Otogi-zôshi

The traditions of Heian fiction, and especially of , were not forgotten during the Muromachi period. Not only was The Tale of Genji itself made the subject of learned commentaries by members of the emperor's court but, along with various handbooks to the celebrated classic, it was perused even by badly educated warriors who were determined to become cultured. The typical fiction of the Muromachi period, however, did not much resemble The Tale of Genji: it was shorter, closer in language to its time, and more apt to describe priests, soldiers, or commoners than courtiers who preserved the traditions of the world of the Shining Prince. There was little influence from the courtly fiction of the period, but the stories about soldiers often derived inspiration from The Tale of the Heike and similar works. These short stories are generally known today as otogi-zôshi, a term that originally meant "tales of a companion"—"companions" (otogi) having been those who entertained their superiors with recitations and other spoken or sung performances. The term otogi acquired its present meaning early in the eighteenth century when a collection of twenty-three medieval tales was published in Osaka under the title Otogi Bunko (Companion Library); the individual stories of this collection became known as otogi- zôshi, a term used later for most of the fiction written during the Muromachi and early Tokugawa periods. Over four hundred of these stories survive. Only one can be dated precisely; the dates proposed for the others vary in some cases by as much as two hundred years. Authorship is equally uncertain; only the one dated story can be confidently credited to a particular man, and even this identification is not illuminating because the author is otherwise unknown. A few tales have been attributed to such celebrated writers of the Muromachi period as the poets Nijô Yoshimoto and Ichijô Kaneyoshi or to the priests Gen'e and Ikkyû. The otogi-zôshi are not stylistically distinguished. The same images occur innumerable times: the appearance of beautiful women almost invariably evoked comparison to cherry blossoms and tinted autumn leaves, and if these women were likened to famous beauties of the past, it was always to the same three or four Chinese or Japanese ladies. Stereotyped phrases and descriptions recur from tale to tale and are sometimes repeated within the same work. The texts, though mercifully easier to read than most other examples of premodern literature, lack individuality of expression; it is hard to imagine that an accomplished writer like Kaneyoshi could have penned such compositions. It was no doubt because of their lack of stylistic distinction that the Muromachi stories were seldom considered by scholars of of the past, and even in recent times the greatest efforts have been devoted to transcribing the texts and collating variants, rather than to discussing their literary worth or placing these stories within Japanese literary traditions. Relatively few of the sources of the stories have been identified apart from those that unquestionably borrowed their themes from well-known Japanese or Chinese works or that resemble extant folktales. Perhaps it has not seemed worth the trouble to trace the antecedents of stories of uncertain intrinsic literary value." However, interest of quite another kind was shown in the otogi-zôshi during the postwar years. At a time when the democratization of was much on people's minds the tales were praised as examples of "literature of the common people"; later (as the Japanese became more absorbed with their particular place in the world), they were acclaimed as "literature of the Japanese people." But regardless of how commentators have interpreted the otogi-zôshi, their attention has usually been focused on the twenty-three stories of the original Otogi Bunko collection, and the bulk of the stories remains inaccessible to the general reader. The stories have been divided into various categories in the hope of bringing order to an otherwise unmanageable mass of texts. Ichiko Teiji, whose scholarly work has exercised the greatest influence, proposed six categories of subjects—the aristocracy, the priesthood, the military, the common people, foreign countries, and nonhuman beings. Not every story can be easily fitted into one of these categories, and some fit almost equally well into several. Even within the same category, moreover, there may be a great range of subjects; for this reason Ichiko was obliged to establish subcategones; for example, among stories treating the priesthood he distinguished those about young acolytes, corrupt priests who had violated the commandments, priests whose faith had been awakened by some extraordinary experience, and great priests of the past. Tales about the avatars of the various Buddhist or Shintô divinities formed still another subcategory of "the priesthood." A simpler division might be equally satisfactory, the nobility, the priesthood, the military, and the commoners.

Tales of the Nobility

The otogi-zôshi that treat the lives of the nobility are generally the least praised by scholars who discuss fiction of the Muromachi period. These tales say little, except inadvertently, about the lives of the mass of people of their time. They are cast in an idiom that seldom suggests how much the Japanese language had changed in the course of the three hundred years since the Heian romances were written and are all too frequently devoted to matters that were more effectively treated in earlier fiction. But some of these stories about the nobility have enough charm to keep them from being dismissed as mere copies of The Tale of Genji. Utatane no Sôshi (A Tale of Fugitive Dreams) has traditionally (but uncertainly) been attributed to a daughter of the courtier and poet Asukai Masachika (1417-1490). An inscription on the box containing one of the surviving manuscripts, in the form of an emakimono, or hand scroll, credits the illustrations and calligraphy to two men who were otherwise active in the middle of the fifteenth century. This seems to date the manuscript, though not necessarily the text, a pastiche of a Heian romance whose content hardly suggests the turbulence of Japan in the fifteenth century. Perhaps it most clearly reveals its time in the wistfulness of its evocations of the court in former days. A Tale of Fugitive Dreams opens with the celebrated poem by Ono no Komachi:

Ever since I saw utatane ni The man who is dear to me koishiki hito wo While I was napping, miteshi yori I have begun to believe yume chô mono wa The things that people call dreams. tanomi someteki

The poem is appropriate as the epigraph for a work whose plot is unfolded mainly in the form of dreams. In Japanese poetry dreams were normally considered to be the opposite pole to reality and therefore unworthy of trust, but the heroine of this story (like Komachi before her) came to believe in them. The lady is the daughter of an important court official. Although he has had many children by his various wives and concubines, he dotes so much on this particular daughter that he is unwilling to send her to court where, even if she is fortunate enough to enjoy the emperor's favors, she will surely be subjected to the jealousy and intrigues of other palace ladies. The daughter grows into a woman of exceptional beauty and accomplishments, but she is lonely. Her mother would have searched for a suitable husband, but the mother is dead, and her father is so preoccupied with court business that he tends to forget about her. The lady spends her days in brooding and in boredom. One day in the rainy season the lady is whiling away the time by playing her koto. She wearily puts aside the instrument, and before she knows it she has dozed off. In her dream someone brings her a spray of wisteria to which a letter written on lavender paper has been attached. It contains this poem: omoine ni More insubstantial miru yume yori mo Than phantoms seen only in hakanaki wa A dream of longing: shiranu utsutsu no The face of one who is real yoso no omokage But distant and a stranger.

