[In the following essay, Araki offers an overview of criticism of Akinari's tales and an analysis of the structural techniques the author employed in Tales of Moonlight and Rain.]

1 A SURVEY OF CRITICAL APPROACHES

Ueda Akinari aspired to distinction as a poet and classical scholar. His reputation in Japanese literary history today, however, rests almost exclusively on his genius as a writer of short stories—particularly of the Ugetsu monogatari (Tales of the Misty Moon), a collection of nine short mysterious tales which he completed probably in 1768. Those in the West who have read the Ugetsu monogatari in translation¹ may have felt that some of the tales are curiously composed, and may have questioned their excellence. Apparent even in translation is a diversity among the nine tales in their structural characteristics and style. The reader of translations may understandably find greater enjoyment in those tales which exhibit traits considered admirable in tales and short stories in the West. Nevertheless, another tale which violates Western dicta on “economy of means,” “unity,” and so forth may receive greater acclaim among the Japanese for the likely reason of its appeal to tastes that have been fashioned by literary and historical traditions quite different from our own. If the reasons for their choice of tales were known to us, we should be enlightened considerably about Japanese tastes.

An appeal to the judgment of the literary historians of Japan will be of little avail in this instance, however, for a tale that may be estimable in the opinions of some may be the object of dispraise by others. Such disagreements have been due to differences in personal taste, as well as differences on the criteria applied in their evaluations—criteria ranging from those based largely on traditional standards of appreciation to those utilizing canons borrowed from recent Western criticism. Evaluations by Western specialists on Japanese literature have also varied depending on the specialist's area of personal preference on this critical spectrum.² Indeed, my own critical reactions to the tales have varied through the years, for my criteria are being constantly modified as I gain in familiarity with traditional modes of storytelling.

The correlating of Akinari's personality with the success of his tales has long been standard fare in studies of the Ugetsu monogatari. We have been told that the tales are verbal extensions of the author's psychological activities, or that Akinari's belief in the supernatural or else his melancholy, misanthropic nature enabled him to produce masterful tales of mystery and suspense.³ We may be reminded of similar associations made between an author's idiosyncrasies and his apparent predilection for morbid themes—in particular, Poe and Akutagawa, both of whom were master literary craftsmen. This critical approach is epitomized in remark by Shigetomo Ki, with reference to the final scene depicted in “Kibitsu no kama” (“The Divining Cauldron of Kibitsu”):

How could anyone contrive to depict the mysterious so superbly? Yet Akinari did. Since this cannot be explained solely in terms of technique, where can we find an explanation? In view of the presence of mysterious, phantasmic, and psychic elements in his life—a life affirmed by his belief in the supernatural—would it not be reasonable to consider this a manifestation of his expansive fantasy? Can we not regard it as the revelation of the most fearful scene he was capable of imagining—a scene which, at the instant of imagination, thrilled him with terror? Should we concede this, we would have to admit that only such as he, who lived in fantasy, could have done so.⁴

Had Ueda Akinari not produced the Ugetsu monogatari, the seeming darkness of his personality would hardly have attracted the attention of those who later were to study him; and, as a matter of fact, it did not up to the 1920's while researchers were concerned primarily with his poetry and scholarly writings. Fortunately Akinari has left us sufficient autobiographical material⁵ to permit some exploration into his personal nature. His essays and studies reveal a mind that is intuitive, imaginative, and poetic, and in some respects more rational (perhaps “modern”) and freer from traditions than his contemporaries. His personality did not remain static. During his youth he had lived gregariously and savored copiously the life in the “floating world” of teahouses and brothels. At the time of his writing the Ugetsu monogatari, Akinari was a gentleman-scholar of thirty-four, with both the resources and leisure at his disposal to freely pursue his scholarly and artistic endeavors. He was hardly the shrunken, vituperative misanthrope he appears to have been in his old age. To be sure, he bore minor physical deformities caused by smallpox contracted when he was a child of four; and he was throughout his life a devout patron of the Kashima Inari Shrine, where his adoptive parents had prayed for his deliverance from the often fatal malady.⁶ But the expression of gratitude for a miraculous cure can hardly be interpreted as a mark of the inveterately superstitious in a traditional society. Though we might assume that the accident of his illness modified his regard for the supernatural, there is little else in his biography up to the writing of the Ugetsu monogatari to suggest any peculiar fascination in the morbid or fantastic.⁷

Asō Isoji has described the excellence of Akinari's tales solely in terms of the author's mastery of the craft of storywriting, but an evaluational summary such as his, based entirely on the knowable, has been the exception.⁸ Many who have studied Akinari have suggested that the tales of Ugetsu were fashioned by a mind steeped in unhappiness and pessimism. There was no precluding such conjecture so long as the question, “When did Ueda Akinari actually write the Ugetsu monogatari?” remained unanswered. The preface to the collection of tales is dated 1768—Akinari was then thirty-four—whereas the anthology was published eight years later, in 1776. The less skeptical among literary historians have accepted the date in the preface, as have some others owing simply to a distaste for speculation. Most others, however, have concluded either that the tales were composed shortly before their publication in 1776 or that the tales, had they been drafted in 1768, were revised considerably during the intervening eight years. Reasons, I might add, other than those based on vague notions of Akinari's psychological state have been proffered. Teruoka Yasutaka, for example, rather summarily dismissed the possibility of Akinari having composed tales in such masterful style only two years after his first introduction to the study of classical literature;⁹ Uzuki Hiroshi arrived at a similar assumptive point of view on the basis of a careful examination of scholarly manifestations in the tales.¹⁰ A precise dating remains of crucial concern to those whose interpretations of the Ugetsu tales have been influenced by a biographical assumption: that the author did not have the manuscript in its final form until after the seventeenth of the first month in 1771, on which day his home and business were destroyed by fire. Very suddenly shorn of his customary means and leisure, Akinari hovered at the depth of despair and darkness; both his sociological outlook and psychological state registered dramatic changes, and the subsequent melancholy and bitterness worked their way into the contents of the Ugetsu monogatari—thus have reasoned those favoring the later dating.

