Tales of Moonlight and Rain
By Ueda Akinari
Translated by Anthony H. Chambers
You have to read it just for the title, don’t you? And it’s a beautiful little book too
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tales-Moonlight-Translations-Asian-Classics/dp/0231139128
with black-and-white prints inside, although I wish I could find attributions for them.
Chambers’ introduction begins: ‘Tales of Moonlight and Rain (Ugetsu monogatari), nine stories by Ueda Akinari (1734-1809) published in Osaka and Kyoto in 1776*, is the most celebrated example in Japan of the literature of the strange and marvellous. . . . Japanese scholars regard it, along with The Tale of Genji (early eleventh century) . . . as among the finest works of fiction in the canon of traditional Japanese literature.’
I lived in Japan for five years when I was a kid–my father was in the US Navy and was posted there. I can’t remember how much I’ve blogged about this, but that experience of living in an utterly alien culture was, and for that matter still is, hugely important to me, and left me with a deep if entirely goofy and impractical** connection to and fascination with Japanese culture. I am therefore embarrassed to say that I don’t recall having heard of Akinari before*** but I immediately tore this review
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/jan/27/featuresreviews.guardianreview32
out of the paper.†
The stories are both delicious and deliciously creepy. A man is gone seven years on a business trip when civil war breaks out and prevents him from returning home. He finally decides he must discover what has become of his wife, and is overjoyed when he finds his old house still standing and his wife answering the door. They exchange stories of the long years they’ve been apart, and then fall asleep . . . you can see where this is going, can’t you? When the man wakes up, he’s alone in the remains of a ruined house: what woke him is rain on his face, because the roof is gone. Another man leaves his virtuous wife to run off with his girlfriend; the girlfriend dies, and the man meets the servant of a recent widow at the graveyard where his girlfriend is buried. The servant suggests he speak to her mistress because they will understand each other . . . you see where this one is going too, don’t you? The mistress is the vengeful spirit of his deserted, now also deceased, wife.
But the plots of course aren’t the point; the plots serve to hang the interesting stuff on. And the interesting stuff is about the very different ways–as well as the very similar ways–people go about being human. Love, lust, rage and jealousy are common to every culture, but one story begins: ‘In the ancient Tranquil Land, people toil and enjoy their tasks and in their leisure hours relax under blossoms in the spring, visit brocade forests in the fall, and, thinking they must know Tsukushi of the unknown fires, rest their heads on rudders, and then turn eager thoughts to the peaks of Fuji and Tsukuba.’ It took me a second read through to figure out what was going on, not because it was strange–people take holidays and travel–but because it’s expressed in an unfamiliar way. Brocade forests. Don’t you love brocade forests?†† The stories are full of gorgeous little throwaways like that.
The eerie stuff is vividly strange too: of a snake-demon who has taken the form of a woman to seduce a beautiful young man, an old priest says: ‘Having a lascivious nature, it is said to bear unicorns when it couples with a bull, and dragon-steeds when it couples with a stallion.’ In the prefatory notes to this story there is a reference to another snake-woman story: ‘When he failed to return to her, as he had promised, her jealous anger transformed her into a serpent and she pursued him to . . . where he had taken refuge inside the temple bell. She coiled herself around the bell and roasted him to death with the heat of her passion.’
Chambers makes another good, obvious but often overlooked, point about reading across time and culture in his introduction: ‘Moonlight and Rain has been called a collection of “ghost stories,” “gothic tales,” and “tales of the supernatural.” In Japanese they are called kaidan. . . and the word kaidan means “narrating the strange.” . . . [but]“supernatural” is probably an inappropriate word. . . . Belief in revenants, spirit possessions, and other phenomena that we might call “supernatural” was widespread in eighteenth-century Japan. . . .’†††
Possibly my favourite story is The Chrysanthemum Vow because it’s romantic and sad and has that samurai sense of honour that I can’t get my head around‡ but it works a treat here. Yes, I’m about to ruin another plot for you, but you always know what’s coming in these stories; it’s the context and the getting there that are why you want to read them. A poor scholar nurses a samurai back to health; they fall in love.‡‡ The samurai eventually decides he must find out what became of the political wrangle he had been escaping when he fell ill, but he promises to come back on the day of the Chrysanthemum Festival. The scholar waits all that day, but it isn’t till nightfall that he sees the longed-for figure of his lover approaching–but cannot understand why his friend seems so sad. He had been detained by a suspicious lordling: ‘. . . I asked for leave to go; but Tsunehisa looked displeased and ordered Tanji not to let me out of the castle. . . . Imagining how you would regard me if I broke my pledge, I pondered my options but found no way to escape. As the ancients said: A man cannot travel a thousand ri in one day; a spirit can easily do so. Recalling this, I fell on my sword and tonight rode the dark wind from afar to arrive in time for our chrysanthemum tryst. . . .” The Guardian reviewer calls this ‘morbid’ but I don’t see it that way; it’s just another story about star-crossed lovers: Romeo was really stupid not to check that Juliet was really dead first.
The reviewer also suggests that there are perhaps too many notes, prefaces, afterwords and expositions. I know what he’s talking about but I don’t agree‡‡‡–he doesn’t entirely agree with himself, saying ‘[Chambers'] introduction and copious notes are diligent–sometimes to a fault . . . the notes . . . [give the stories] a cluttered feeling. . . . On the other hand, these are sophisticated literary works, embedded in often quite complicated historical situations, dense with cultural allusions. . . .’ Yes. I love all the notes. You read the story, then you read the notes, then you read the story again. Maybe you read the notes again too. It’s a short book; you have time to read everything twice; and if this is your sort of thing, you’ll want to.
* * *
* 1776, forsooth. I feel that it’s somehow pleasingly off-the-wall appropriate to do a book report on this book in the month that America returned not only the first Democrat in eight years to the White House, but the first person of any flavour whatsoever but pure anglo.
** I could not, for example, give you the name of a single modern Japanese politician.
*** Lafcadio Hearn ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafcadio_Hearn ) must have known of and written about Akinari, and I read Hearn. (And Genji, of course.) So I am having a senior moment. I have so many.
† . . . which was then instantly buried in the detritus on my desk, from whence it was only unearthed this spring.
†† Thank you, Mr Translator.
††† ‘. . . Tengu are goblins said to live deep in the mountains. In Japanese art, they often resemble birds but sometimes take human form, with wings and a beak or a long nose. . . . Tengu were apparently brought under control by the . . . government, which issued commands to them and expected them to obey.’
‡ Okay, why is it the noble thing to sit down in the middle of a battle that is going against you and disembowel yourself, thus leaving your friends and colleagues in even worse shape by your terminal defection?
‡‡ The falling in love part is disputed. I think it’s pretty obvious the way the story is told or anyway translated and ‘In early modern Japan, the chrysanthemum blossom was a common symbol of homosexual intercourse because it was thought to resemble an anus . . . chrysanthemum vow is a euphemism for homosexual intercourse.’
‡‡‡ He does get it wrong occasionally. Akinari’s preface is a brief invocation to classic writers: ‘Look at their writings: each depicts many ingenious scenes and stories; their silences and songs are true to life . . .’ Chambers glosses this: ‘”silences and songs”: style, rhythm, and tone.’ Please.
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