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  Pagoda, Skull & Samurai

  Koda Rohan (1867-1947) was born in Tokyo. Although he was an avid reader in his youth, his family's financial circumstances did not allow him a formal higher education. In 1884, he began working as a telegrapher in Hokkaido, but drawn to the bustling Japanese literary world in Tokyo, he left the job after three years to return to the capital. An introduction to the works of Ihara Saikaku and others launched a literary career that would span six decades. His early works were idealistic and then realistic fiction. Later, scholarly treatises on Japanese and Chinese classics earned him a Ph.D in literature from Kyoto Imperial University.

  Chieko Irie Mulhern, former Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, lives in Tokyo where she leads a busy life as a writer and speaker. She is the translator of Pagoda, Skull, and Samurai: Three Stories by Koda Rohan (1985) and the author of an historical novel, Amethyst Ring (Aoi suisho, 1985). More recently, she edited Heroic with Grace (1991), a book on legendary women in Japanese history, and authored Japanese Women Writers (1994), which looks at the appeal of historical fiction set in Japan.

  The stories in this book were originally published in 1982 in typescript form by the Cornell China-Japan Program as one of its East Asia Papers.

  Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd,

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  Copyright in Japan, 1985 by Charles E. Tuttle Publishing Co., Inc.

  First Tuttle edition, 1985

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN 978-1-4629-0324-5 (ebook)

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  page 7 Introduction

  21 The Five-Storied Pagoda (Gojū no Tō)

  Selected Allusions 109

  111 Encounter with a Skull (Tai Dokuro)

  Selected Allusions 146

  149 The Bearded Samurai (Higeotoko)

  Selected Allusions 257

  261 Afterword

  275 Historical Notes on "The Bearded Samurai"

  (with map)

  Note: Throughout the text, Japanese name order (surname followed by given name) has been followed. Macrons, signifying long vowels, have been retained except in very well-known place names. For Chinese names, the Wade-Giles system of romanization has been used.

  INTRODUCTION

  Koda Rohan was born Kōda Shigeyuki in Edo (present-day Tokyo) in 1867, the last year of the feudal Edo period. Both his grandfather and father served the Tokugawa shogunate as direct samurai retainers in a hereditary position in charge of protocol, ceremonies, and shogunal audience appointment. Their official stipend of sixteen koku (roughly forty bushels) of rice a year was quite modest by any standard, but they also had an annual cash income of three hundred ryō from other sources. (In the late Edo period, a household servant's yearly pay was two to four ryō; one ryō bought one koku of rice, equivalent to a full adult ration for a year.) Thus, the Koda family was relatively well-off until a cataclysmic event shook the entire nation.

  After a complex and protracted series of political assassinations and insurrections subtly involving the advent of Western intervention, the shogun surrendered political power and the shogunate estates, worth seven million koku, in favor of Emperor Meiji in 1868. The abdicated shogun's heir soon moved to the original Tokugawa fief, which amounted to seven hundred thousand koku and was comprised of Enshū, Mikawa, and Suruga provinces (parts of present-day Shizuoka and Aichi prefectures). This marked the end of the feudal Tokugawa regime and the beginning of the modern monarchy in Japan. Rohan's father decided to remain in Tokyo, thereby forfeiting his hereditary employment and stipend, and eventually secured a minor post in the Ministry of Finance of the new national government.

  Rohan had three brothers and two sisters, all of whom distinguished themselves. The eldest brother climbed to the presidency of a large cotton-spinning company. The second, a naval lieutenant, attained national fame as the heroic explorer of Japan's northern territorial waters and as organizer of the settlements on the Kurile Islands (taken over by the Soviet Union in 1945). Rohan's younger brother published scholarly works, making invaluable contributions as professor of international commerce. Both his sisters were nationally prominent: a brilliant concert pianist and a violinist, and tutors to the Crown Princess and the Empress. One sister shared with Rohan the honor of being among the inaugural members of the Imperial Academy of Arts established in 1937. This impressive family tradition has continued into the next generation: Rohan's nephew Andō Hiroshi has been twice nominated for the prestigious Akutagawa Literary Prize under the pen name Takagi Taku; and Rohan's only surviving daughter, Koda Aya (b. 1903), is a highly acclaimed novelist.

  Rohan was raised under austere discipline and received the standard education for sons of the samurai class. He was taught the usual reading, writing, and the recitation of Chinese classics at a private school before he entered and completed compulsory elementary school. Thereafter, his education was erratic in terms of formal schooling, but nonetheless effective in retrospect. Largely due to financial hardship following his father's loss of employment during governmental reorganization, Rohan was forced to withdraw from Tokyo First Middle School after one year in 1880, and from Tokyo English School in 1882, also within a year after his entrance. He eventually graduated from the government-subsidized telegraphers' school. Notwithstanding his lack of higher education, Rohan would become widely acknowledged as a leading scholar and intellectual writer from the early stages of his career, while contemporary novelists boasting Imperial University degrees were often accused of decadent trivialism.