Studies of the creative process in literature can be engaging, but surely they are meaningful only if the biographical data on which they are based are reasonably accurate. We may be reminded that even Leon Edel, among the more meticulous of literary biographers, has on one occasion, at least, correlated “Henry James's own haunted state” with the substance of his ghostly tale but instead, having relied on a slim sheaf of biographical misinformation, demonstrated that such associations, though seemingly natural, need not exist.¹¹ Students of Akinari were given cause recently at least to reflect on the possible dangers of basing literary interpretations on extraliterary propositions. Their attention was directed to a rather startling discovery—a printed announcement which, in the first month of 1771, heralded the “shortly forthcoming publication” of the Ugetsu monogatari; and now there were indications that the manuscript may have been ready for press and, perhaps, already set down in woodblocks in preparation for the printing before Akinari lost his home and source of income.¹² Unfortunately, we remain uninformed as to what occasioned the delay of five years before the tales were eventually published in 1776, and we may continue to be told how the brooding melancholy of the then distraught Akinari became the source of his literary inspiration.

It is gratifying to note, on the other hand, that one previously blackened area in the background of the author of the Ugetsu monogatari has been brightened up considerably by new information. Akinari's own remarks concerning his parentage suggested that his was an illegitimate birth. Biographical sketches of Akinari often begin with a statement that his mother was a prostitute; Akinari himself had known that it was so rumored, but in his memoirs he neither confirms nor denies the allegation. By whom he was sired remained anyone's guess until the introduction in 1959 of new documentary evidence that could eliminate much of the stigma attached to his pedigree. A passage pertaining to Akinari in the memoirs of the Confucian scholar Rai Shunsui (1746-1816) revealed that Akinari was fathered by a scion of a prominent samurai family and was born, although out of wedlock, to a woman from a family of some importance in present-day Nara Prefecture and, furthermore, that Akinari had been aware of his distinguished pedigree.¹³ Takada Mamoru made use of this new fragment of information in reconstructing the circumstances surrounding Akinari's birth, and all other pieces of the biographical puzzle fell neatly into place. As a result, Takada could state with some assurance that Ueda Akinari was a grandson of the eminent shogun retainer Kobori Masamine (died 1760), who was descended from Kobori Enshū (1579-1647), celebrated in his time as a warrior, designer of gardens, and a master of the tea ceremony.¹⁴ Because the statement pertaining to Akinari was recorded several years after his death and, furthermore, was possibly sourced in hearsay, its reliability may be challenged.

The tenor of critical remarks has remained relatively unchanged through the years. We do note, however, some shift in emphasis toward the view espousing literature as a vehicle for social criticism. Commenting also on the tale “Kibitsu no kama,” Uzuki Hiroshi much more recently attributed the success of the tale to the author's antifeudal and anti-Confucianist convictions, and he concluded, “The Ugetsu monogatari stands in golden prominence in the history of mystery fiction because it embodies a literary representation of the entire range of Akinari's thought and spirit.”¹⁵ We find similar-sounding evaluative statements incorporated into some editions of the Ugetsu monogatari designed as high school texts. Inasmuch as critical comments are practically nonexistent in these texts, the few that do appear will surely impress those who may some day specialize in fiction by Akinari. In one such text that has enjoyed at least a dozen reprintings since its initial publication in 1960, the editor concludes his introduction thus: “An especially noteworthy point [in evaluating the Ugetsu monogatari] is that the quality of mystery is not infused merely for the interest of the reader; it is the product of a determination to achieve an ideal—to seek a release for emotions felt by the commoner and yet pent up within the oppressive framework of the feudal system of the Tokugawa government.”¹⁶ The relating of the success of Akinari's tales to his intention in producing them can be of biographical interest; furthermore, had there existed a direct relationship of this kind, the fact would tell us something about the author's creative process. But we are not at all certain whether Akinari was so motivated when he wrote the Ugetsu monogatari. True, he once commented explicitly on the purpose of fiction writing:

Writers of fiction occupy their thoughts with grief over their personal misfortune, their resentment of the present age, and their nostalgic yearning for the distant past. They see the country flourishing as do the flowers in full bloom and are reminded that all must eventually fade away. … Though they would write in order to enlighten those who would reach for the unobtainable treasure of immortality, they instead, for the sake of appearance, relate their thoughts through innocent tales that cannot be traced in ancient history.¹⁷

This, however, is a very general statement which he recorded some years after the Ugetsu monogatari was published, and we must agree that the causal relationship between his world view and his tales remains assumptive.

In the foregoing, I have focused principally on what seem to be among the negative aspects of native literary scholarship treating the Ugetsu monogatari. This was inevitable insofar as specialists treading in speculative areas have been the more outspoken. The native scholars and critics, I might add, have been among the first to recognize the often misty character of observations penned by literary historians who have ventured into criticism of traditional literature.¹⁸ Critical observations on the Ugetsu monogatari that are both precise and meaningful are more often found embedded within studies of fiction that are essentially descriptive rather than analytical—as in the instance of Asō's critique to which I referred earlier—and within some of the exegetical studies of Akinari's fiction. Nakamura Yukihiko's explicatory volume on the various writings of Akinari, for example, is very richly studded with evaluative statements derived from analytical processes.¹⁹ The fact that the book is addressed primarily to the nonspecialist may account for Mr. Nakamura's inclusion of illuminating critical observations, ostensibly to assist the general reader. I say this in view of the general reluctance among literary historians of Japan to engage in criticism or to regard criticism as a worthy subject in literary scholarship.

