SOURCE: Zolbrod, Leon M. “A Comparative Approach to Tales of Moonlight and Rain.” Humanities Association Bulletin 21, no. 2 (spring 1970): 48-56.

[In the following essay, Zolbrod explains the complex relationship between Tales of Moonlight and Rain and the Chinese and Japanese sources of the collection.]

Tales of Moonlight and Rain (Ugetsu monogatari) is a collection of nine Japanese stories of the supernatural. Although the preface dates from 1768, the book was not published until 1776 in Kyoto and Osaka, and the author, Ueda Akinari (1734-1809), probably completed it shortly before this time. Japanese scholars classify Moonlight and Rain under a category of narrative prose known as yomihon, or “reading books.” These yomihon,¹ which were written in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, may be thought of as historical novels or tales, remotely reminiscent of the Gothic romances. They were usually based on actual events and typically included supernatural happenings. Ancient Japanese history, medieval literature, Confucian ethics, Buddhist morality, and Chinese scholarship entered into such tales and romances and served to make them a summary and synthesis of traditional Japanese culture. During the period of their ascendancy, between 1750 and 1850, nearly 700 items appeared that scholars now classify as yomihon. The best of them, such as Moonlight and Rain, represent the culminating development in Japanese narrative prose before the influence of Western fiction after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Modern scholarly usage of the term yomihon specifically denotes collections of short stories and historical romances influenced by Chinese vernacular literature published in Kyoto and Osaka around 1750-1800 or in Edo, 1800-1850. Booksellers issued a typical yomihon title in sets of five kan, or “sections”, of quarto size, with each bound in heavy, soft paper. Sometimes an embossed pattern or design enhanced the covers. On other occasions they displayed shades of beige, amber, peach, blue, or green tinted paper. For customer appeal booksellers wrapped the sets in paper envelopes often illustrated by the best woodblock artists with a design suggestive of the contents.

The complex background of eighteenth century Japan created a fertile setting for the yomihon. Famous scholars revived interest in national history, language, and literature. Discontented young samurai experimented with Dutch studies. Edo culture began to flower, and Kyoto and Osaka ceased to be the exclusive centers of culture and society. Chinese vernacular literature came to exert a pervasive influence on educated readers and men of letters. Foreign learning, which before the eighteenth century was restricted to a small elite, by the early nineteenth century became available to any literate man of leisure. Meanwhile, readers found the realistic and risque fiction of the floating world to be vapid and flat. They preferred the exotic yomihon, replete with imaginary or legendary heroes, Chinese phrases, classical Japanese stylization, historical events, and allusions to contemporary manners, morals, and even sometimes political events. Japanese society, indeed, seemed to be entering one of those times of radical change of direction in its literary tradition, which especially accompany profound social or political movements or upheavals.

Against such a background as outlined above Ueda Akinari composed nine masterful stories of mystery and suspense entitled Tales of Moonlight and Rain. Although they were published less than two hundred years ago, these narratives seem as securely established among classics of Japanese literature as The Tale of Genji, which was written by Lady Murasaki nearly a thousand years ago. This is in spite of how Moonlight and Rain appears on the surface to be essentially a collection of tales of mystery, ghosts, and supernatural occurrences, a branch of fiction least likely to be accorded the status of a literary classic.²

Moonlight and Rain is made up of a brief preface by the author, written in Chinese, and five sections of a single volume each, all but one containing a pair of stories. Also, the original text boasted of twenty woodblock illustrations that form ten ukiyoe diptychs. Although these were not signed, to judge from their style Akinari's friend, an Osaka illustrator named Katsura Meisen, probably supplied the drawings.³ In format Moonlight and Rain resembled many representative yomihon. At least four distinct woodblock editions of the book appeared during the Tokugawa period. Therefore it gained fairly wide circulation and popularity, at least for a yomihon, in spite of its preface in Chinese and the text with its difficult compounds and hodgepodge of archaic and colloquial expressions, which prevented Moonlight and Rain from appealing to the common taste. All the tales have been translated into English at least once. But no book version has ever appeared. There exists, however, a French edition published in Paris, and more recently an incomplete Spanish text, which appeared in Mexico.