  The most significant factors formative to his character and scholarly expertise were the Tokyo Library (the former Shogunate Academy library, now the National Diet Library) and a private academy of Chinese learning called Geigijuku, both of which occupied his time from 1880 to 1883. Rohan ravenously read books of all kinds at the library; throughout his life he would maintain this habit of avid reading, which resulted in encyclopedic knowledge in intellectual as well as practical fields. The master of Geigijuku, Kikuchi Shōken (1806-86), was a Confucian scholar of considerable repute who provided Rohan with thorough training in the Neo-Confucianism of the Ch'eng-Chu school and the practical philosophy of Wang Yang-ming (1472-1528) based on the doctrine of the Unity of Knowledge and Action. Rohan soon developed sufficient insight and analytical ability to explore on his own Taoist mysticism, older commentaries on Confucian canons, and Buddhist sutras. For mental concentration, physical exercise, and rel
axation, Rohan continued to practice swordsmanship in his adult years, often using a real blade as well as a wooden or bamboo sword.

  Rohan began working as a telegrapher in 1884; this was to be his sole experience of practical employment. When he was stationed in an office in remote Hokkaidō, the Japanese literary world was bustling with new talents possessed by a vision of literary renaissance. In 1885, Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859-1935) published the Essence of the Novel, in which he renounced the moralistic didactic approaches inherited from late-Tokugawa literature and advocated the adoption of modern realistic techniques from the West. In the same year, the eighteen-year-old student Ozaki Kōyō (1867-1903) organized what was probably the first Japanese literary coterie, Ken'yūsha, which dominated the Meiji literary scene for over a decade.

  As an equally ambitious eighteen year old, Rohan was increasingly frustrated in his mundane job. In August 1887 he abandoned his post and headed for Tokyo. His pen name, Rohan, "companion of the dew," derives from his haiku describing this journey, during which he was forced to walk through the night to catch his train:

  Sato tōshi

  Far from towns,

  Iza tsuyu to nemu

  I'll share with the dew

  Kusamakura

  A pillow of grass.

  Back in Tokyo, he found that his family had coverted from their hereditary faith of Nichiren Buddhism to Christianity. Rohan did not consent to be baptized, but attended church lectures and Bible-reading classes. (Not surprisingly for a future writer of mystic stories, he seems to have taken particular interest in the Apocalypse.) At the same time, he participated in group studies of Buddhism viewed as metaphysics and philosophy. Then a friend from his Tokyo Library days introduced him to the works of Ihara Saikaku (1642-93) and other writers of the Genroku period (1688-1704). The newly rediscovered realistic and objective techniques of the Genroku literature soon inspired Rohan to launch into a literary career which was to span six decades and make him one of the pillars of Meiji literature.

  Rohan's career is often discussed in five phases. The first may be called the Idealistic Phase (1889-93), during which he produced the bulk of his best fiction, brilliantly embodying his idealistic themes in ideal heroes. "Tai-dokuro" (Encounter with a skull, 1890) and "Gojū no To" (The five-storied pagoda, 1891) are the twin summits of this period and of Rohan's career as a whole. The second, Mature Phase (1893-96), is represented by his unfinished but most expansive novel, Fūryū Mijinō (Storehouse of infinitesimal life, 1893-95), which revolves around two central characters and unfolds by means of a complex narrative technique called the chain-link structure. Here Rohan viewed life as it is, rather than as it ought to be (as he did in the works of the Idealistic Phase). Through keen observation and realistic description, he endeavored to delineate the existence of Absolute Truth as manifested in human life. He was no longer concerned with individual characters but rather with the grand dynamics of fate and the correlation between an individual's personality and fate. But it was also during this period that he began to turn away from fiction as his faith in its intrinsic value waned.

  During the Stagnant Phase (1896-1903), Rohan was uncomfortable in his attempt to adopt realistic techniques and the gembun itchi style (the unity of written and spoken languages) in writing a series of minor modern stories. Yet he found success, ironically, in reverting to his masterful gazoku setchū style (a mixture of poetic diction and vernacular). One example is "Higeotoko" (The bearded samurai/The bearded man, 1896), a historical tale set more than three hundred years in the past. The fourth, Syncretic Phase (1903-19), yielded his last long novel, Sora Utsu Nami (Waves dashing against the sky, 1903-5). In this contemporary narrative, Rohan synthesized realism and idealism, the gazoku setchū and gembun itchi styles, poetic imagination and scholarly learning, Oriental tradition and Western philosophy, and more fundamentally, fiction and academic treatise. The Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) and influenza prematurely terminated this work. Thereafter, Rohan began to publish more and more scholarly treatises on Chinese and Japanese classics. These recondite theses eventually earned him an appointment as lecturer of Japanese literature at the prestigious Kyoto Imperial University in 1908 (from which he resigned after one semester to devote his time to writing) and the Doctor of Literature degree in 1911.