Literary historians of Japan have customarily given importance to detailed textual criticism and the exhaustive investigation of historical and literary sources as a means to achieving a total explication of works of literature; and this is reflected in past studies of Akinari's works. One can only marvel at the thoroughness of investigations which have uncovered the source of almost every conceivable theme and motif discernible in Akinari's tales. The less speculative sections of Shigetomo's study of the Ugetsu monogatari are veritable mines of such information.²⁰ Those who study the Ugetsu monogatari today are to be envied indeed, for the available products of research, each having been built upon the cumulative results of earlier endeavors,²¹ provide nearly all the basic information needed for a sure and complete understanding of the text. The task of literary analysis has been facilitated far beyond modest measure, and the useful scholar henceforth may conceivably be the one who will, as Helen Gardner advocates, uphold the critical torch in order to illuminate, elucidate, and assist the reader to discover the value which he himself discerns in the work.²²

May we look forward to evaluations of the Ugetsu monogatari that will be founded on the results of a full cycle of analyses? The answer depends much on how soon and how often the critical torch is lit in the study of traditional Japanese literature. The professional literary critic in Japan today practices rather exclusively in the area of journalism and confines himself almost entirely to criticism of modern fiction. University students majoring in literary history but with an interest in literary criticism are most often faced with a stultifying indirection. Some among the younger literary historians, aware of the importance given to criticism in Western literary scholarship and sensing themselves far removed from what they think ought to be the main current, are understandably restive. Some, in reacting against this predicament, have belittled the meticulous scholarship of their predecessors, and this seems unfortunate. We have heard similar outcries in the West.²³ Mr. Uzuki, incidentally, is now vocal in reproving what he calls the “retrogressive and mediocre nature of research in traditional Japanese literature” and the use of “methods in literary research that were current in the West an era ago.”²⁴ But it is to his credit that he has proceeded to contribute studies of individual tales in the Ugetsu monogatari and so evidence his recent preference for an internal frame of reference and an analytical approach to literary criticism.²⁵ For many in Japan have cast strictures against established modes of literary scholarship with no greater purpose than to advance whatever critical approach they themselves espouse.

Youthful aspirants to the academy may eventually contribute significant studies of the classics—of such works as the Ugetsu monogatari which, they contend, require restudy and re-evaluation. We may detect among them now, however, an aversion for proceeding in accordance with any approach that is apt to be labeled “orthodox” (to many, it means “old-fashioned”) and a penchant for discovering research objectives and procedures that will bestow on their efforts an aura of modernity. But the aspiration of each individual to achieve his own distinctive style of literary scholarship can lead to chaos. Yoshida Seiichi, the rare practising critic among established literary historians, may have had this in mind when he remarked on how often “research results that pass as articles in scholarly journals or as scholarly monographs are products of casual notions and do not represent results of careful and painstaking procedures.”²⁶ With regard to “modern” studies of the Ugetsu monogatari, one doctoral candidate was compelled to remark, “I recognize the presence [of the ‘modern’ commentators] … but the question is whether or not I can apprehend the presence of Ueda Akinari.”²⁷ Commenting on the literary quality of the Ugetsu monogatari, Noda Hisao, another scholar of note, sounds a warning about the potential inadequacies of critical judgments that rely excessively on insights gained through any one critical point of view:

[References to] Chinese tales, historical research, and ancient poetry are simply manifestations of the intellectual quality of the work. This work is clearly not of the order of light-minded contemporary fiction; it is fiction in which the tone of erudition is explicit, and intentionally so. The composing of the tales was, for Akinari, a pastime related to his scholarly endeavors; and he probably would have felt disappointed were this not fully appreciated. It is quite by design that the loftiness [of style] contributes to a heightening of the artistry of the tales. We can say this not only with regard to the tale “Kikka no chigiri” but to the Ugetsu monogatari as a whole. … Furthermore, it is clearly a case of overemphasis in analysis to regard the work as a piece of satirical or didactic literature by Akinari. The author's world view and personal nature are, of course, reflected in his literary work. But it seems that if one has taken only these to be the source of value, he has only superficially viewed an artistic work of literature. A work of beauty should stand as a thing of beauty. A thing of beauty evokes a response in people for its beauty. … The comprehension of its beauty is the only way this work may be appreciated.²⁸

Mr. Noda's emphatic regard for the quality of “beauty” should probably not be construed so much as an indication of a preference for yet another single critical procedure than an insistence that critics be concerned primarily with qualities that are evident within the work of art itself. He may have wished to remind us of the method of approach to the Ugetsu monogatari taught by Suzuki Toshiya, the earliest explicator of Akinari's tale who, more than thirty years ago, isolated these seven aspects of his critical subject for separate discussion: the “introduction” in which basic textual and publication data are presented, “sources of influences,” “synopses of the nine tales,” “plot elements,” “narrative structure,” “theme,” and “tone.”²⁹

The cumulative results of a recent series of studies on Ueda Akinari by Nakamura Yukihiko may, perhaps, be regarded as an exemplary product of a similarly well ordered approach. His studies are founded on a detailed knowledge of the voluminous writings of Akinari and, also, of sources, both literary and historical, that cast illumination on the Ugetsu monogatari and its author. His working with a vast range of literary sources led to his discovery, among others, of a set of haikai poems which Akinari composed during his youth; an assessment of Akinari as a haikai stylist has facilitated our tracing the development of his prose style.³⁰ Mr. Nakamura has preferred to limit each investigation to some specific aspect of his critical subject. His biographical description of Akinari, for example, stands as a model of clarity and conciseness in a presentation based on verifiable biographical information.³¹ His hypothesis on Akinari's theory on fiction writing is, again, based on a carefully selected set of statements recorded personally by Akinari.³² The critical comments in his volume, cited earlier, are much the more significant because they rest on a foundation of factual knowledge acquired through the exacting procedures of bunkengaku (philological research), a method of which some of his younger colleagues have been frankly contemptuous. He has also contributed a brief, essentially analytical study in which he discusses in very general terms the entire range of Akinari's prose.³³ What we should like to anticipate from Mr. Nakamura is a stylistic analysis of the Ugetsu monogatari that will be as full and penetrating as the one he did of a Saikaku novel,³⁴ or, better yet, a critical volume in which we shall find synthesized all the results of his many previous investigations of Akinari's prose fiction.