She awakes before she can discover who sent her the letter, but her thoughts keep returning to the dream. She induces herself to fall asleep again, and this time she sees before her the man who wrote the poem, a splendidly attired young gentleman whose appearance is so radiant that she wonders if "even the Shining Genji one reads about in that old story could be a match for this man." The gentleman takes her hand and chides her for not having vouchsafed a word in response to his poem, and he reminds her of the terrible consequences of rejected love. But just as she prepares to answer him, a cock crows and the gentleman says he must leave. Once again she awakes, still ignorant of the identity of her dream suitor. The lady falls into a despondent state that is not relieved by the prayers of the priests summoned by her worried father. Her half-brother, a priest of the Ishiyama-dera, suggests that the lady pray at the temple to the deity Kannon, who grants to believers whatever they desire, and the lady sets out on foot, imitating Tamakazura in The Tale of Genji who had refused a carriage when she made a pilgrimage to Hatsuse, believing that the more arduous the journey, the more likely her prayers would be answered. Once she is surrounded by the holy atmosphere of the temple the lady recalls that it was in this very temple that Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji. At that moment she hears from the next room men's voices; one of them, to her astonishment, is exactly like the voice or the man of her dream. In the course of the conversation the man (identified as Sadaishô) reveals that he had come to the temple in the hope of obtaining relief from the torment aroused by a dream. The lady peeps into the room. Peeping through a fence or hedge (kaima-miru) is a familiar device in Heian literature, but this is a rare instance of a woman's taking a covert look at a man. As Sadaishô tells his companions about his dream, he recalls a passage in The Tale of Genji; like the lady, he is reenacting Genji. He describes the beautiful woman of his dream and his unhappiness over not being able to meet her. The lady spends the night by the crack in the door, looking at and listening to the man she loves. But when morning comes she decides that there is no seemly way for her to reveal her identity, nor can she possibly forget him. She has no choice but to place her trust in Kannon and in the life to come. A messenger arrives from the aged nurse of her elder brother, a priest. The nurse has heard that the lady is in the vicinity. The lady decides to visit her, but as she and her women are crossing a bridge, she suddenly throws herself into the river. The women shriek for help. Providentially, a boat is passing and the lady is rescued. Aboard the boat, as we might have guessed, is Sadaishô. Seeing her in the flesh for the first time, he is dazzled by her beauty, even more striking than in the dream, and she, overcome with joy, forgets her embarrassment. They are united and, we are told, their descendants prosper mightily. The story concludes with a brief apology from the author for having wasted good ink in writing so inadequate an account of the wonders of fate. The author of A Tale of Fugitive Dreams was in no sense attempting to hide his indebtedness to The Tale of Genji; on the contrary, he was at pains to call attention to parallel situations. All the same, this wispy romance bears little resemblance to its great predecessor. It is not merely a matter of scale; unlike Murasaki Shikibu, this author used only the most conventional expressions when describing his hero and heroine, and we are likely to remember the tale not in terms of the characters but of its dreamlike atmosphere or perhaps its pictorial beauty. Several enchanting emakimono confirm this impression: the people depicted seem to have their eyes shut throughout, as if they walk in their sleep. The paintings are even more successful than the prose in conveying the fragile beauty of the story. This is by no means the only instance of the illustrations of an otogi- zôshi being of superior aesthetic quality to the works they illustrate. Many tales survive only in booklets that were bought and preserved primarily for their illustrations. These brightly colored volumes are known as Ehon, or Nara picture books. They were produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mainly for the amusement of the upper classes, whether as bridal gifts or merely as tasteful decorations for empty bookshelves; but their popularity waned when inexpensive illustrated printed books began to appear in the seventeenth century. Hitomotogiku (A Single Chrysanthemum), a tale of the nobility in the form of a Nara picture book, recounts (like many otogi-zôshi about the nobility) the cruelties of a wicked stepmother; but it is unusual in that there are two victims, a brother and a sister, rather than a single Cinderella in the tradition of the stepmother stories of the Heian and Kamakura periods. The boy (like Genji) is exiled, and the girl (like Ochikubo) is shut up in a wretched house, but despite these Heian touches, the work betrays its Muromachi origins in such passages as the account of a pilgrimage to Kiyomizu-dera, another temple sacred to Kannon. Worship of Kannon was certainly not new, but during the Muromachi period pilgrimages to the thirty-three temples sacred to Kannon became a craze. Iwaya (The Hut in the Rocks), another work of the same genre, features an even more hateful stepmother. The story, set in the ninth century, relates the hardships endured by Tainoya, the daughter of Middle Counselor Korenaka. Her mother died when she was still a child, and her father remarried two years later. The new wife had a daughter of her own, a year older than Tainoya, and this made Korenaka suppose that she would extend to Tainoya the affection she felt for her own daughter. However (as we might have predicted), the stepmother resents Korenaka's seeming partiality for Tainoya, and resolves to get rid of her. In Tainoya's thirteenth year Korenaka is appointed the vice-governor of the Dazaifu in Kyûshû. He decides to take his family with him, and the stepmother sees a golden opportunity for getting rid of Tainoya. She summons the daughter's tutor, Tadaie, who assures her there is no task, however difficult, that he would not perform for her. The stepmother orders Tadaie to abduct and drown the girl on the way to Kyûshû. The obedient Tadaie manages to abduct Tainoya, but she is so lovely he finds it almost impossible to kill her. Steeling himself, he tells the girl to say her prayers, but as she prays his resolution falters once again; instead of killing Tainoya, he abandons her on a rock off the coast of the island of Awaji. When the others discover that Tainoya is missing, they can only suppose that she has drowned. Tainoya, however, is rescued by fishermen and lives in their remote village for four years until a nobleman, ship- wrecked in a storm, accidentally discovers her and, entranced by her beauty, takes her to the capital. This unusually long otogi-zôshi goes on to describe the jealousy Tainoya's beauty arouses among the palace ladies, the tests to which she is subjected by them in the hope of revealing her uncouth background, and finally her joy when she is reunited with her father and acclaimed at court as the fairest and most accomplished lady of the land. At the end the wicked stepmother (who has already suffered a bout of madness, attributed to spirit possession) loses her senses completely and dies, and the fisherman who rescued Tainoya is rewarded by being elevated to the rank of daimyo. The Hut in the Rocks is far more literary than most other otogi-zôshi, possibly an indication that it followed closely a lost Heian romance. As so often in these stories, there is mention of Prince Genji, in this case in connection with his travels along the coast of the Inland Sea from Suma to Akashi. The principal characters are more persuasively drawn than in most tales, and even minor figures are sometimes characterized so successfully in a few words as to leave a distinct impression. Other stories about the nobility are devoted to such historical figures of the Heian court as Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu. Both women are portrayed in terms of their sensual natures. Izumi Shikibu opens in this manner:

Not so long ago, during the reign of the Emperor Ichijô, there was in our fair capital a beautiful courtesan named Izumi Shikibu. There was in the palace a man named Tachibana no Yasumasa. From the time that Yasumasa was in his nineteenth year and Izumi Shikibu in her thirteenth, an extraordinary bond was formed between them. Their feelings ran deep, and in the spring of her fourteenth year she gave birth to a baby boy. At night, as they murmured together, pillows side by side, how ashamed she must have felt! She abandoned the baby on the Gojô Bridge. She wrote a poem on the hems of the narrow-sleeved kimono of pale blue lined with crimson the baby wore, and left beside him an unsheathed dagger. A townsman found the baby and, after rearing him, sent him up .

