Rain exerted a powerful influence in the twentieth century. Many novelists—including Izumi Kyōka (1873–1939), Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), Ishikawa Jun (1899–1987), Enchi Fumiko (1905–1986), and Mishima Yukio (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 (Warring 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 Bashō (1644–1694), and the dramatist Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1724).

The period we are most concerned with here, the eighteenth 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 education 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 numbers 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 Senjirō 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 Yamato 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 fingers malformed, the young Akinari had a comfortable childhood and received a good education, possibly at the Kaitokudō, one of the most prominent of the new schools chartered by the government to provide “an appropriately practical Confucian 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 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 pastime, 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, including 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 marriage but had no children. Akinari’s adoptive father died in 1761, leaving to Akinari the family business and the responsibility for supporting himself, his new bride, and his adoptive mother, to whom he was devoted. They lost their business and all their belongings to a fire in 1771, after which Akinari turned to the study of medicine, probably under Tsuga Teishō (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 scholarship, teaching, and writing. How he supported his family during these years is unclear; he may have lived on accumulated 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 the eighteenth-century bunjin—a nonconformist, independent 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 characters 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 Chinese models and much to the ukiyo zōshi (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 collections of stories in this genre, Shodō 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 zōshi.¹³ Akinari 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 Katō Umaki (1721–1777), a disciple of the great nativist scholar Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769). This led him to abandon the ukiyo zōshi 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’yōshū (Collection of Myriad Leaves, ca. 759), the oldest anthology of Japanese poetry; and the Kokinshū (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 continued over a number of years and on various subjects, with the most noted of the National Learning scholars, Motoori Norinaga (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 interpretative, 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 ...