2 ANALYSIS OF AKINARI'S COMPOSITIONAL TECHNIQUES

A tale of mystery may be among the least likely in fiction to be accorded the status of a literary classic. The interest in plot is so overwhelming that, once read, it is not apt to inspire a rereading as, say Pride and Prejudice might for its appreciable levels of irony, or Ullman's The White Tower, for its pervasive atmosphere. The Gothic sense of pleasurable horror in a story can impart artistry to a tale of mystery, but this can wear thin on a second reading, even of a tale so masterfully constructed as Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

Although the Ugetsu monogatari was published less than two centuries ago, it seems to be as securely established among the classics in Japanese literature as is the Tale of Genji, composed a millennium ago. What to us may seem obvious, and serious, shortcomings in the Ugetsu monogatari as we read the tales in translation are mostly matters having to do with the composition of the tales. These apparent shortcomings, however, often are attractive elements insofar as native readers are concerned, and without which the tales would be insipid on rereading. What will remain obvious is that these elements are impediments to our achieving a “native” level of appreciation—which is, after all, an ideal to be sought in reading foreign literature. Many readers of Japanese consider Akinari's classical prose style the most attractive element of the Ugetsu monogatari. Although the vocabulary and peculiarities of sentence structure can be approximated in translation, the classical quality of the author's diction and grammatical style cannot be adequately reproduced for readers of the English, to whom this paper is addressed. I have chosen, therefore, not to touch upon those subtleties of style. The discussion following will focus primarily on the compositional techniques employed by Akinari, with particular reference given to the narrative structures of “Kikka no chigiri” (“The Vow of the Chrysanthemum”) and “Asaji ga yado” (“A Lodging amidst Shallow Reeds”), which represent partial adaptations from Chinese tales, and of “Buppōsō” (“The Buppōsō Bird”), generally considered the most original tale in the collection.³⁵

One evaluative assumption has already been set forth: structural elements which seem perplexing to us and, hence, require explication are very often the ingredients which, according to some native specialists, contribute effectively to the literary excellence of Akinari's tales. Two of the tales, “Kibitsu no kama” (“The Divining Cauldron of Kibitsu”) and “Jasei no in” (“The Lust of the Serpent's Spirit”), differ so little in their manner of composition from the usual Western tale of mystery that they do not seem to require special analysis here. I should like to cite Father Pierre Humbertclaude's evaluative remarks on some of the other Ugetsu tales, for they generally agree with appraisals by Japanese critics who have preferred to gauge traditional literature by contemporary standards. They represent a valid point of view and shall serve the purpose here of touching off a discussion of some of the traditional concepts of appreciation. With regard to “Kikka no chigiri” and “Asaji ga yado,” he wrote:

In “Kikka no chigiri,” the avenging of the death is an “hors d'oeuvre” from the point of view of unity of interest, even if the act is justified by the Japanese concept of friendship in which a death cannot remain unavenged. Where this ‘parasitism’ exceeds the limit is in “Asaji ga yado,” with its episode concerning Mama no Tekona that follows an already overextended dialogue with the old man.³⁶

The remark on “Kikka no chigiri” suggests that the act of vengeance at the conclusion of the tale is not necessarily a structural hors d'oeuvre to a reader familiar with Japanese traditions. The tale is about a vow made by an itinerant samurai that he would revisit his friend, a scholar, on a specified day a year hence. On the day of the rendezvous, the samurai is being held a political prisoner in distant province, in the custody of his treacherous cousin. Rather than violate the vow to return, he kills himself in the belief that the spirit can travel a thousand miles in a day. The highpoint of the story definitely is the unearthly reunion, when Samon, now waiting “alone in the light cast by the icy lunar ring … sees the figure of a man in the dim darkness, drifting hither with the wind.” But a denouement is necessary, and the motif of the vendetta provides a fitting conclusion to this tale on the theme of loyalty in friendship. “Kikka no chigiri” is an adaptation of the Chinese tale “Fan Chü-ch'ing Is Offered Chicken and Millet at a Meeting of the Dead and the Living.”³⁷ In the Chinese tale, Fan Chü-ch'ing is so preoccupied with his activities as a merchant that he simply lets the promised date slip from his mind. Akinari has improved upon the Chinese story by involving the samurai in a political intrigue, so that there is a cogent reason for his inability to return. In the Chinese tale, the survivor kills himself at the tomb of the dead and is honored as a paragon of the faithful friend. Akinari allows the grieved Samon to act honorably with the situation he has placed him in. In either tale the resolution seems appropriate.

We may note, on the other hand, that Akinari's tale begins in curious fashion, with this—a free translation of the opening passage of the Chinese model. It reads:

Do not plant in your garden the lustily green weeping willow of spring; and do not form personal ties with the perfidious. Although the river willow and weeping willow tend to luxuriate, will they endure even the early winds of autumn? The perfidious mixes easily with others but is quick [to leave and forget]. The willows become tinged with green on each recurring spring; the perfidious man will never again return.

The rather “Chinese” didactic preamble is a literary convention with which readers in Akinari's time were familiar, for they had already been exposed to a virtual deluge of translations of Chinese fiction. Though perhaps even absurd in the eyes of modern-day readers, the pseudo-didactic prologue is a structural peculiarity that was probably regarded as a tasty literary hors d'oeuvre; it is functional, moreover, as a statement of the anticipated theme or counter theme of the story. We might also note that the popular ukiyo tales produced earlier by Ihara Saikaku (1642-93) and Ejima Kiseki (1667-1736) were often introduced with such prologues, although the intent there was usually one of irony or a parody on didactic literature. Finally, Akinari concludes “Kikka no chigiri” with the statement, “And so they say that one must never form an association with a perfidious man”—it is a recapitulation of the introductory prologue and functions like a coda that sounds a note of finality in a tale so structured. In the eyes of readers accustomed to similarly structured Chinese stories, the design of this tale by Akinari was probably a harmonious one, and also appropriate to the substance of the story.

