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The Tale of the Enchanted Sword 妖剣紀聞

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The Tale of the Enchanted Sword 妖剣紀聞 Volume 16 | Issue 6 | Number 1 | Article ID 5123 | Mar 15, 2018 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus The Tale Of The Enchanted Sword 妖剣紀聞 Izumi Kyōka Translated and With an Introduction By Nina Cornyetz the uncanny, the grotesque, and the supernatural, have been known to pose challenges to modern Japanese readers and scholars because of their densely allusive imagery and use of archaic phrases and orthography. Cornyetz’s translation, the first into English of this Kyōka text that combines features of both Edo-style and modernist writing, has been particularly successful in capturing the dazzling visual effects of its language. *** From his writing debut in Meiji until his death in Shōwa, the prolific Izumi Kyōka (1873-1939) wrote over three hundred narratives. Kyōka was famous as a quirky, anti-mainstream writer, a romantic-idealist, and an impressionistic stylist, whose narrative aesthetics ran counter to the prevailing naturalism of his time. He frequently wrote supernatural “gothic” tales haunted by a dark, perverse eroticism, and many stories made protagonists, or antagonists, of people inhabiting the newly defined domains of the social abject or the uncanny of the era, such as Introduction geisha, outcastes, ghosts and demons. The Asian Studies Department of Cornell Yōken kibun (The Tale of the Enchanted Sword, University is proud to announce the recipients 1920) is one of my favorites for several reasons. of the 2017 Kyoko Selden Memorial Translation The first is thematic: besides telling a good Prize competition, concluded on November 1. story, the text centers in part on a member of The prize for a published translator has been the outcaste community. As such, the text has awarded to Nina Cornyetz, Professor ofhistorical and cultural significance. Interdisciplinary Studies at the Gallatin School of New York University, for her translation of Secondly, the text is stylistically interesting in Izumi Kyōka’s “Tale of the Enchanted Sword” its rejection of the linguisticgenbunitchi (妖剣記聞, Yōken Kibun, 1920). Writings by movement towards literary transparency and Kyōka (1873-1939), renowned for his tales of realism. Filled with Edo-style linguistic 1 16 | 6 | 1 APJ | JF flourishes, packed with description and kissed novel in Japan, which required the leaving by the supernatural, Yōken kibun is recounted behind of a homosocialism that included the to us by a narrator who is not the protagonist, possibility of same-sex relations and indeed nor a direct agent in the tale, although he comprised one model for idealized love in Edo might be easily conflated with the author narratives. With the onset of heteronormative himself. This narrator often speaks inmodernity, representations of same-sex conversational rather than literary language, eroticism were not so much proscribed as mixing masu with de aru sentence endings, circumscribed within an increasingly distant refusing then-developing literary norms and and aestheticized past. Hence it is not combining past- and present-tense narration uncommon to find texts in which the two drenched in the “flavors” of Edo fiction. A historically sequential models actually cohabit serious story of impossible love, there are single texts. As Eve Sedgwick argued, numerous delightfully humorous passages to entertain the reader. Kyōka’s prose borrows issues of modern homo/heterosexual definition and mixes attributes from the Japaneseare structured, not by the supersession of one premodern literary canon in a decidedly model and the consequent withering away of modernist form. As Donald Keene described it, another, but instead by the relations enabled by “The long sentences are broken up into the unrationalized coexistence of different seemingly unconnected fragments, following models during the times they do coexist.... 5 their own logic rather than that of normal unexpectedly plural, varied, and contradictory. syntax, and the expression can be as indirect as 1 Although it is a tale of a socially impossible that in the later Henry James.” Ikuta Chōkō heterosexual love, the narrator of Yōken kibun claimed that Kyōka’s prose was “styled like a lets us know of samurai Gennoshin’s desire to whirlpool, churning confusion to its “keep the youth (Seisaburō) close,” and that it utmost.”2 In Kyōka’s texts events may be linked appears that this is a one-sided wish. The by association rather than by logical plot sobriquet for Seisaburō, “kappa,” as well as the progression, leading Noguchi Takehiko to claim fact that one impetus for the events in the tale that one “frequently follows image, not – the eradication of a kappa – suggest symbolic story.”3 There are often temporary obfuscations links to homosexual desire, and an ambivalence of voice, space, and time; some of these may be towards such a desire. This association is later clarified