[In the following excerpt, Frank discusses Akinari's work as part of the Western Gothic tradition.]

The writings of the eighteenth-century Japanese Gothicist Ueda Akinari confirm the presence of the Gothic spirit in oriental literature. All of the traditional features of the genre are firmly embedded in Akinari's tales of terror, with a special place given to the psychological monstrosities of the dream life and the intrusion of the malicious supernatural into human lives at their most vulnerable moments. The residue of feudalism and bushido codes of Japanese culture in the eighteenth century provide that sense of enclosure and entrapment crucial to the evocation of Gothic fear. The superiority of evil to goodness in Akinari's Gothic work links him with Western Gothicism at its most pessimistic extremes. According to Akinari's modern translator Leon Zolbrod, “The form that Akinari helped to perfect led to a species of historical romance similar to the Gothic novel in the West. Although Akinari's ghosts and otherworldly creatures show an animal nature that defied control and mastery, they have neither the bleeding skulls nor luminous hands of the spirits of Gothic novels; nor are they headless apparitions clad in armour or eerie forms extending phosphorescent claws toward the victim's throat. Rather, they are at once more primitive and more modern” (Tales of Moonlight and Rain 53-54). While his characters are often menaced by supernatural forces, it is their psychological and spiritual peril that links Akinari's Gothicism to primitive and modern monstrosity.

Early in the twentieth century, Akinari's place in the Gothic tradition was recognized by the orientalist Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo, 1850-1904), who included two Akinari tales in A Japanese Miscellany (1901). More recently, his Gothic virtuosity has been admired and praised by Yukio Mishima (1925-1970), whose sensational ritual suicide in 1970 might have been borrowed from one of Akinari's lurid plots. Currently gaining in popularity with general readers as well as students of Gothic fiction, his works remained almost unknown and untranslated in the West until the appearance of a monographic assessment by Pierre Humbertclaude in 1940.

Akinari's life was filled with mystery, misery, rejection, and physical affliction. He was born in Osaka in 1734, possibly in a bordello, to a woman who may have been a prostitute. The stigma of illegitimacy would mar him for life. Rejected by his mother, he was adopted by Ueda Masuke, a former samurai who had become a paper dealer. He contracted smallpox, which left him marked for life by a crippling deformity of the middle finger of the right hand. The digital deformity accounts for Akinari's occasional use of the pen name “Senshi Kijin” (Mr. Oddfinger). Never having known his real father, Akinari thought of himself as a pariah stigmatized by disease and doomed to misfortune. Such a stance accounts for the pathological tone of many of the narrators as well as the recurrence of mutilation and youthful failure in the tales. As a young man, he developed an interest in haiku poetry, signing his own compositions with the pseudonym “Mucho.” The muted quality of the three-line haiku verse form was later reflected in the style of the Gothic pieces, particularly in the understated horror of the climaxes. In 1760, he married Ueyama Tama and in 1766 published his first book, a collection of “naughty” character profiles, Shodo kikimimi sekenzaru [Worldly Apes with a Smattering of Various Arts]. This was followed in 1768 by the first Gothic work, nine stories collected under the title Ugetsu monogatari [Tales of Moonlight and Rain]. An elegant volume complete with woodcuts was later published in 1776. After his home and paper business in Osaka were destroyed by fire, Akinari moved to Kashima, where he began the study of medicine under the tutelage of Tsuga Teisho, a physician and writer of sophisticated, belletristic literature called yomihon. He returned to Osaka, practiced medicine, and there became preoccupied with classical literary study and serious writing in his determination to transcend his marked life by achieving artistic success. By 1788, he had abandoned his medical practice to devote himself wholly to literature, most especially tanka poetry (a thirty-one-syllable verse form also called waka). Total loss of sight in his left eye and visual problems hampered his work but deepened his Gothic vision of self and society. Impoverished and facing permanent blindness, he moved to Kyoto, where he contemplated suicide after the death of his wife in 1797. Possibly to forestall suicidal desires, Akinari began writing another Gothic short-story set, Harusame monogatari [Tales of the Spring Rain], finishing the manuscript in 1802. After a period of physical distress and intellectual inertia, he attempted to destroy all of his writings in 1807. He died two years later in Kyoto at the age of seventy-five, unaware of the fact that Tales of Moonlight and Rain would soon be regarded in Japan as one of the most important prose works of the eighteenth century.