Not all literary historians have found the above structural feature attractive. Noda Hisao is disturbed by the prologue, which he considers “overornate and reeking of didacticism,” and by the concluding sentence, concerning which he states, “The purpose no doubt is to echo the introductory passage, but the statement suggests that Samon was a faithless man.”³⁸ Nakamura Yukihiko, on the other hand, states, “Being a statement of the theme of faithfulness made at the very outset of the tale, the passage, impressively solemn, is indeed appropriate to the tale.”³⁹ And Shigetomo Ki is lavish in his praise of Akinari's adaptation of the Chinese structural device.⁴⁰ It is interesting to note that the modern novelist Satō Haruo (1892-1964) was so fond of “Kikka no chigiri” that he claimed to have reread it close to thirty times, and that he found particularly attractive the shape given the tale through the addition of the prologue and the recapitulatory concluding passage, whereas Ishikawa Jun (1899-), another prominent novelist, considers the introductory prologue extraneous, irrelevant, and even misleading.⁴¹ Differences in the literary background and tastes of the two novelists probably account for this divergence in appraisal. We may recall that Mr. Satō had been known for his translations of Chinese fiction, and Mr. Ishikawa, as a product of a foreign language academy and one-time translator of French literature. Thus we find them at opposite ends of the critical spectrum of which I spoke earlier.

The tale “Asaji ga yado” may, indeed, seem burdened with an extended epilogue that dilutes the atmosphere of mystery. Having at last returned to his provincial home after seven years of misfortune and wandering in war-torn lands, Katsushirō is surprised to find his house still standing. His wife, Miyagi, is there to greet him with tears of joy. But when he awakens after the night of blissful reunion, Katsushirō finds himself bedded alone amidst the roofless ruins of his house. Closeby he sees Miyagi's tomb and discovers this poem, inscribed in Miyagi's hand on a weathered strip of paper:

Saritomo to
omō kokoro ni
hakararete
yo ni mo kyō made
ikeru inochi ka
Deceived
By my heart that told me,
“And yet,”
Have I continued to live
Till today in this world.

The narrative continues well beyond this structural highpoint: the only person to recognize Katsushirō is a venerable neighbor who had been much too infirm to flee the village with the others; the old man leisurely recounts the tragic fate of Miyagi, and then relates an ancient legend about a virtuous maiden named Mama no Tekona and sighs that even the famed virtue of Tekona pales in comparison with the fidelity shown by Miyagi. Rather than end his tale in a crescendo of dramatic wails, Akinari allows the reader to enjoy an aftertaste of melancholy. The mood of passionate grief gives way slowly to one of subdued but deep-felt sorrow. The closing passages, depicting the grief of the two unaffected, unsophisticated rustic characters, provide some attractive strands of realism in the romantic fabric of the story.

Akinari's tales are often said to manifest influences from the traditional Japanese theater. The conclusion of “Asaji ga yado” may, indeed, be savored with some of the enjoyment of a nō drama (in performance) on a supernatural theme—for example, Sumidagawa (Sumida River), in which a frenzied passion aroused by the appearance of a spirit gives way gradually to an awareness of the illusion and, subsequently, of the reality and profoundness of sorrow. What I admire most about the tale is this shift in tone; the atmosphere of mystery is dispelled after the familiar pattern of the nō drama, and the reader is left in a state of musing, not panting excitation. But, as Father Humbertclaude and others have suggested, the episode concerning Mama no Tekona may not have been wisely chosen. Even though the author has prepared the reader for it by placing the setting in the hamlet of Mama, the tone of the story, while the legend of Mama no Tekona is being related, tends toward flatness rather than mellowness. The over-all tone of this tale, I might add, can in no way be compared to that of “The Legend of the Beloved Wife,” the fantastic Chinese yarn to which the basic motifs in Akinari's tale can ultimately be traced.⁴²

With regard to the tale “Buppōsō,” Father Humbertclaude remarks: “‘Buppōsō’ ends perfectly, but the lengthy introduction is outside the subject; or, rather, we find a juxtaposition of two stories that are even less closely associated with each other in terms of the locale than in the case of the episode of Tekona [in ‘Asaji ga yado’] cited above.”⁴³ Here we may with profit recall what the Japanese have traditionally considered “elegant” prose fiction: a blend of facts, pseudo-facts, legends, and fiction, with decorative embellishments to impart an aura of elegance and erudition to the basic story.

“Buppōsō” seems to approach the ideal form of “elegant” prose fiction. The tale does not appear to be built around a “single preconceived effort” as Poe would have had it, but neither is it an incongruous combination of two unrelated episodes. It begins with a melodious laud of the land of Japan, and no sense of mystery is suggested until the central character, Muzen, and his young son arrive just before nightfall at Kōyasan, or Mount Kōya, the seat of the esoteric Shingon Sect of Buddhism. Having offered prayers at the various temple edifices, they come to the innermost sanctum of the monastic grounds, resolved to spend the night there in prayer. The preceding can be viewed as an extended prologue to the story proper. To note again a parallel with the nō drama, this prologue is similar structurally and in tone to the michiyuki (lyrical description of travel) that is recited by the waki, or “supporting player,” upon his entering the nō stage—with the difference, of course, that in Akinari's tale the journey has taken place in story time. Just as the waki typically seats himself at the left-front of the nō stage, awaiting the appearance of the protagonist, Muzen and his son sit quietly in the dark of night, intoning the sutra and conversing. The experienced Japanese reader is well prepared for an extraordinary occurrence.

At this point Akinari may seem to dawdle, for in a nō drama the protagonist (very often a spirit in the guise of the living) would make his appearance immediately. In the nō drama, a phantasmal atmosphere at this point is implicit in the stereotyped structural sequencing, but there is no such convention in the written story. Akinari must, instead, allow the effect of time and the increasing gloominess of the setting to be felt by the reader.