To characterize Akinari's tales merely as ghost stories is certainly to miss the point, though the casual reader might understandably make such a mistake. After all, each of the nine tales involves the appearance of an apparition. In the first story, “White Peak” (“Shiramine”), for example, a travelling poet-priest meets the specter of a former emperor. In the second, “Chrysanthemum Tryst” (“Kikuka no chigiri”), the spirit of a man who has committed suicide keeps a solemn promise that he previously gave to his friend. In the third, “The House Amidst the Thickets” (“Asaji ga yado”), a husband comes home after long absence and experiences a vision with his dead wife. In the fourth, “The Carp that Came to My Dream” (“Muo no rigyo”), a man returns as if from the dead and describes how for three days he was transformed into a fish. In the fifth, “Bird of Paradise” (“Bupposo”), a pilgrim and his son, forced to remain overnight at a Buddhist holy spot, have an eerie audience with a ghostly entourage of court noblemen and warriors. In the sixth, “The Caldron of Kibitsu” (“Kibitsu no kama”), the ghost of a philandering man's wife rises from the dead to exact her grisly revenge. In the seventh, “The Lust of the White Serpent” (“Jasei no in”), a young man is haunted by the materialization of a snake in the guise of an attractive and passionate woman. In the eighth, “The Blue Hood” (“Aozukin”), an itinerant Zen monk in curing an aberrant colleague's cannibalistic behavior witnesses a spiritual transformation. Lastly, in the ninth, “Wealth and Poverty” (“Himpukuron”), a warrior receives a visit from the phantom of the gold that he hoards. In every tale, therefore, the supernatural element appears as a dominant motif. To be sure, the pleasurable horror that one gets from a Gothic novel or tale can indicate great artistry, but often it wears thin on second reading. What, then, if the artistic presentation of the spiritual world itself does not suffice, contributes to the importance of Moonlight and Rain as a Japanese classic and suggests that it is fully deserving of a wider reputation as part of world literature?

In the following pages I wish to advance the view that Akinari's literary indebtedness to earlier Chinese and Japanese classics conduces to give Moonlight and Rain its distinction as one of the memorable works produced in traditional Japan. Much of the high repute accorded Moonlight and Rain and a degree of the potential effect of the tales even on the Western reader derives from the author's conscious attempt to synthesize Chinese and Japanese elements with the colloquial language of Akinari's own day. Inspired by Chinese vernacular fiction, Akinari made stylistic innovations in storytelling in Japan. From anecdotes and passages in earlier Chinese and Japanese literature he pieced together a highly original style of narrative prose. Each tale may be found to have its Chinese and Japanese literary prototypes. Moonlight and Rain, therefore, may be seen as a specific manifestation of the movement to revive the tradition of National Learning in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Japan. It exemplifies the neoclassical mode of creativity, though the use of this term must be understood to denote interest not in Greek and Latin classics but in those of China and Japan. Its significance in this respect outweighs the charm of the individual tales as ghost stories. For reasons aside from the aesthetic value of the text that literary analysis can reveal, Akinari's collection numbers among the select masterpieces of world literature that receive a tradition, reinforce it, and pass it on in a stronger form. If Moonlight and Rain marks a rare synthesis of traditional Japanese and classical and vernacular Chinese literature, the catalyzing force was Akinari's emotions. Into his tales he poured his own personal outlook and philosophy. In a highly sublimated form he expressed his discontent with contemporary style in life and literature, and the result was conscious art, such as that of the best poets and writers everywhere.

In the third tale, for example, “The House Amidst the Thickets,” one can find a juxtaposition of Chinese and Japanese elements. Akinari is chiefly indebted to a chapter in The Tale of Genji, to a late-fourteenth or early fifteenth century Chinese tale, “The Story of Ai-ch'ing,” (“Ai-ch'ing chuan”), and to a ballad-like verse in the eighth-century Japanese anthology known as the Man'yoshu. A full evaluation of “The House Amidst the Thickets,” or any other tale in Moonlight and Rain can scarcely be attained without examining Akinari's literary sources, just as one can hardly account for certain similarities between Don Quixote and the novels of Fielding purely on the basis of biographical research or knowledge of the English literary tradition. Recognition of Akinari's sources is essential to understanding the author's artistic effect. It may sound strange or pedantic to some modern western readers to assert the need for examining the literary sources of Moonlight and Rain, but Akinari used them with such vigor that they form as essential a backdrop to the tales as costumes, designs, and stage settings might for a Victorian drama. Just as knowledge of how Shakespeare transmuted material taken from Boccaccio or from Holinshed enhances our appreciation of the works, a full estimate of Moonlight and Rain depends on a realization of Akinari's indebtedness to Chinese and Japanese literary sources.