  Rohan made his literary comeback with the celebrated story "Ummei" (Destiny, 1911), based on the power struggle between the Chien-wen Emperor (r. 1399-1402) and the Yung-lo Emperor (r. 1403-23) of China's Ming dynasty. During this Last Phase (1911-47), Rohan produced a series of serenely reflective short stories beloved by his fellow writers and scholars. Shortly after completing a voluminous commentary on Rokubushū (Six collections of linked verse) by the haiku master Matsuo Bashō (1644—94), Rohan died from pneumonia at age eighty in July 1947.

  Rohan's standing in Japan's literary history is illustrated by the term "Kō-Ro jidai," the age of Kōyō and Rohan, applied to the period between Rohan's debut in 1889 and 1903, the year of Kōyō's death and Rohan's last novel. Two of the first modern Japanese writers to make a living by the pen, Ozaki Koyo and Rohan were responsible for the bloom of neoclassical literature. By revitalizing indigenous literary traditions, they fully answered in their own way Tsubouchi Shōyō's urgent call for a new literature of intrinsic value and realistic techniques. At the time, theirs was a more popular alternative to the tired old Edo fiction than the epoch-making innovation by Futabatei Shimei (1864-1909). A specialist in Russian language and literature, Shimei signaled the birth of modern Japanese novel with Ukigumo (Drifting clouds) in 1887, but his primary model and inspiration, Russian realism, was not immediately accessible to the majority of aspiring Japanese writers. It is no small wonder that the neoclassical Kō-Ro school reigned supreme in the Japanese literary world for nearly two decades, until supplanted by shizenshugi, a Japanese brand of naturalism.

  Kōyō's superior genre novels in Genroku style somehow jaded with age and faded out of fashion as the mainstream of Japanese literature has become more and more oriented toward the West. In contrast, Rohan's stories, charged with poetic passion, philosophical insight, and mystic vision, still remain high on the list of favorite works among today's intellectual readers. The influential academic journal Koku-bungaku Kaishaku to Kanshō (Interpretation and appreciation of Japanese literature) reported in its January 1969 issue the result of a poll ranking the most admired Meiji writers. Rohan placed third after Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916) and Mori Ōgai (1862-1922), considerably ahead of Shimazaki Tōson (1872-1943), Futabatei Shimei, and Koyo.

  Japanese literary history usually classifies Rohan as an idealist writer (the only other Japanese writer so labeled is Mori Ogai) because his idealistic early fiction is the best known and the most significant of his diverse works in terms of their impact on Japanese mind and literature. All three stories in this book belong to the idealistic type by theme, impulse, and genesis. Even "The Bearded Samurai," completed in 1896, was originally begun in 1890, during his first phase. Rohan's idealism is a synthesis of diverse ideas: philosophical (a Platonic belief in the Absolute); metaphysical (the universal salvation of Mahayana Buddhism and the Taoist unity with Nature); humanistic (Buddhist-Christian love and compassion); moral (Confucian ethics/Taoist detachment/Shinto cleanliness/the samurai code of honor); social (a sense of mission to lead progress in positive and lofty directions); and aesthetic (a faith in the power of art to humanize and enlighten mankind).

  Rohan was one of the few writers who stood aloof from the subsequent tide of naturalism, which swept through the literary scene, quickly degenerated into trivial, sentimental slices of life and masochistic confessions, and soon exhausted itself. Today, long after the demise of the once overwhelming mainstream, Ōgai and Rohan remain a prominent pair of luminaries whose humanistic, positive, and idealistic visions cast bright beams of hope across the morbid, pessimistic clouds that all but smother the modern Japanese literary landscape.

  Beneath his accomplished classical style and historical sett
ing, Rohan is surprisingly modern and universal in his theme and perspective. Modern Western readers are in a better position to appreciate the aggressive individualism and glorification of creative minds that Rohan advocates in "The Five-Storied Pagoda." Ironically, it is the modern Japanese reader who must first struggle through Rohan's rich traditional diction and syntax. Japanese readers, moreover, must extricate themselves from their preconceptions about particular historical settings before they can fully enjoy Rohan's fertile imagination and poignant insight. Critic Masamune Hakuchō, Rohan's contemporary, marveled after reading Arthur Waley's translation (1925-33) of The Tale of Genji: "For the first time I feel I could understand this eleventh-century novel." Rohan may well prove another case in which an English translation is more accessible than the original, though, of course, no translator can ever hope to approximate, let alone recreate, Rohan's resonant, surging poetic prose, which has its own force and rhythm so inimitably Japanese.

  "The Five-Storied Pagoda" was originally written as a serialized piece of fiction in the intellectual newspaper Kokkai (Diet, or Parliament), beginning in November 1891 and ending in March of the following year. As a consequence, chapter divisions in this story, and in the other two as well, do not necessarily coincide with the breaks in plot progression or narrative pauses. Any attempt to analyze its structure or its cadence in dramatic intensity must take into consideration the peculiar conventions of the newspaper serial novel, a popular but rather complex genre in Japan, where practically all newspapers (including sports and racing dailies) carry fiction serials by prominent or popular novelists.