Muzen idles away his wakeful hours by relating an anecdote about Kōbō-daishi (774-835), the founder of the monastery. The piercing cry of the buppōsō bird resounds in the night air, and Muzen again has reason to recount historical anecdotes, as well as ancient poems—this time concerning the mysterious bird whose name buppōsō (allegedly a stylized onomatopoetic rendering of its cry) consists of verbal elements representing “buddha,” “dharma,” and “sangha.” Subtle sound images effectively heighten the mood of the forlorn. By inserting historical anecdotes and poetry, moreover, Akinari has introduced conventions employed in Chinese tales of the supernatural, thereby furthering the implication of a pending miracle.

In the deep of night, a courtly noble arrives with an entourage of warriors, and an eerie banquet ensues. The mysterious nobleman, it is revealed, is the specter of Toyotomi Hidetsugu (1568-95), known both in history and legend as the archetype of the wicked, sadistic lord. Although Hidetsugu had been adopted by his uncle, Hideyoshi, and made heir apparent to the military suzerainty of the Japanese Empire, his misconduct led to his confinement and eventual execution at Mount Kōya. This supernatural episode is by no means inconsequent. The setting of the story has been closely associated with the memory of Hidetsugu's gory execution, and most readers during the Edo Period—indeed, many today—should have vaguely anticipated the introduction of his ghostly form into the darkened atmosphere. The unspoken presentiment induces in the protagonist a phantasm, or perhaps a dream, in which the dreaded becomes a seeming reality.

Muzen and his son are removed to the far background and become spectators off the scene as the noble and his retainers discuss at considerable length the true meaning of an ancient poem by Kōbō-daishi. Akinari's inclusion of historical anecdotes and comments on ancient poetry contributes little to the plot (here, “plot” as defined by E. M. Forster),⁴⁴ but it does contribute to the shape of this piece of “elegant” fiction. This being understood, we need not be particularly concerned whether the presence of such elements signifies a pedantic intent on the part of Akinari the author-scholar. The charm of the author's interpretation of the poem and the above-mentioned aura of erudition redeem the episode from tedium. The remainder, however, is perfection. The apprehension of Muzen turns into alarm as the identity of the men becomes clear, and to terror when the phantoms command him to recite his “poetry of the present era.” Although “Buppōsō” is related by a narrator (the fictional point of view, however, is that of Muzen), Muzen seemingly becomes the “I” of the story in the climactic moment of fear when he is forced on to the center of the scene. This momentary shift in the narrative point of view is a technique used by Akinari with great effect in other tales as well to intensify the sensation of terror.

The denouement of “Buppōsō” is, again, patterned on the nō—on the rapid resolution that characterizes plays belonging to the mugen, or “phantasmal,” thematic category. The men suddenly revert to their satanic forms and clamor about, threatening the live characters, and then disappear off into the distance. The tale is brought to a close with an epilogue in which Muzen and his son are restored, as dawn breaks, to the world of reality. The concluding passage is entirely conventional: “This, which I have recorded, is exactly as he [Muzen] had related it to the people of the capital.”

I should like to add a brief comment on “Muō no rigyo” (“A Carp in a Dream”), a curious example of a contrast in tone and style in a tale by Akinari. Whereas “Buppōsō” is probably the most original story in the Ugetsu monogatari, “Muō no rigyo” is a close adaptation of a Chinese short story. Akinari in this instance took the “Yü-fu chi” (“Chronicle of the Man in the Suit of a Fish”),⁴⁵ placed it in a Japanese setting, and refined it into a tale that is superior in many respects to its model. In the “Yü-fu chi,” the utter disregard for an artistic mode of storytelling reduces the tale to a clumsy, though attractive, fable.⁴⁶ We find Hsüeh Wei caught in the classic pattern of the confused state of reality, in which he “lives” the experiences of a fish. Any possibility of a sustained suspense is lost when Hsüeh Wei, upon awakening from his death-like state of dream, promptly tells those gathered about him that the fish they had killed was in reality himself. Akinari, on the other hand, tantalizes the reader with only a hint at the direction the plot may take and allows the mystery to unfold gradually amidst mounting amazement and dismay among the listeners. Having selected as his protagonist an obscure painter in Japanese art history by the name of Kōgi, he is able to introduce a number of attractive motifs relating to painting, including the two which allow the tale to end on a note of light drollery. The setting—the great lake Biwako with its many famed scenic views—is well chosen, for it provides Akinari with the opportunity to insert a decorative passage of poetic prose, among the most delightful in the Ugetsu monogatari. Being otherwise free of unusual embellishments and structural peculiarities, “Muō no rigyo” is a short story that can be read and enjoyed without recourse to burdensome explanatory notes.

Notes

1. All the tales are available in English. For scholarly translations of “Shiramine”, “Jasei no in”, “Kibitsu no kama”, “Himpukuron”, and “Asaji ga yado”, see Wilfrid Whitehouse, “Ugetsu monogatari,” in Monumenta Nipponica, i, no. 1 (1938), pp. 242-258, i, no. 2 (1938), pp. 257-275, and iv, no. 1 (1941), pp. 166-191. A faithful rendering of “Muō no rigyo” is contained in Selections from Japanese Literature, ed. F. J. Daniels (London: Lund Humphries, 1959); for paraphrased versions of this tale, see “The Carp in a Dream” in Monogatari: Tales from Old and New Japan, ed. Don C. Seitz (New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1924), and “The Story of Kōgi the Priest” in Lafcadio Hearn, Shadowings and a Japanese Miscellany, vol. x of The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1923). A translation of “Aozukin”, I understand, is available in The Young East, ii, no. 9 (February 1927), pp. 314-319. As for the ninth tale, “Kikka no chigiri”, there is a truncated retelling under the title “Of a Promise Kept” in Lafcadio Hearn's volume cited above. For a complete translation into French, see Ueda Akinari, Contes de pluie et de lune, trans. René Sieffert (Paris: Gallimard, 1956). For the translation of “Kikka no chigiri” (“The Chrysanthemum Tryst”), “Buppōsō,” and “Aozukin” (“The Blue Hood”), see Dale Saunders, “Ugetsu monogatari,” Monumenta Nipponica, xxi, nos. 1-2 (1966), pp. 171-202.