At this point in order to outline a comparative approach to Moonlight and Rain, it is appropriate to discuss how a scholar or critic can investigate Akinari's “literary indebtedness” to certain Chinese texts. For convenience's sake, one can analyze Akinari's direct debt to Chinese literature under five headings. These are “translation,” “imitation,” “stylization,” “borrowing,” and “source.” In addition, one may also discern parallel features between Moonlight and Rain, certain Chinese works, and earlier Japanese narrative prose writings. These features, however, do not necessarily indicate a direct relationship.

Translation, the first of the terms, here is defined as expression in one's own language of a work from another tongue, often from a different period in time. All translators more or less adapt and modify the original. Although owing to the degree of freedom that Akinari exercises one can hardly apply this term rigorously to any of the tales in Moonlight and Rain, portions of several border on translation. In the fourth story, for example, “The Carp That Came to My Dream,” one passage where the protagonist is relating his reverie reads as follows: “Nonetheless, a man swimming in the water can never enjoy it as much as a fish; so when I began to envy how the creatures were gliding about, a large one nearby me said, ‘Master, I can easily fulfil your desire. Please wait here for me.’ So saying, he disappeared far into the depths. Presently a man wearing a crown and court dress rose up astride the same fish, followed by many other creatures of the deep. He said to me, ‘The God of the Sea speaks. You, old priest, by hitherto liberating living creatures, have accrued great merit. Now having entered the water, you wish to live like a fish, and it is our privilege to grant you for a time the garb of a golden carp and to permit you to enjoy the pleasures of our watery domain. But you must take care not to be blinded by the sweetness of bait and get caught on a hook and lose your life. Thereupon he left me and disappeared from sight. With great wonder I looked around at my own body. Unawares, I had been adorned with fish scales, gleaming like gold, and I had assumed the form of a carp. I flapped my tail, moved my fins, and swam everywhere to my heart's desire, without feeling it the least bit strange.”

The Chinese version of this fanciful story, under the title, “The Man who Became a Fish,” appears in Famous Chinese Short Stories, Retold by Lin Yutang. Although this book is advertised as “fresh and inspired translations,” the reader who compares Lin's and Akinari's versions in translation with the original tenth century source will find that in some ways the particular passage quoted above is closer than that of Lin to the Chinese text.

Among other examples of the role of translation in Akinari's tales, the seventh story in Moonlight and Rain, “The Lust of the White Serpent,” in particular, remains throughout quite close to its Chinese model, “Madame White Is Forever Shut at Thunder-Peak Pagoda” (“Pai Niang-tzu yung chen Lei-feng-ta”), from an early seventeenth century text, one of the so-called San Yen collections. To be sure all the Chinese place names have been changed. The scenes are reset in Japan. Akinari's text abounds in stylistic changes and carefully planted allusions to classical Japanese literature. Still, “Lust” stays faithful to its foreign model.

Second among the five terms mentioned above is imitation. It figures when the writer in some degree gives up his creative personality to that of another author or work. The term is particularly applicable to Moonlight and Rain. Although scholars and critics often condemn the act, imitation can involve, as it does in Akinari's tales, independent aesthetic merit. It need not indicate intellectual poverty but rather may show, in Pushkin's words, “noble trust in one's own strength, the hope of discovering new worlds, following in the footsteps of a genius, or a feeling in its humility even more elevated, the desire to master one's model and give it a second life.”⁴