The boy grows to maturity at the Tendai monastery on Mount Hiei, where he develops into such an extraordinary scholar that even as a youth he is celebrated not only in the monastery but throughout the whole country. When Tômei, as he is called, is in his eighteenth year he is summoned to the palace to give sermons on the Lotus Sutra. A wind is blowing through the courtyard as he lectures, and two or three times the blinds are lifted by the wind, revealing a beautiful young woman of about thirty years of age who is sitting within, intently listening to his sermon. (This scene recalls the one in The Tale of Genji when a cat on a leash knocks aside the curtains hiding the Third Princess, permitting Kashiwagi to see her.) From the first glimpse, Tômei falls in love with the woman, and when he returns to his cell, he can think of nothing but her. Yearning to see her again, he hits on the plan of gaining access to the palace by pretending to be a tangerine peddler. (During the it would have been quite unthinkable for a peddler to wander into the palace, but times had evidently changed.) The lady sends a servant with twenty coppers to buy some tangerines, and Tômei gives her twenty tangerines which he counts out in the form of twenty love poems. The astonished servant asks how it happens that a man of his talents became a peddler, and he answers with the cryptic word furifuri. Word of the strange peddler gets around the palace, and the emperor orders that he be trailed when he leaves. The servant reports to her mistress what has happened. Izumi Shikibu at once recognizes the allusion to a poem describing a woman whose tears fell like rain (furifuri) because of unrequited love. Recalling the unhappy fate of Ono no Komachi, who was cruel to her would-be lover, she goes to Tômei's lodgings. He is overjoyed and the two spend the night together. The next morning, when she is about to leave, she happens to notice Tômei's little dagger and asks about it. He tells how it was found with him after he was abandoned as a baby on the Gojô Bridge. The lady asks him how old he is, what clothes he was wearing when he was abandoned, and what poem was written on his infant clothes. She produces the scabbard of the dagger, and reveals that she has kept it on her person ever since she abandoned her baby. They realize to their horror that they are mother and son. But Izumi Shikibu, unlike Jocasta, is not suicidal; instead, she intuitively understands that she had to be shocked into following the path of the Buddha. She leaves the same night for a temple where she spends the rest of her life in prayer. The story concludes with a somewhat altered version ot one of Izumi Shikibu's best-known poems:

kuraki yori I came from darkness kuraki yamiji ni To be born in the darkness umarekite Of an obscure path; sayaka ni terase yama no ha no tsuki Oh, shine on me most brightly, Moon at the edge of the hill.

The religious ending of this story is characteristic of the otogi-zôshi, many of which conclude with the protagonist fleeing the "burning house" of this world and entering Buddhist orders. In Izumi Shikibu's case, the realization that she has committed incest leads her to take a step that she might not have otherwise considered or would have postponed indefinitely. In other cases, the intentional commission of a crime, even murder, provides the impetus for gaining salvation; repentance and prayer can win forgiveness. Other otogi-zôshi about the nobility follow traditions of the mo- nogatari so closely that it is almost impossible to detect anything that is specifically of their time, though the clumsiness of the style and the construction often gives away the late composition. Yet however derivative these stories about the nobility may be, they are certainly more effective as literature than the mass of otogi-zoshi. The emphasis in these stories is not so much on the love shared by the characters as on the obstacles that keep them apart; perhaps this is their most distinctive feature. But the classicizing attitude of the authors, who seem to have felt that the world they actually lived in was not worth describing, kept their works from enjoying the popularity ot even inartistic tales that better reflected their own times.