2. Wilfrid Whitehouse, for example, states that “Shiramine” is simply a dialogue explaining Akinari's views on “the national spirit” and ideas of sovereignty and is inferior to “Jasei no in” (“The Lust of the Serpent's Spirit”); see Monumenta Nipponica, i, no. 1 (January 1938), pp. 244-245. Father Pierre Humbertclaude, on the other hand, holds: “Shiramine l'emporte pour la beauté noble et sévére de la ligne, dans le dépouillement le plus complet de l'action. Il ne se passe absolument rien, et c'est ce minimum de matiére que veut la poésie pure.” See his “Essai sur la Vie et l'Oeuvre de Ueda Akinari,” Monumenta Nipponica, v, no. 1 (January 1942), pp. 83-84.

3. See, for instance, Sasakawa Taneo, Kinsei bungeishi (Tokyo, 1931), p. 143; Moriyama Shigeo, “Akinari,” in Nihon bungaku kōza (Tokyo: Kawade shobō, 1951), iv, 202-206; Aiso Teizō, Kinsei shōsetsushi, ii (Tokyo, 1956), 249; or Hirosue Tamotsu, “Ugetsu monogatari no bungeisei” (“The Literary Quality of the Ugetsu monogatari”), Kokubungaku (Gakutōsha), iv, no. 7 (June 1959), pp. 21-26.

4. Shigetomo Ki, Ugetsu monogatari no kenkyū (Kyoto, 1946), pp. 47-48. His orientation today remains basically the same; see his Ugetsu monogatari hyōshaku (enlarged ed., Tokyo, 1957), pp. 31-38, and Kinsei bungakushi no shomondai (Tokyo, 1963), pp. 259-261 and 285-298.

5. Details are found throughout the miscellany titled Tandai shōshin roku (A Record of Boldness and Timidity), which Akinari completed in 1808; the more fleeting emotional impressions are recorded in his Fumihōgu (Literary Scraps), a collection of his letters, published also in 1808; his social attitudes may be gleaned from the Kuse monogatari (Choleric Tales), a Juvenalian satire written in his old age and published posthumously in 1822. In the Kakaika—some give these characters the reading Ashikariyoshi—(Heckling the Reed-Cutter), a record compiled in 1790 of his polemics with Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801) over problems of scholarship, we find revealed Akinari's recognition of the sort of tolerance which anthropologists today term “cultural relativism.” The above works are contained in the Ueda Akinari zenshū, 2 vols. (Tokyo, 1917). For an extended biographical narrative, see Fujii Otoo, Kinsei shōsetsu kenkyū (Osaka, 1947), pp. 141-222. Also useful is Tsujimori Shūei, Ueda Akinari no shōgai (Tokyo, 1942), a monograph treating most conceivable aspects of Akinari's life and career.

6. Akinari's belief in a divine intervention is stated in his remarks appended to a set of poems of which he made an offering to the Kashima Inari Shrine in 1801, when he was sixty-seven; see Ueda Akinari zenshū, i, 155. Because Akinari was adopted as heir into the Ueda family when he was a three-year-old, many specialists contend that the experience resulted in a trauma that left a core of darkness in him; then again, others say that the warm affection of his adoptive parents could have only brightened his personal nature.

7. The following account, recorded in the Tandai shōshin roku, has often been cited in this connection. The episode described, however, occurred much later in Akinari's life; moreover, Akinari's statement can be construed to mean two different things “After I had spoken about ghosts (or, after I had told a ghost story), I was greatly humiliated by this comment [made by Takayama Riken]: ‘How ignorant can one be! Ghosts and fox-possession simply don't occur. What we call fox-possession is inevitably a malady of the temperament.’” See Ueda Akinari zenshū. i, 360.

8. See Asō Isoji, Edo shōsetsu gairon (Tokyo, 1956), pp. 174-177.

9. See Teruoka Yasutaka et al., Koten Nihon bungakushi (Tokyo, 1962), p. 331. Mr. Teruoka assumes that Akinari was introduced to classical studies for the first time by Katō Umaki (1721-77), whom he met either in 1766 or 1767. There is evidence, however, to suggest that Akinari may have become interested in both classical Japanese literature and Chinese fiction as early as 1759; see Takada Mamoru, Ueda Akinari nempu kōsetsu (Tokyo, 1964), pp. 24-27.

10. See Uzuki Hiroshi, “Akinari bungaku no tenkai” (“The Literary Development of Akinari”), Kokubungaku (Gakutōsha), iv, no. 7 (June 1959), pp. 10-12.

11. See Earl Roy Miner, “Henry James's Metaphysical Romances,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, ix, no. 1 (June 1954), pp. 1-21.

12. Takada Mamoru discusses the significance of this discovery in some detail in his Ueda Akinari nempu kōsetsu, pp. 377-384.

13. This passage, from the Kakan shōroku, is cited in Takada, p. 351.

14. Takada, pp. 350-360.

15. Uzuki Hiroshi, “Akinari no shisō to bungaku” (“Akinari's Thought and His Literature”), in Akinari, ed. Nakamura Yukihiko, vol. xxiv of Nihon koten kanshō kōza (Tokyo, 1958), pp. 249-258; the quotation is from p. 258.

16. Ozaki Hideo, Bumpō shōkai Ugetsu monogatari shinshaku (13th ed., Tokyo, 1965), p. 12.

17. From Yoshi ya ashi ya (For Better or Worse), a fascicle of supplementary commentary which Akinari wrote when he edited the commentary by Kamo Mabuchi (1697-1769) on the Ise monogatari. See Ueda Akinari zenshū, ii, 408. According to Nakamura Yukihiko, Yoshi ya ashi ya (1793), from which I have quoted, is an abridgement of a longer unpublished commentary that Akinari wrote probably during the 1770's; see his Akinari, p. 260. If it were before 1776, my next statement will have to be accordingly modified.