while others remain. For these strengthened by the term used to describe reasons, the translation obviously presented its Gennoshin’s relationship with the boy, nengoro own set of challenges. I opted for faithfulness which was in Edo commonly used to describe to the original as much as possible, hopefully homosexual relations. As I am mapping out in without rendering the English awkward. I have an in-progress article, I find the tale to retained much of the idiosyncratic punctuation represent precisely such an ambivalent co- of the Japanese version. presence of modernity and convention in the figures of the differing desires of Seisaburō and Third, the tale is important in that it narrates a Gennoshin. kind of doubled temporality that Keith Vincent has argued informed many modern Japanese Please note that I have chosen to leave out literary texts: an oscillation between amacrons in the translation. premodern homosocial and homosexual continuum, and a modern compulsorySynopsis: heterosexualism.4 Heteronormativity was an integral part of both the process ofThe primary, unidentified narrator announces modernization and the development of the that he will recount to the reader a story he has 2 16 | 6 | 1 APJ | JF heard. In that tale the year is 1793. A samurai, loved the iris since childhood.6 I am not choosy, Gennoshin, and his young companionand love those which come to life on gilt Seisaburō, are visiting the provinces ofscreens as well as those blooming in garden Koishikawa. They encounter an outcaste ponds. Strolling by myself on short excursions woman Omachi (a torioi), who gives Seisaburō to the countryside, along a stream bordering a an iris blossom (kakitsubata). Urged by his rice field, by a little brook in the mountain companions, Seisaburō discards the blossom foothills or at the base of a log bridge, suddenly but he has been irrevocably polluted as well as there they are, opening tremblingly, reserved enchanted by her, and he wanders about in a in their fragrance and violet hue. The waters daze trying to find her again. may be shallow or stagnant but I am struck with a deep familiarity and I cannot simply A second tale is embedded in the first. During walk on. As I gaze at them I am overcome with their trip to Koishikawa, Gennoshin anda longing, a nostalgia, and feeling like a child Seisaburō are told of a mystery of twoagain, a lonesome joy, an emotion strong underwater caves by a waterfall bordering a enough to bring tears to my eyes as the sun’s nearby temple, caves which have long been the warmth soaks into my body. cause of repeated drownings. Previous attempts to eradicate the river demon – or Recently I heard this story. ——— Irises bloom kappa – believed to be the cause of the so vividly in it that I feel I can see them. Picture drownings, have failed. The head priest, a narrow stream of water flowing quietly before Sakuden, dives into the caves to challenge and the gates and behind the back doors of some eradicate the kappa, discovering and removing five or six, shall we say, humble cottages, a strange sword. Mysteriously, the sword which stand in a cluster of small dwellings. At appears to return repeatedly on its own to the the spot where the stream cascades like cave where it was found. Eventually the two scattered jewels is a slim, young, attractive tales are interwoven, as it is revealed that minstrel girl standing across from the Omachi has been stealing the sword and iris.7 ——— Her figure and the scene are returning it to one of the caves to stab herself, poignant. Merely uttering the word flower, can thereby purifying her polluted blood. Seisaburō I truly convey their purple hue?8 I do not know. pulls her from the cave and drinks her blood as ——— Still, I will tell you the story. she dies, receiving both her pollution and a mysterious knowledge of swordsmithing. ——— A ghost will make a brief appearance in my tale, but please, do not say, what, again? ——— The setting: Today there is a waterfall at Koishikawa Sekiguchi.9 ——— It became a The Tale Of The Enchanted Sword public park about a year ago. ——— But it was once called Oaraizeki. A by-way crosses over Izumi Kyōka, 1920 the Komatsuka Bridge, following the upper Nina Cornyetz, translator banks of Inogashira from the cliffs to Mejirodai. That is where the irises bloom and the young Part One minstrel girl stands. 1. The time: It is the seventh day of the fourth month in the fifth year of Kansei.10 True to the There are no flowers which I dislike, but I have season, a cascade of falling sunflower blossoms 3 16 | 6 | 1 APJ | JF had just that morning come to a full halt. of weather turns it into a water-mirage, as it is Visions of damp purple blossoms entice us to called in the song of Musashi Plain.15 A begin there, but first we must take a little remembrance of times long gone." detour on our path into a tale of doomed love.11 "So it does," responded the samurai, raising his The rain had cleared yet it was a bit humid as eyebrows.
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