Most often Akinari's imitations were from the Japanese, but he also applied this technique to his Chinese sources. Whenever one decides that Akinari has exceeded the bounds of translation, imitation may be present. Much of Akinari's second tale, “Chrysanthemum Tryst,” for instance, involves imitation of another example from the San yen collections, “Fan Chü-ch'ing's Eternal Friendship” (“Fan Chü-ch'ing shu ssu sheng chiao”). The opening passage of Akinari's story, which echoes a lofty, didactic tone, is especially close to the original and like it presents a counter-theme to the tale that follows. “Green green grows the spring willow,” the tale begins. “But never plant it in your garden. For a friend, never pick a frivolous man. Although the willow may bud early, can it hold up when autumn's first wind blows? A frivolous man make friends easily, but he is fickle. While the willow for many springs takes on new color, a frivolous man will break off with you and never call again.” Akinari's subsequent development of the tale is free from the detailed fidelity that one associates with translation. Especially because of its revenge motif, lacking in the Chinese model, “Chrysanthemum Tryst” is far more satisfying structurally than “Fan Chü-ch'ing.”

Imitation, as Akinari practiced it, may be traced back at least to the twelfth century essays on Japanese poetry and ultimately to Chinese literary criticism of the T'ang Dynasty and earlier. As here defined, it is a technique similar to that elsewhere called—in describing its application to poetry—“allusive variation,”⁵ and the basic impulse is akin to what in the West one terms neoclassicism.

By stylization, the third term, is meant the effect that results when an author through a combination of style and material suggests for artistic purposes another author or literary work, or even the style of an entire period. Akinari in Moonlight and Rain frequently uses Chinese diction and style. Typically he take Chinese phrase, metaphor, and simile, and reshapes them in accordance with the native literary tradition. These qualities can never be simply lifted intact from another literature.

How then did Akinari handle the stylistic problems that his Chinese literary sources presented? His solution in Moonlight and Rain permitted him to retain the best of two worlds by means of a unique system. The method, however, is hard to explain to the reader unfamiliar with the Chinese and Japanese scripts. Simply speaking, Chinese characters have both a semantic and a phonetic value. Therefore, Akinari could keep the Chinese graphs for their semantic meaning, employing them as ideographs, while indicating by the use of the Japanese phonetic gloss how he wanted the symbol to be read. As with other yomihon authors, including Takizawa Bakin (1767-1848),⁶ Akinari could be as arbitrary as he pleased.

The ninth tale, “Wealth and Poverty,” which draws freely on sections of the first century b.c. Chinese historical classic, Records of the Grand Historian (Shih chi), and other early Chinese texts, is rich in examples of stylization. Sometimes in a brief statement such as, “To be sure, the Great Sage taught us that the rich need not be haughty” (“Sate mo tomite ogoranu was oki-hijiri no michi nari”) Akinari alludes to a longer passage, in this case one in the Lün yü (Analects), which reads in its entirety, “Tse-kung said, ‘What do you pronounce concerning the poor man who yet does not flatter, and the rich man who is not proud?’ The Master replied, ‘They will do; but they are not equal to him, who, though poor, is yet cheerful, and to him, who, though rich, loves the rules of propriety.’”⁷ Here, Akinari's phrase, “tomite ogoranu” “the rich need not be haughty,” is a close stylization of the Chinese, “fu erh wu chiao” “the rich man who is not proud.”⁸ Owing to the ingenuity of the Japanese script, the reader of the original text can benefit at once from the visual and semantic associations of the Chinese character and the security and immediacy of the Japanese phonetic value. To cite a crude analogy, one might imagine writing English that employs the Greek alphabet for classical roots and our own for function words and inflected endings. Space prohibits presentation of further examples of this technique, but “Wealth and Poverty” is a virtual mosaic of such allusive stylizations, and the technique occurs with special frequency throughout Moonlight and Rain.

In applying the next expression, “borrowing,” to Akinari's work, one refers to the aphorisms, images, figures of speech, motifs, and plot elements that he took from a variety of Chinese texts. It may be thought of as summarizing the three previous terms. Once one perceives such items, or evidence, the critic or scholar may then try to discover how the old material is used in the new work. The various examples quoted above should amply demonstrate that Akinari in Moonlight and Rain borrowed considerably from Chinese sources. For the most part the author's purpose seems to have been on the one hand to enlighten his readers by reviving their interest in the earlier literature of China, as well as of his own country, and on the other hand to present his own interpretation of art, life, and literature in an elegant fashion and in what one might term a neoclassical diction. That Akinari borrowed extensively from earlier Chinese and Japanese sources serves to enhance the aesthetic delight of his tales, because through them one can find a guide to numerous previous classics. Moonlight and Rain, therefore, at once complements and intensifies one's appreciation of traditional Chinese and Japanese literature. This is a primary reason for the high rank accorded it in Japan, and it explains partly why it is frequently used as a school text.