Tales of the Buddhist Priesthood

The Buddhist temples played so large a part in the lives of people of the Muromachi period that it is not surprising many of the otogi-zôshi describe priests, temples, or the avatars of the various Buddhist divinities. Among the tales of the priesthood, two subcategories proposed by Ichiko, those that described chigo (acolytes) and those that are devoted to the events which caused some priest to experience hosshin tonsei (awakening of the faith and escape from this world), were of particular literary importance. Seven of the nine surviving stories about chigo relate how monks fell in love with boys—some acolytes at their temples, others merely visitors. It was, of course, prohibited for monks to marry or to have sexual relations with women, and for that reason some sought erotic pleasure in the company of boys of fifteen or sixteen. This, too, was a sin, but probably not quite as shameful to people of the time as consorting with women. In the otogi-zôshi the love of monks for boys is usually reciprocated, and is not portrayed in terms of decadence or immorality; rather, these attachments (though attachments to anything in this world were undesirable) are praised as the direct causes of enlightenment. At the end of a chigo story the boy is likely to be revealed as having been in reality a buddha who came into the world to guide the monk on the true path of salvation. The best known of the chigo stories is Aki no Yo no Nagamonogatari (A Long Tale for an Autumn Night). This late Kamakura or early Muromachi work tells the story of Sensai, a learned and artistically accomplished priest who lived at the end of the Heian period. Sensai was known in his own time especially because of the great golden statue of Amida Buddha erected in the Ungo-ji, the temple in the Higashiyama area with which he was long associated. Poems by Sensai were included in the Shin Kokinshû and later imperial anthologies, and he enjoyed a following as a leading Jôdo cleric of his day. A Long Tale was written in the episodic manner of an emakimono with shifts of scene that lend themselves to pictorial depiction. Despite its title, it is not especially long even by the standards of the average otogi-zôshi (it is only about twenty-five pages in a modern edition). The story opens with an account of Sensai, then known as Keikai, a priest who has gained recognition as a master of sacred and profane knowledge and even of the military arts, but is nevertheless dissatisfied with his life. He has begun to wonder if all of his efforts to gain Buddhist enlightenment had not in the final analysis been inspired by his hopes of winning fame and profit. He makes up his mind to withdraw from human society and seek truth in a solitary hut in the mountains. Before he leaves for this retreat, Keikai goes to the Ishiyama-dera where he plans to spend seventeen days and nights praying for Kannon's help in achieving enlightenment. On the seventh night he sees in a dream a beautiful young man standing beneath a cherry tree that sheds blossoms over him. Keikai interprets this vision as a sign that his prayers have been answered; and instead of going off to a hut in the mountains, he enters the monastery on Mount Hiei. He can think of nothing but the youth who appeared in his dream, though it hardly seems possible anyone so beautiful could exist in this world. One day when Keikai is passing by the great Mii-dera, not far from Mount Hiei, he is caught in a sudden rain and decides to take shelter. As he nears the gate he sees the boy who appeared in his dream, standing under a magnificent cherry tree and breaking off a branch from which blossoms cascade like snow. Keikai falls madly in love with the youth, and eventually is able to spend one night with him, but the boy, Umewaka, mysteriously disappears. He has been abducted by a tengu and shut up in a cave. The priests of the Mii-dera, not knowing this, suppose that Umewaka has been stolen from them by Keikai, a monk from the hated Enryaku-ji. Their fury aroused, two thousand monks from the Mii-dera attack their rivals, only to be met by a vastly superior force from the Enryaku-ji. The Mii-dera is once again destroyed. In the cave where he is kept prisoner by the tengu, Umewaka hears about the burning of the Mii-dera, and learns that it was in order to foment discord between the two temples that the mischief-making tengu abducted him. Umewaka and his servant manage to escape, aided by a storm god, but the thought that he was responsible for the destruction of the temple and the loss of many lives weighs on Umewaka, and he throws himself from a bridge into Lake . Keikai is desolated, but Shinra Daimyôjin, the Shintô god who protects the Mii-dera, manifests himself and reveals that Umewaka was in reality the Kannon of the Ishiyama-dera who, in order to bring enlightenment to Keikai, had taken the form of the beautiful youth. Keikai, at last free of all worldly attachment, changes his name to Sensai as a sign he is a new man, and goes to live in a mountain retreat. The poem he wrote on the wall of his hut was of such surpassing beauty that it was later included in the Shin Kokinshû. A Long Tale for an Autumn Night describes a priest who actually lived, and a historical event, the burning of the Mii-dera. It is at least possible that Sensai loved an acolyte of the rival temple: indeed, one professedly historical record of the fighting between the monks from the two temples stated that the Mii-dera was burned in 1181 as the result of the hostility aroused by the disappearance of a boy loved by Keikai. But even if the historicity of a few elements in the story can be demonstrated, the rest is fiction, inspired by the legends that grew up around Sensai after his death. The intervention of the tengu and Shinra Daimyôjin makes it evident that the author's main purpose in relating the tale was to persuade readers that enlightenment can be attained in unexpected ways. The author of A Long Tale was traditionally identified as the priest Gen'e. Modern scholars for a time rejected the attribution for want of hard evidence, only for it to be revived in recent years, mainly because of the discovery of the oldest-known text of A Long Tale, dated 1377, on the reverse of a manuscript of the , which was long supposed to be (in part) by Gen'e. Perhaps Gen'e actually witnessed the last burning of the Mii-dera in 1319, and recalled it in his story. However, the appeal of this tale obviously does not lie in its documentary value but in the exceptionally moving and well expressed narrative. We cannot take seriously the machinations of goblins, but it is possible to believe in Keikai's love for the boy Umewaka, and the tale is far more appealingly narrated than most of the otogi-zôshi. This first work of Japanese literature devoted chiefly to a description of homosexual love is one of the most artistic. Scholars have suggested that the author— Gen'e or whoever it was—may have been attempting to justify, by revealing that Umewaka was a manifestation of Kannon, the love he personally had felt for a beautiful boy. Such loves were evidently common in monasteries, but if they had not been clothed in the poetic expression of A Long Tale and the other chigo tales, they would probably not have been preserved in later times when the loves of priests were no longer of much interest. The chigo tales generally have plots that (in all but the crucial respect of the sex of the beloved) closely resemble more conventional stories of romantic love. The first meeting of a priest with the boy is accidental, but after one glimpse the priest falls helplessly in love; he discovers to his great joy that the love is shared; against their inclinations, the lovers are separated, leading to the death of one of them; the survivor spends his remaining days in prayers for the lover he has lost. In Matsuhoura Monogatari (The Tale of Matsuhoura), for example, a priest and the boy he loves are separated by the son of the prime minister, who has himself fallen in love with the boy. He sends the priest into exile on the island of Awaji in order to get rid of the rival, but the boy does not respond to the other man's affection. Resolved to follow the priest into exile, the boy escapes and reaches Awaji, only to learn that the priest has died. In despair, he shaves his head and, in his sixteenth year, becomes a monk on Mount Kôya. The language of the chigo tales is generally poetic, in the manner of the Heian novels rather than that of most otogi-zôshi. This passage from Toribeyama Monogatari (The Tale ot Mount Toribe) may suggest the mood:

One night he secretly made his way into the house where the boy lived. A perfume that seemed a part of the place lingered pervasively in the air, making him all but exclaim that he had reached the land of a living Buddha. He peeped in through the door, which had been left slightly ajar. A screen depicting swirling cherry blossoms and red leaves stood around the boy who was quietly bending over a pile of picture books that he had spread open in the dim light of a lamp, a faint fragrance emanating from his tumbling stray locks. He was like the dawn when blossoms are heavy with dew or an evening landscape when willows incline with the wind, incomparably more lovely than when the priest first saw him in the northern hills. He pushed open the door and went in. The serene charm with which the boy greeted him made him wonder if this might not be an unfinished dream, but he went up beside him, tears as much of pain as of joy starting to his eyes. The look on the boy's face as he shyly turned away might be likened to a spray of autumn clover, the blossoms heavy with dew. It need hardly be said how touching, how lovely he was—it quite made the priest lose all sense of reality, and the melancholy to which he was prey was completely swept away in the night they spent together.