Each of the nine tales in Tales of Moonlight and Rain displays immediately identifiable Gothic occurrences, situations, conflicts, and characterization. Their settings are historical, with action placed in tenth- to seventeenth-century Japan, a medieval period of samurai warfare, social disorder, and imperial intrigue. Akinari's management of malign supernatural forces etched against the blood-stained canvas of feudal history was influenced to some extent by the Chinese supernatural tales in Ch'ien tang hsin hua [New Tales for Lamplight], in which the cultural and historical horrors of violent social transition figure prominently. The severe and simple style of the tales also demonstrates the influence of the setsuwa, a Japanese story form rooted in fable, parable, and supernatural incident. Akinari was also familiar with the kusazoshi, the Japanese literary equivalent of the Gothic chapbook or rapid tale of terror.

Functioning as a symbol of the desire for permanence, peace, and stability, rain signifies throughout the tales that form of innocence that precedes any deep contact with evil, while moonlight signifies the sinister illumination of experience, a knowledge often accompanied by death, madness, or psychic torment. In many of the tales, the precarious balance of good and evil is often tipped in evil's favor as Akinari depicts moments of dark enlightenment when rain yields to moonlight. Within this general symbolic context, three characteristic Gothic motifs empower the stories and link them to one another in a chain of supernatural cause and effect. The perilous or fatal journey during which the characters undergo an unexplainable supernatural experience is a story pattern found in several of the nine tales. A pestilential or pathological atmosphere fraught with spectral depictions of disease is common to many of the pieces. Confining spaces charged with phantasmic energy “where demons might appear and consort with men, and humans fear not to mingle with spirits” (114) are deployed throughout Akinari's closed Gothic world. Within the framework of the dark journey, the terrible place, and palsied universe are to be found most of the horrific objects and conditions of mainstream Western Gothicism, including cadaverous confrontation, psychotic retrospection, imminent mutilation by architectural forces, torture, ghostly assaults, gruesome prophecies, peripatetic corpses, haunted abodes presided over by restless spirits, madness, murder, erotic sadism, satanic transformation, demonic dominance and possession, necrophagia or corpse eating, and psychotic pleasure in pain. Several of the nocturnal climaxes in Akinari's tales have close psychological and stylistic parallels with the night scenes in Poe's homicidal and suicidal fantasies.

“White Peak,” the opening story in Tales of Moonlight and Rain, is a tale of demonic encounter, dark prophecy, and an awakening to the power of evil. Out of a kind of Faustian curiosity and desire for contact with the demonic world, the poet-narrator conjures up the phantom of the emperor Sutoku (reigned 1123-1141) by chanting a cabalistic verse. The imperial ghost delivers a hideous account of his potency, informing the narrator that it is “I who have recently caused all of the trouble in the world” (100) and accusing him of a selfish ignorance of the ways of the world. Centuries ago, the emperor had written an oath in blood, thrown the sutras or scriptural precepts into the sea, and denounced humankind to become “a king of Evil.” “I finally became a great king of Evil, head of the more than 300 kinds of demons. Every time my band sees happiness, they turn it into misery. Whenever they see the country at peace, they cause war” (100). His satanic revelation climaxes in his gruesome metamorphosis into a hawklike being. Now realizing his peril of soul, the narrator dispels the king of evil with another charm, but recollecting the bloody history of the realm, the narrator has to admit the power of the demon emperor and, by extension, his own and every man's involvement with the evil of the world. Now wiser, the poet-narrator knows and will build on the knowledge that “what he related was as terrifying as it was mysterious” (108).