18. I refer the reader to the round-table discussion on the topic “new criticism and Japanese literary studies” transcribed in Kaishaku to kanshō, xx, no. 7 (June 1965), pp. 126-142; discussants are Konishi Jin'ichi, Saeki Shōichi, and Shinoda Hajime.

19. Nakamura, Akinari; see note 15.

20. Ugetsu monogatari no kenkyū (Kyoto, 1946).

21. For example, Mr. Shigetomo, in compiling his list of Akinari's sources, was adding to and refining the store of information brought together in Yamaguchi Takeshi, Edo bungaku kenkyū (Tokyo, 1933), pp. 295-337.

22. Helen Gardner, The Business of Criticism (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 7. I have taken the liberty, in my paraphrasing, to supply the word “discerns” in the place of “believes” in the clause that in the original reads “… the value which he believes the work to have.”

23. For a fairly recent example, see Louis D. Rubin, Jr., “What's Wrong with Graduate Literary Study,” The American Scholar, xxxii, no. 2 (Spring 1963), pp. 213-228. There are probably limitations to all approaches that represent any extreme point of view, and we can appreciate Mr. Rubin's objections to studies that dwell so exclusively on the extraliterary that—to cite an apt comparison stated in Wayne Shumaker's Elements of Critical Theory (Berkeley, 1952)—they have no more value than an art-history thesis on Rembrandt's easel.

24. See his review of Matsuda Osamu, Nihon kinsei bungaku no seiritsu, in Bungaku, xxxii, no. 3 (March 1964), pp. 357-360.

25. His analysis of “Himpukuron,” published in 1963, indicates a penchant for precision in defining critical standards, although there are strong manifestations still of the speculative; see Kinsei shōsetsu kenkyū to shiryō (Tokyo, 1963), pp. 77-97. His recent evaluative study of “Jasei no in” is more thoroughly analytical in approach, and he is careful to relate his “extrinsic” observations in parenthetical fashion; see “Jasei no in no bungakuteki kachi” (“The Literary Value of ‘Jasei no in’”), Bungaku, xxxiii, no. 5 (May 1965), pp. 1-15.

26. Yoshida Seiichi, “Kokubungaku no genjō” (“The Present State of Japanese Literary Studies”), Kokubungaku gengo to bungei, iii, no. 3 (May 1961), pp. 1-7; the quotation is from p. 2.

27. What may be considered representative viewpoints were expressed in a round-table discussion by six doctoral candidates from the University of Tokyo and the Tokyo University of Education on the topic “what is your regard of Japanese literary studies?” reported in Kokubungaku gengo to bungei, IV, no. 3 (May 1962), pp. 2-17.

28. See the entry on the Ugetsu monogatari, contributed by Noda Hisao, in Nihon bungaku kanshō jiten koten-hen, ed. Yoshida Seiichi (Tokyo, 1960), pp. 59-60.

29. Suzuki Toshiya, “Ugetsu monogatari,” a fascicle in Iwanami kōza: Nihon bungaku (Tokyo, 1932).

30. Mr. Nakamura's study of Akinari's early poetry, originally published in 1955, has been further expanded and included in his Kinsei sakka kenkyū (Tokyo, 1961), pp. 201-218.

31. See Ueda Akinari shū, vol. lix (Tokyo, 1959) of Nihon koten bungaku taikei, pp. 3-9

32. See his essay, “Monogatarizama—Akinari no shōsetsukan” (“A Mode of Storytelling: Akinari's Theory of Fiction”), in Akinari, pp. 259-267.

33. See his Kinsei sakka kenkyū, pp. 250-260.

34. His analysis of Kōshoku ichidai otoko appears also in Kinsei sakka kenkyū, pp. 7-44.

35. Akinari borrowed many of his themes and motifs from earlier works of fiction of both Japan and China. For information regarding their sources, see the convenient reference chart presented in Gotō Tanji, “Ugetsu monogatari shutten o saguru” (“Seeking the Literary Sources of Motifs in the Ugetsu monogatari”), Kaishaku to kanshō, xxiii, no. 6 (June 1958), pp. 52-64.

36. Pierre Humbertclaude, “Essai” (see note 2), p. 78.

37. “Fan Chü-ch'ing chi-shu ssu-sheng chiao” in the Ku-chin hsiao-shuo.

38. Noda Hisao, Hyōchū Ugetsu monogatari zenshaku (Tokyo, 1963), pp. 57 and 87.

39. Nakamura, Akinari, p. 61.

40. Shigetomo, Ugetsu monogatari no kenkyū, pp. 72-77.

41. See Satō Haruo, Ueda Akinari (Tokyo, 1964), pp. 115-118; this section was originally drafted in 1946. See also Ishikawa Jun, “Akinari shiron” (“A Personal View of Akinari”), in Edo shōsetsushū, vol. xxviii (Tokyo 1961,) of Koten Nihon bungaku zenshū.

42. “Ai-ch'ing chuan” in the Chien-teng hsin-hua. In the Chinese tale, the protagonist Ch'ao returns from a similar journey and learns that his wife is dead. He exhumes the body and finds her as radiant and beautiful as in life. She reappears as a spirit in order to enjoy a momentary earthly reunion with Ch'ao and to bid him farewell. The Otogibōko (1666) by Asai Ryōi (d. 1690) contains an earlier adaptation of “Ai-ch'ing chuan,” and Akinari was most likely familiar with it.

43. Humbertclaude, “Essai,” p. 78.

44. “We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality.” Quoted from Aspects of a Novel (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1954), p. 86.

45. “Yü-fu chi” in the Ku-chin shuo-hai.

46. John L. Bishop has cited, among characteristics of Ming Period fiction, “… a monotonous preoccupation with ‘story’ rather than with an individual mode of telling the story.” See his article, “Some Limitations of Chinese Fiction,” Far Eastern Quarterly, xv, no. 2 (February 1956), p. 242.