Phrase after phrase echoes the Heian classics. The scene ot their meeting is written with grace and sensitivity, but we know from the outset that the pledges of love they exchange that night cannot last very long; this gives greater poignance to the Buddhist belief with which the work is colored throughout—that the world we live in is not to be depended on. The priest and the boy continue to write even after they part, but the boy wastes away with loneliness. At first he refuses to disclose the cause of his grief, but one day, moved by an old servant's devotion, he reveals the secret of his love. The servant informs the boy's parents, who agree to send for the priest and allow him to live with the boy. As soon as the priest receives word of the parents' decision, he sets out for the boy's house; on the way, however, another letter reaches him, this one telling of the boy's death. The priest builds a hut by Mount Toribe, the site of the boy's funeral pyre, where he spends his remaining days in prayer. If some of the chigo tales are similar in expression to the tales about the nobility, others are close to the tales of the military, suggesting once again the difficulty of assigning works to a particular category. Gemmu Monogatari (The Tale of Gemmu) is once again the story of a priest who has fallen in love with a young man, but Hanamatsu is somewhat older than the boys in the other stories, and though he responds to Gemmu's love, his heart is set on vengeance for his father. Hanamatsu and Gemmu meet intimately only in Gemmu's dreams. He learns that Hanamatsu successfully killed his father's enemy only to be killed by another man. Stunned by this revelation, he goes to Mount Kôya, where he gives himself to prayers for his dead lover. On the first anniversary of Hanamatsu's death Gemmu attends a special service in the Founder's Hall, where he notices a young priest praying with unusual fervor. Moved by curiosity, Gemmu asks the other priest why he has entered orders so young. The priest reveals that he is the son of the slain man. He killed his father's assailant; but when he examined the body of the man he had killed, Hanamatsu's beauty had moved him to an awareness of the brevity and undependability of human life. He had come to Mount Kôya to pray for Hanamatsu's repose. The two men realize that it was because of Hanamatsu that they had both experienced an awakening of faith. We are told that they spent the rest of their lives on the mountain in prayer, and the story concludes with the revelation that Hanamatsu was a reincarnation of the divinity Maňjusri, who had assumed human form in order to bring about the salvation of the two men. Another variety of tale about priests, one of particular literary im- portance, is the confession of what had induced men and women to "abandon the world" and devote themselves to Buddhist prayer and meditation. People of the middle ages believed that if one became a priest or nun it would wipe out all one's sins on earth and promote rebirth in paradise. Most people of the aristocratic or warrior class in their old age or when they suffered a severe illness shaved their heads, took vows of ordination, and assumed the dark robes of the Buddhist clergy. Even a man like , whose life of violence hardly promised salvation, became a priest late in life; but it was less common for a man in his prime to enter Buddhist orders. Some of the most affecting otogi-zôshi describe what led relatively young people of dissimilar backgrounds to take the Great Step. The best of these stories and, indeed, the story often rated as the finest of all the otogi-zôshi is Sannin Hôshi (The Three Priests). The setting is Mount Kôya, as so often in these tales. Three priests come together by chance from the various places on the mountain where they have their abodes, and one of them in the course of a conversation suggests, "Let us each confess to the others why he has abandoned the world. This can surely do no harm, for they say that confession reduces the sins." The first priest to speak is a man in his early forties. Despite his torn robes and haggard face, something of the aristocrat lingers about his appearance. He recalls how when he was young and known as Kasuya no Shirozaemon, he was in the service of the shogun Ashikaga Takauji. On one occasion he accompanied Takauji to the house of Lord Nijô, where he saw a court lady who was so extraordinarily beautiful that he fell desperately in love. Unable to think of anything but the lady, for days he refused all nourishment. The shogun, worried about Kasuya's condition, sent his personal physician to examine the young man. The physician diagnosed Kasuya's malady as love. The shogun thereupon sent Kasuya's closest friend to find out who had aroused this passion in Kasuya, and the friend, discovering the name of the lady, reported this to the shogun, who did what he could to promote Kasuya's suit. All went well, but one night, when Kasuya had left the lady to worship at a shrine, he heard people gossiping about a court lady who had been killed by a robber who tore off her clothes. As he listened, a terrible presentiment came over him, and he rushed out to learn what had happened. His worst fears were realized: not only had his beloved been killed without mercy, but even her hair had been sheared off by the robber. In horror and despair, Kasuya became a monk that very night. For the past twenty years he has lived on the mountain, praying for her repose. The next priest to speak was a man of about fifty. He stood six feet tall, had a protruding Adam's apple, angular chin, prominent cheekbones that gave the face a forbidding expression, thick lips, large eyes and nose. He was dark complexioned and had an extremely heavy frame. Above his tattered robes he wore a stole tucked into his cloak. As he spoke he fingered a large rosary. "I should like to be the next to tell my story," he said. The others urged him to begin at once. He said, "Strange to relate, it was I who killed the lady!" At the words Kasuya starts up, ready to kill the man who murdered his beloved, but Aragorô, the second priest, begs him to remain calm until he has finished his story. Aragorô relates that he began his life of crime at the age of eight and was twelve when he first killed a man. But in the year that he killed the woman Kasuya loved, his luck had turned and he had failed to commit even one successful robbery. His wife and children were without food or clothing, and his wife nagged at him to bring home some money. In desperation Aragorô went out that night and waited for someone to pass. A radiantly beautiful court lady accompanied by two maids went by and he ran after them. The maids escaped, but the lady stood her ground. Aragorô demanded all her clothes, including her underrobe, and when she refused he killed and stripped her. His wife was delighted with the loot, but asked how old the victim was. "Seventeen or eighteen," replied Aragorô, at which the wife rushed outside without a word of explanation. After a while she returned, saying, "You are really much too magnanimous a robber. As long as you are committing a crime you should try to make the most of it. I just went to cut off her hair. My own is rather thin, but if I twist hers into plaits it will really look beautiful. I wouldn't change it for the robes." Aragorô, filled with disgust and revulsion, reflected on his life of crime, and understood that if he continued he would not escape the torments of hell. "To go on in this way committing grievous sins, dragging out a meaningless existence, not realizing the hollowness and futility of my life, seemed revolting even to me. And now the monstrous behavior of my wife had struck me dumb with horror. I repented bitterly that I had slept with such a woman, that our lives had been joined." That very night he went to see the monk Gen'e, became his disciple, and soon afterward climbed up Mount Kôya. He offers now to let Kasuya kill him, in whatever way he chooses, but Kasuya realizes that the lady must have been a manifestation of a bodhisattva who came into the world to save both men. "If this had not happened, would we have become priests, turned our backs on the world, and placed our hopes in the incomparable bliss of paradise? This is our joy within sorrow, and from this day forth I shall be grateful for die event that has made us companions in seeking the Way." The story of the third of the priests, disappointingly, is not connected with those of Kasuya and Aragorô. The high reputation of The Three Priests is due to the unexpected dovetailing of the first two narrations (though a similar effect is found in The Tale of Gemmu), and to the brief but unforgettable portrait of Aragorô's wife. The ending of the story recalls Shinran's paradox, "Even the good person can be saved"; and Aragorô, for all his unspeakable acts of wickedness, will be saved because he has thrown himself on Buddha's mercy. This was certainly an appropriate conclusion for a tale about priests, but it was also used to conclude many other works; however artfully they might narrate their stories, however many amusing or frightening events they might include to capture the attention of readers, a didactic intent was generally close to the hearts of those who composed the otogi-zôshi.