“The Cauldron of Kibitsu” is a story of appalling spectral revenge taken by a dead wife upon her unfaithful husband. Akinari uses the familiar Gothic situation of the ghost vigil along with some precisely installed Gothic acoustics in the form of a single “scream of bloodcurdling intensity” (159) to dramatize a dark truth about the human heart. The dissolute and unfaithful Shotaro has a posthumous rendezvous with Isora, whose spirit has been lurking about his house for forty-one nights. The dire consequences of his adultery and the supernatural power of the phantom spouse have been ominously foreshadowed by the silent boiling of the cauldron at the shrine of Kibitsu. On the forty-second night of his vigil, his friend Hikoroku hears Shotaro shout in agony (the tale's single scream), then vanish. As a grisly memento of her return and revenge, Isora has left on display atop the house eaves “nothing else than a bleeding head torn and mangled. This was the only trace of Shotaro that remained” (160). Like the formalized violence of a No theater scene, the bloody head illuminated by Hikoroku's raised torch highlights the tale's moral by showing “the power of the supernatural. Thus, the story has been handed down” (160). Such abrupt, unrelieved horror has led some commentators to point out the closeness in method between Akinari's horror tableaux and the formalized violence of the No drama.

The longest tale in the set, “The Lust of the White Serpent,” should remind Western readers of the legend of the snake that inhabits a human body, a “bosom serpent” as in Hawthorne's gruesome fantasy “Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent.” Akinari gives another snake figure shared by many folklores, the Lamia or serpent lady, an especially grotesque vitality in his descriptions of the tale's fatal woman, Manago. Encountering her in a storm and giving her his umbrella, the naïve young man, Toyoo, finds himself entangled in her guileful coils. Giving him an antique sword, Manago proposes to the young man, pledging “a thousand years of love with you” (166). Invading Toyoo's life in a ghostly manner, she works her will upon him until he is tormented to the point of obsession by the beautiful demon and begs for release from an old Buddhist priest. He marries Tomiko, thinking that taking a natural mate might expel the evil spirit of the snake-woman, but the effect is the opposite when Tomiko's voice and appearance change to “unmistakably that of Manago” (179). When a priest tries to seize and destroy her, she asserts her power over men by transforming herself into an enormous serpent.

No sooner did he open the door of the sleeping chamber, than a demon thrust its head out at the priest. The projecting extremity was so huge that it filled the doorway, gleaming even whiter than newly fallen snow, with eyes like mirrors and horns like the bare bows of a tree. The creature opened its mouth more than three feet wide; its crimson tongue darted, as if to swallow the priest in a single gulp.

(180)

In a final effort to free himself from his snake-bride, Toyoo throws a monk's robe over Manago to smother her, but upon removing the robe “there lay Tomiko, unconscious, with a white serpent more than three feet in length coiled motionlessly on her breast” (183). The Lamia's victory over human love is complete. Like the “Horla” in Maupassant's tale of demonic possession by a deadly creature or like the invasion of the Lady Rowena's body by Ligeia, the strength of the vampiric woman or “conqueror worm” in beautiful disguise is reaffirmed by the remorseless climax.

The story in the set that most resembles the monastic horrors of many eighteenth-century Gothic novels is “The Blue Hood,” a parable of dark enlightenment. When the Zen Buddhist priest Kaian Zenji pauses at the mountain hamlet of Tomita, he is mistaken by the frightened residents for the mountain demon, a mad Buddhist abbot who fell in love with a boy, then devoured his corpse after the boy's death. Akinari's description of the abbot's corpse feast is a loathsome horror photograph. “Then, refusing to allow the body to rot and decay, he sucked the flesh and licked the bones until he utterly devoured it. ‘The abbot has turned into a devil,’ the people in the temple said, and they all fled” (188). After his bestialization by the taste of human flesh, the abbot becomes a ghoul who raids and cannibalizes the villagers. Like Matthew Gregory Lewis's Ambrosio in The Monk, he is changed by sexual lust into a monster. “Once he descended into the sinful path of lust and covetousness, he was changed into a demon, and he fell victim to the flames of the fires in the hell of delusion. This probably came to pass because of his self-righteous and arrogant nature” (192). Deciding to rid the mountain of the monster, Kaian Zenji goes alone to the ruined temple where the abbot lurks in mad solitude. Giving him his blue-dyed hood, Kaian Zenji recites a gnostic verse for the reclamation of the abbot's soul. After a year, Kaian revisits the ruined temple, there to encounter the abbot's wraith, now a living ghost that continually chants the salvational stanzas. When Kaian strikes him with his Zen rod, the figure vanishes, “leaving only the blue hood and a skeleton lying in the weeds. At this instant the monk probably overcame his stubborn attachment to evil. Surely a divine principle was in operation” (193). Allegorically, the tale deals with the salvational power of art over the savagery of human nature and is rare among Akinari's stories in its moralized depiction of the triumph of goodness over evil and the human over the inhuman.