Lastly, the word “source” denotes the place from which borrowing takes place. Usually the source and the form are quite separate. For example, Pushkin's source for Boris Godunov is Karamzim's History. Shakespeare found sources in Holinshed and Boccaccio. But the artistic use of the material came from elsewhere.⁹ The same may be said of Akinari. Besides the well-known Chinese classics, including the earliest dynastic histories, Akinari's main foreign sources were as follows: 1) New Tales for Lamp Light, (Ch'ien teng hsin hua), a late-fourteenth or early-fifteenth century collection of tales written in the Chinese literary language. This book was first brought to Japan from Korea at the end of the sixteenth century. A Japanese edition was printed in 1648. 2) The three collections of short stories, known together as the San yen, which were compiled early in the seventeenth century; Ming printed editions from the 1620's have been preserved in Japan. 3) Water Margin, (Shui hu chuan), or as Pearl Buck has translated it, All Men Are Brothers, which in its earliest form appeared in the fourteenth century. The first annotated Japanese edition dates in manuscript from the year 1727. 4) And lastly Five Assorted Offerings, (Wu tsa tsu), an encyclopedic compilation published in the early seventeenth century, of which there is an edition printed in Japan in 1666.¹⁰ Although many others can be identified, these four texts from the Ming Dynasty stand out as Akinari's most significant Chinese sources.

Aside from the five terms described above, which indicate direct connections between Moonlight and Rain and Chinese literature, one may also discern parallel features. Sometimes a question remains about the actual source of borrowing, because comparable materials are present in several available works. This is often the case with Akinari's tales, especially when classical allusions or conventional metaphors are involved. One can rarely be certain whether Akinari took a phrase from another Japanese work, from a secondary Chinese text, or from an original source. Study of Moonlight and Rain also reveals yet another kind of parallel. The fourth tale, “The Carp that Came to My Dream,” as stated earlier, derives from a tenth century work, an encyclopedia entitled Compendious Records from the Era “Great Peace,” (T'ai p'ing kuang chi).¹¹ But one also finds a later Chinese version in one of the San yen collections. Strong evidence, based on similar diction, suggests that Akinari was familiar with both. Thus, it is hard to say merely on textual evidence from which of these sources he derived his initial inspiration.

In its totality the nature of literary indebtedness as discussed above, pertaining to indirect as well as to direct connections between Moonlight and Rain and Akinari's Chinese sources, comprises a phenomenon that is frequently termed “influence.” The extent of Akinari's indebtedness reveals a great Chinese influence, though to be sure this is not the only one present. In fact, virtually the entire range of Japanese and Chinese literature as it was known and available in Akinari's day is reflected in the style, images, characters, themes, mannerisms, content, thought, ideas, and philosophy of life found in his collection of tales. Still, the Chinese influence is one aspect of the tales that should arouse strong interest among students of comparative literature. Besides the Chinese influence, Moonlight and Rain also shows borrowing from a wide range of earlier Japanese sources, including popular tales from Japanese history, Buddhist narratives, collections of supernatural stories, classics of the Heian period, Man'yoshu poetry, early chronicles, the no plays, tales of the floating world, kana books, philosophical essays, hiakai poetry, linked verse, and military chronicles.

At the beginning of his preface Akinari said, “Lo Kuan-chung wrote Water Margin, and for three generations he begot deaf mutes. For writing The Tale of Genji, Lady Murasaki was damned to hell. Thus were these authors persecuted for what they had done. But consider their achievement. Each created a rare form, capable of expressing all degrees of truth with infinitely subtle variation and causing a deep note to echo in the reader's sensibility, wherewith one can find mirrored realities of a thousand years ago.” Akinari revealed an awareness of both earlier Chinese and Japanese literature, as well as a Confucian attitude toward fiction. These remarks, however, also reflect the low opinion with which serious men of letters regarded popular fiction. Nevertheless, Akinari evinces belief that the suffering previous authors endured for their art was worthwhile, and he goes on to imply that his effort as well is worthy of consideration alongside that of his illustrious predecessors. What stronger self-confidence can any author express?