Tales of the Military

The Muromachi period was marked by almost incessant warfare, and much of the fiction composed during the age, as we might expect, described the military. Some otogi-zôshi rehearse the mighty deeds of the heroes of the war between the Taira and the Minamoto, others are devoted to their immediate descendants or else to warriors of a somewhat later generation, but surprisingly few tales are about more recent events. The repulsion of the two invasions of the Mongols in 1274 and 1281 should have provided materials for stories celebrating the Japanese heroes and the kamikaze, but they inspired hardly a single literary work. Godaigo's abortive revolt, his exile to Oki and later triumphant return, and, above all, the heroism of Kusunoki Masashige are the kind of subjects that would have attracted European writers of poetry and prose, but the Japanese authors, fearing perhaps official disapproval, avoided mention of the military and political events of their own times. When not set in the distant past, the stories are usually no more precisely dated than mukashi (a long time ago). Although vague with respect to time, the tales are usually quite precise as to where the action took place. Unlike the Heian and Ka- makura stories, they are prevailingly set in the hinterland rather than in the capital, reflecting the establishment of centers of culture in many parts of the country. Writers who had been driven from the capital by the warfare of the fifteenth century took refuge with local potentates, bringing with them the culture of the capital. They may have felt obliged to mention in their compositions the legends and traditions of the places where they had taken refuge. The otogi-zôshi that treat the military class were probably intended to please who enjoyed hearing or reading about the heroic deeds of the past. Ichiko distinguished three main varieties of military tales: those about heroes who vanquished monsters; those concerned with the warfare between the Minamoto and the Taira; and those that describe succession disputes and vendettas among the military families of the provinces. Stories about heroes who conquered supernatural creatures go back as far as the Kojiki, where we find the story of the god Susano-o and the monstrous serpent. The best-known otogi-zôshi, both in terms of its lasting popularity through the centuries and its influence on later literature, is probably Shuten Dôji. This rather lengthy tale describes the triumph of the hero Minamoto Raikô and his five friends over a demon who has been abducting and devouring beautiful young ladies. Their victory is not unaided: before they set out for Ôe-yama where the demon has his stronghold the heroes pray at three shrines, and the gods of these shrines lend their help at critical moments. When the gods first appear (in the guise of three old men), they tell the heroes about the sake-loving demon Shuten Dôji, and supply them with a magical liquor which, if consumed by demons, will prevent them from flying, but if consumed by men is a medicine. The old men also give the heroes star-crested helmets that they must wear when they kill Shuten Dôji. The six heroes make their way to Shuten Dôji's hideout. When the other demons first see Raikô and his friends, they are delighted: they have not had any human beings to eat in quite a while, and these men will make a fine dinner. But they dare not eat the men without first obtaining permission from their master. The heroes, brought before Shuten Dôji, identify themselves as yamabushi who have lost their way. They say they would like to offer him some special sake. At the mention of sake Shuten Dôji's interest is aroused, and he invites the six men to drink with him. The liquor he serves is blood squeezed from human beings, and as appetizers there are human arms and thighs. Shuten Dôji offers Raikô a cup of this wine, which he cheerfully drains. Entering into the spirit of the occasion, Raikô slices off some of the meat and eats it, smacking his lips. Tsuna does the same. Shuten Dôji is surprised that priests should so readily drink and eat the rather special fare of his table, but Raikô informs him that it is their duty to eat whatever anyone out of kindness bestows on them even if it is not entirely to their taste. Now it is Raikô's turn to offer entertainment. Shuten Dôji and the other demons gladly drink and become inebriated on the sake provided. Shuten Dôji retires to his bedchamber, perhaps to sleep off the effects of the liquor, but once again the three gods intercede, fastening Shuten Dôji's arms and legs to posts in four directions. The gods instruct the heroes how best to decapitate Shuten Dôji and the lesser demons. In a scene of joyful carnage, Raikô and his associates do precisely as told. They rescue the many maidens who have been captured by the ogres and bring them back to the court where the emperor welcomes the heroes and bestows splendid rewards. They all live happily ever after. The other heroes on Raikô's team were celebrated in stones of their own, and some also slew monsters. They were not the only men credited with such feats. Tawara Tôda Monogatari relates how the hero Tawara Tôda Hidesato killed the giant centipede of Mikami Mountain; in the second part of the tale Hidesato disposed of a mere human being, the would-be usurper Taira no Masakado. Sometimes the hero instead of killing a female monster marries her, discovering her true identity only when, about to give birth, she resumes her "real" appearance as a serpent. The bravery of these heroes is never in question, but they always benefit from divine intervention, and sometimes even a man who is not a renowned hero triumphs because he carries a magic sword presented by the gods. It is curious all the same that in an age of warfare, when there was no shortage of heroism, the storytellers felt obliged to provide divine help for their heroes, some of them bearing the names of historical personages. The otogi-zôshi about heroes and the descendants of the heroes of the wars between the Minamoto and the Taira are more appealing and certainly of greater literary value. Two in particular stand out, Yokobue no Sôshi (The Story of Yokobue) and Ko Atsumori (Little Atsumori). The Story of Yokobue is not concerned with warfare or the suppression of demons though its hero, Takiguchi, is a soldier. He falls in love with Yokobue, a lady in the entourage of the Empress Kenreimon'in. His love is reciprocated, and he wishes to marry Yokobue, but his father, pointing out that she comes from an unimportant family, insists that he break all ties with her at once. Unwilling to disobey his father, but unable to dismiss Yokobue, Takiguchi takes Buddhist vows and enters a temple. Yokobue, at first supposing he has deserted her, is heartbroken, but when she discovers he is at a temple rushes there. She begs for a glimpse of him, but he yields only to the extent of speaking to her briefly from behind a door. In despair, she drowns herself. Takiguchi finds her body and, after burying her ashes, climbs Mount Kôya, to live the rest of his life in its silence. The Story of Yokobue illustrates the difficulty of assigning works to a particular category, although about a military man, it portrays the world of the aristocracy, and the hero at the end becomes a priest. Needless to say, readers remember the work not in terms of the category to which it belongs but as a story of a tragic love. The essential elements were already present in The Tale of the Heike, but the story, as expanded in the otogi- zôshi version, is even more affecting. Little Atsumori is also derived from The Tale of the Heike, but only indirectly. The account of the death of the young general Taira no Atsumori at the hands of the Minamoto soldier is one of the unforgettable incidents of The Tale of the Heike, and doubtless readers desired to know what happened afterward; Little Atsumori, like the Nô play Ikuta Atsumori, is about the next generation. The Tale of the Heike makes no mention of a wife of Atsumori, let alone a son, but the otogi-zôshi states that the wife was seven months pregnant at the time of Atsumori's death. When the baby was born she feared for its life; the victorious Minamoto were determined to eradicate every male Taira. At a loss what to do, she abandoned the baby by the wayside together with a sword, hoping that some kindly person, recognizing the child's superior lineage from the sword, would rear him. The celebrated priest Hônen, on his way to a ceremony at the Kamo