Two stories in the collection Tales of the Spring Rain, “The Smiling Death's-Head” and “The Grave of Miyagi,” are tales of passion with strong Gothic overtones in atmosphere and characterization. In contrast to the gruesome supernatural content of most of the pieces in Tales of Moonlight and Rain, these tales achieve their effect by a concentration on the morbid beauty of death. In fact, several of the tales may be read as extended epitaphs with minimal supernatural action but a great deal of supernatural reverie. The narrator of “The Grave of Miyagi,” a poet, has come to Kanzaki near Osaka to trace the legend and locate the grave of the prostitute Miyagi. Her lover, Jutabei, had been poisoned, and she had been made the sexual slave of his murderer, Fujidayu. She ended her tragic life with a prayer to Buddha and a leap into the sea. Now her soul is elegized by the poet, whose quest after her memory finally brings him to a “stone monument scarcely the width of an outspread fan. Thus I wrote, paying homage to the soul of Miyagi. I have heard that now not a trace remains of her grave, for it was thirty years ago that I wrote the poem” (Tales of the Spring Rain 154). As may be seen, Akinari's Gothicism in this tale is lyric and not episodic, its mood celebrating the joy that resides in sorrow itself.

In the almost naturalistic story “The Smiling Death's-Head,” a father's avarice destroys his son's happiness, and a brother murders his sister to prevent his family honor from being tainted. The saki brewer Gosoji is determined to block the love match between his son, Gozo, and the beautiful Mune simply because “she hasn't any money” (102). Complicating the conflict between father and son is Motosuke, Mune's honor-driven brother. When Gozo brings Mune into Gosoji's house as his bride, the stage is set for the tale's Gothic resolution. Abruptly and without warning, Motosuke intervenes. “‘She is your wife. She must die in your house.’ With these words, he drew his sword and struck off his sister's head. Gozo lifted up Mune's severed head and wrapped it in his kimono sleeve. Not letting fall a single tear, he started to walk out of the gate” (109). Following a trial for murder, the three men are banished and dispossessed of all wealth, while the legend of the severed head of Mune, a head that “retains even in death its brave smile and courageous expression” (112), is absorbed into the legends of the district. Although Akinari's use of the living head lacks the horrific impact of the screaming skull of a Western Gothic writer like F. Marion Crawford, he nevertheless succeeds in inspiring the fear, awe, and wonder that lie at the heart of Gothic beauty.

The dramatic and episodic Gothicism of Tales of Moonlight and Rain is counterpointed by the lyric and reflective Gothicism of Tales of the Spring Rain. Both sets of stories establish Ueda Akinari as a Gothic innovator worthy of the attention of all modern readers who are interested in the persistence of the Gothic in non-Western cultures. Akinari's influence on the development of a Japanese Gothic tradition is registered in the work of Izumi Kyoka (1873-1939), whose masterful short stories of the Meiji period (1868-1912) have been compared with Poe's tales. Four recently translated Kyoka stories, “The Surgery Room,” “The Holy Man of Mount Koya,” “One Day in Spring,” and “Osen and Sokichi,” clearly show the influence of Ueda Akinari on his Gothic successors as an inspirational model.

In the two prefaces to the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole advised his readers to expect to find the characters in “extraordinary positions” and further indicated that his Gothic tale would provide “a constant vicissitude of interesting passions.” Walpole's criteria for Gothic liminality are repeatedly applied with astonishing force in the demonized universe of Japan's Ueda Akinari.