Most likely Akinari composed his tales not with Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji, Lo Kuan-chung's Water Margin, or other old texts in his hand, but rather with the phrases and passages that he had memorized from repeated readings echoing in his head. In eighteenth century Japan rote memory of classical texts of the Confucian tradition, as well as of the national literature, played a pre-eminent role in the learning process. His readers knew many of the texts that Akinari employed. As one aphorism of the time put it, “To read a book and not return to it was as if visiting the marketplace without money to buy.” When Akinari's readers, in turn, found echoes of familiar passages in his work, they felt an added pleasure. Akinari's techniques of what one might call shadow-boxing with the old masters, therefore, was not original to him but marked the best of Chinese and Japanese literature from early times. His success in Moonlight and Rain, then, was partly owing to his skill in applying traditional techniques and material in a fresh and original combination admirably suited to his age. In fact, Confucius, himself, asserted that he was not an original thinker but merely a transmitter of the best of the ancient wisdom. Although such modesty may be deceptive, it explains much about Akinari's own concept of originality and creative manipulation of the language and thought of the ancients.

With their mixture of bold assertiveness and defensive humility, the views of narrative fiction that Akinari embodied in Moonlight and Rain also characterized the best of other authors' yomihon, or “reading books.” A sense of form, didactic tone, Chinese flavor, and an audacious mixture of colloquial and classical idiom distinguished Moonlight and Rain and other yomihon from ordinary popular Japanese fiction.¹² As Bakin stated in 1810, in the yomihon a moral stance and a well-written story must go together.¹³ This required a combination of vast learning and a deep understanding of human feeling, standards which few authors in any age could meet. Prose fiction, as Bakin wrote, must combine penetrating emotion and a successful story. In both of these qualities Akinari excelled.

Notes

1. See my “Yomihon: The Appearance of the Historical Novel in late Eighteenth Century and Early Nineteenth Century Japan,” The Journal of Asian Studies, XXV, 3 (May 1966), 485-498, for a historical survey of the development of this form. Also available in The University of British Columbia, Department of Asian Studies Reprint Series.

2. James T. Araki, “A Critical Approach to the Ugestu monogatari,” Monumenta Nipponica, XXII, 1-2 (1967), 58.

3. Nakamura Yukihiko, ed., Nihon koten bungaku taikei, LVI: Ueda Akinari-shu (Tokyo, 1957), p. 9. Surnames precede given names, according to the practice in Japan.

4. Pushkin, writing in 1836, the year before his death, quoted in J. T. Shaw, “Literary Indebtedness and Comparative Literary Studies.” in Comparative Literature Method and Perspective, ed. Newton P. Stallknecht and Horst Frenz (Carbondale, 1961), p. 63.

5. Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner, Japanese Court Poetry (Stanford 1961), pp. 286-287.

6. See my Takizawa Bakin, in Twayne's World Authors Series, XX (New York, 1967), for a biographical study.

7. James Legge, ed. and trans., The Chinese Classics (Hong Kong, 1960), I, 144.

8. Nakamura, ed., Nihon koten, LVI, 132.

9. Shaw, “Indebtedness,” in Comparative Literature, p. 64.

10. See my “Hsieh Chao-che” (with L. C. Goodrich), in “Draft Ming Biographies,” No. 10 (Editorial Board of the Ming Biographical History Project, 1968), 8 pp. (internal pagination).

11. Wolfgang Bauer, “The Encyclopaedia in China,” Cahiers D'Histoire Mondiale, IX, 3 (1966), 664-691, provides a useful study of such compendiums in China, N.B. p. 671.

12. For an essay on this subject, see my “Kusazoshi: Chapbooks of Japan,” The Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 3rd ser., X (1968), 116-147. Also available in The University of British Columbia, Department of Asian Studies Reprint Series.

13. See “Heiben” (“Horsewhippings”), in Kyokutei iko (Kyokutei's Posthumous Manuscripts) (Tokyo, 1911), p. 296.