Shrine, heard the baby's cries and took him in his arms. He left the baby with a nurse, and arranged for him to have a suitable education. Kumagai, at the time a monk at Hônen's temple, happens to see the child. Struck by his extraordinary resemblance to Atsumori, he asks him about his family. The boy replies, "I was an orphan without father or mother, but the Holy Man found me and saved me." Then, bursting into tears, he asks, "Why do all other children have fathers and mothers and I have none? I have never had a father or a mother." When the boy asked Hônen the same question, he was told to think of Hônen himself as both father and mother. The boy, increasingly unhappy because he knows nothing of his real parents, stops eating and refuses even to drink water. The boy's condition is such that Hônen decides to track down the boy's parents even if this means that the boy may be killed as a Taira; it is better for him to know his parents than to go on living in ignorance. The boy loses consciousness and it seems as if he must surely die, but just at this time a beautiful young woman, dressed in magnificent robes, arrives at the temple. Seeing the sick child, she reveals that she is his mother. The boy opens his eyes at his mother's words, seemingly brought back to life. He understands that Atsumori is dead, but he yearns to see him all the same. He goes to the Kamo Shrine and prays for one hundred days that the god grant his wish. On the hundredth day an old man appears and tells the boy that Atsumori is at Ikuta in the province of Settsu. The boy, though in pitifully weakened condition, goes to Ikuta, where he sees an aristocratic-looking young man praying at the shrine. The man asks the boy who he is, and when he replies that he is the son of Atsumori, the man bursts into tears. He is Atsumori. He draws the boy to him, removes his rain-soaked clothes, and then tells him the circumstances of his death. Atsumori describes also the torments of hell, and urges the boy to accumulate merit on earth and in this way lighten the torment his father suffers. The boy begs Atsumori to persuade Emma, the king of hell, to let him take his father's place in the netherworld. Atsumori weeps at these words and strokes the hair of his son, who lies with his head in Atsumori's lap. He writes a poem and gives it to the boy, only to disappear with the approach of the dawn. When the boy awakens he finds a human bone, and realizing that this must be a relic of his father, takes it along with Atsumori's poem to his mother in the capital. Stunned by these relics, she exchanges the beautiful robes of a court lady for the somber habit of a nun, and builds a shrine to Atsumori where she intends to spend the rest of her days in prayer. At first she is reluctant to part with her son, but she realizes that having this living keepsake of Atsumori by her can only increase the pain she must bear, and she sends the boy back to Hônen. Alone in the hut she has built, she prays for Atsumori's repose. Although Little Atsumori has its ultimate source in The Tale of the Heike, its appeal does not stem from its references to warfare. The story moves us because each detail of the description—for example, when Atsumori removes his son's wet clothes—is at once believable and affecting. The characters are also believable in a way not often encountered in literature of this time. When Hônen decides it would be better for the boy to be dead rather than live in perpetual uncertainty about his parents, we may not agree about the correctness of his opinion, but psychologically it rings true; and when the boy begs his father to persuade the king of hell to allow him to take his father's place, we can be sure that this is not a formal gesture of filial piety but his real emotion. The otogi-zôshi, though they contain many passages that convey genuine emotions, do not often rise to this level of literary distinction. A number of otogi-zôshi are about another hero of The Tale of the Heike, Minamoto Yoshitsune. The best known of these tales is Jôruri Jûnidan Sôshi (The Story of Jôruri in Twelve Episodes), which recounts Yoshitsune's meeting and love affair with Lady Jôruri while on his flight to the north of Japan. The original Otogi Bunko included another tale about Yoshitsune, Onzôshi Shimawatari (Yoshitsune's Crossing to the Islands), which relates his journey to the islands north of Japan where he encounters a king of devils and is rescued by a beautiful princess. These stories are of interest to modern readers mainly as examples of the fascination that Yoshitsune continued to exert over the Japanese. One more military tale should be mentioned, Akimichi. Despite its pedestrian style, the story is unforgettable. It is set in the Kamakura period, and the hero, Yamaguchi Akimichi, is a sainurai whose consuming wish is to avenge his father, who was murdered by the brigand Kanayama Hachirozaemon; but even though Akimichi is brave and resourceful, he is unable to discover the whereabouts of Kanayama's secret stronghold. As a last resort, Akimichi asks his beautiful wife to gain access to Kanayama by pretending she is a prostitute. At first she is horrified at the thought of surrendering her chastity to another man, even for a noble purpose, but in the end, as a samurai wife, she yields to her husband's imploration. The plan is successful. Kanayama, despite his extreme suspicion of outsiders, is captivated by the wife's beauty and takes her as his mistress. For a year and a half she waits for some carelessness that will give Akimichi the chance to strike, but Kanayama never relaxes his vigilance. In the meantime, she gives birth to Kanayama's son. The wife's most important task is to discover the location of his secret cave in the mountains. Kanayama killed all the laborers who built the place, and no one except himself knows the way. The wife feigns illness in the hope that Kanayama, who by this time dotes on her, will care for her at his hideout and, just as she hoped, he takes her there. The first chance to attack Kanayama occurs while he is off in a distant province. The wife guides Akimichi to the cave, where he waits. When Kanayama returns he again takes the wife to the cave, but his suspicions are aroused by every slight indication that an outsider may have found his way there. The wife manages to give a plausible explanation for each sign that Akimichi has penetrated the stronghold, but when they reach the cave Kanayama, just to be sure no one is there, throws a dummy inside to see if some enemy, mistaking the dummy for himself, will attack it. Just as Akimichi, falling into the trap, raises his sword to strike, a chorus of voices is heard. These are the voices of all the people Kanayama has killed. Akimichi holds back his sword and Kanayama, reassured, enters the cave where he is killed. Now that Akimichi has avenged his father, he plans to revert to his old life, but his wife refuses to live with him; her sacrifice has changed her too much. Abandoning both her husband and her child by Kanayama, she becomes a nun. Akimichi also enters Buddhist orders, leaving Kanayama's child as the heir to the Yamaguchi family. Akimichi is an exceptionally well narrated tale. Nothing is known about the sources, though there are somewhat similar stories of people who disguised themselves as menials in order to penetrate an enemy's defenses. The special interest of the story, however, is not Akimichi's vendetta but his wife. It was an unimaginable disgrace for a samurai's wife to have an illegitimate child, and this was one reason why she could not resume her life with her husband. Even more important, she could not forget that Kanayama was the father of her child, and she felt obliged to pray for his repose; although he was a cruel and violent man, he had trusted and loved her. The conclusion is ironic: as the result of the successful vendetta, Kanayama's son becomes the heir of Akimichi. Vendetta stories occupy an important place in medieval Japanese literature; The Tale of the Soga Brothers is perhaps the best-known example. The theme is developed in later literature, notably in Chûshingura, but the ending of Akimichi is not like that of more typical vendetta stories—a shout of triumph to celebrate the taking of the enemy's head. Akimichi has carried out his plan, but it has cost him his wife and his own position in society. There is no mention of joy when he enters the path of the Buddha; instead, we are left with the impression that the success of the vendetta was ultimately meaningless.

Tales of Commoners

Many of the twenty-three tales in Otogi Bunko, the first collection of otogi-zôshi, are (at least in some sense) about commoners. Even fables that recount the doings of monkeys, cats, mice, and other creatures hardly differ from the tales of human beings; they wear Japanese clothes, behave exactly like human beings of the time, and express themselves in familiar imagery when they write their love letters or bewail their distinctly human griefs. Bunshô Sôshi (The Tale of Bunshô), the first tale in Otogi Bunko, may seem to the reader more like a European than a Japanese tale. Bunshô, the hero, is a menial who diligently serves the high priest of the Kashima Shrine in the province of Hitachi. The high priest, thinking perhaps to test him, tells Bunda (as Bunshô is then called) that he is dissatisfied with him, and urges him to seek employment elsewhere. Bunda accepts the priest's decision and apprentices himself to a saltmaker. He works so hard that before long he is rewarded with two salt kilns of his own. Throwing himself into the work, Bunda produces and sells salt of unusually high quality, and his customers, sure that it brings long life, buy his salt in great quantities. In this way he becomes rich, and as a sign of his prosperity, he takes a new name, Bunshô Tsuneoka. Even though Bunshô has become exceedingly prosperous, with no fewer than eighty-three storehouses and ninety houses, his wife is childless and she is by now over forty. At the suggestion of the high priest of the Kashima Shrine, she observes abstinence and prays at the shrine. The god grants her a child. (Many otogi-zôshi are about môshigo, children born in response to prayers addressed to a god or buddha.) Bunshô is disappointed that it is a daughter. The wife tries again, and gives birth to a second child, but it too is a daughter. Bunshô is unhappy not to have a male heir, but the two girls are extraordinarily beautiful. The high priest, learning of their beauty, asks for the girls as wives for his sons, but the girls absolutely refuse. They are equally unresponsive when the governor of the province, a noble from the capital, asks for one of the daughters. The disappointed governor gives up his post to return to the capital. He tells the son of the kampaku, a captain, about his experience, and this young man instantly falls in love from the description of their beauty. The pangs of unrequited love turn into a wasting illness that arouses the consternation of his family. Two friends, learning the cause of his malady, propose that they all go to Hitachi disguised as merchants, and the captain accepts with delight. When they reach Bunshô's mansion, a maid comes out to ask what these merchants have brought with them. This is the occasion for a long enumeration of silken goods of many different colors and patterns. (Enumeration is one of the typical stylistic devices of the otogi-zôshi.) Bunshô, intrigued by these unusual merchants, invites them into his house and drinks with them. The captain offers presents to Bunshô's daughters, one of which hides a sheet of exquisite paper exquisitely inscribed with an exquisite poem. Naturally, she is interested. At a concert that night given by the captain and his friends, a gust of wind lifts the bamboo blinds, revealing the ladies seated behind— another echo of the famous cat on a leash of The Tale of Genji. The captain and Bunshô's older daughter exchange glances. That night he makes his way to her room and they are soon joined in ties of love. The next day he abandons his disguise and attires himself in his court costume, not neglecting to blacken his teeth and darken his eyebrows. When Bunshô learns the true identity of the merchant, he is all but wild with joy. He cries, "My son-in-law is a prince, and the prince is my son-in-law!" (Mukodono wa denka zo, denka wa mukodono yo!) The captain takes his bride with him to the capital, where his parents offer her boundless affection, sure that she is not merely the daughter of someone named Bunshô but a manifestation on earth of a heavenly being. Not long afterward, the emperor, having heard that Bunshô's second daughter is even lovelier than her sister, sends for her. Bunshô is desolate at the thought of being deprived of the company of both his daughters, but the emperor solves this by commanding not only the daughter but Bunshô and his wife to come to the capital. The girl before long is made a consort and gives birth to an imperial prince. Bunshô is appointed a major counselor and his wife is known as Lady of the Second Rank. They live happily ever afterward, each one of them attaining an age of at least one hundred years. The final sentence urges everyone to read this tale as the first, felicitous act of the new year. The Tale of Bunshô is not artistically told. The language is ordinary and there are many repetitions of words and phrases. The one section that reveals literary intent (of a kind) is the tedious description of the fabrics offered for sale by the pretended merchants. The plot is also filled with implausibilities, whether the amazing success of a salt merchant or the unexplained antipathy of his daughters for the various candidates for their hands. The lovesickness of the captain has been interpreted in terms of the well-known trope of the prince, forced to leave the capital for the country, who finds a woman to love despite the unpromising surroundings, but surely nobody ever fell that gravely ill over a woman he had never seen. The honors heaped on Bunshô and his family are without parallel in Japanese fact or fiction. And, finally, we may have trouble believing that every member of the family lived to be over one hundred years. It is precisely because one improbability is piled on another in this way that The Tale of Bunshô appealed to readers of its day and is still of interest to us. Bunshô's success may recall the diligent merchants described by the seventeenth-century novelist Ihara Saikaku, but not even his most worthy merchant was rewarded by having his daughter marry the emperor or himself becoming a major counselor, one of the highest offices of the land. In the Muromachi period it seems to have been possible at least to dream of such glory coming to a man who had started his career as a saltmaker. This, perhaps, is an example of the spirit of gekokujo, often invoked as the essence of the culture of an age of constant warfare. The point is emphasized when Bunshô's daughters reject the sons of a high-ranking Shintô priest and various members of the samurai class and the nobility in favor of a man whom the older daughter supposes to be a merchant. This is an obvious instance of wish fulfillment, but perhaps when The Tale of Bunshô was first written there was at least a glimmering hope that the fairest maiden in the land, regardless of her father's occupation, might marry Prince Charming, in the manner of a European fairy tale. Saru Genji Sôshi (The Tale of Monkey Genji) concerns a sardine peddler with the peculiar name of Monkey Genji. He has succeeded to the sardine business of his father-in-law who had entered Buddhist orders and become a priest on familiar terms with great landholders and members of the shogun's family. Monkey Genji goes to the capital, where he roams the streets crying, "Here's Monkey Genji from Akogi Bay in Ise, buy your sardines from me!" This unusual greeting appeals to people of the capital and they buy his sardines in such quantities that before long he becomes quite rich. One day, as he is crossing the Gojô Bridge, a palanquin with reed blinds passes him. Just then a wind from the river lifts the blinds, permitting Monkey Genji to get a glimpse of the beautiful woman inside. He falls in love from that first glance, and can think of nothing but the lady. Tormented by his unrequited love, he wastes away. His father-in-law, the priest, when he learns the cause of Monkey Genji's sickness, bursts out laughing, "I have never before heard of a sardine seller falling in love! Under no circumstances let other people hear about this." Monkey Genji counters with an instance of a fishmonger who won the love of a court lady. The priest grudgingly concedes that the example is apt, but insists that one glance is not enough to make a man fall in love, to which Monkey Genji responds with quotations from The Tale of Genji, including (predictably) the instance of Kashiwagi's infatuation with the Third Princess, aroused by a single glimpse. The father-in-law is again impressed, but objects that Monkey Genji does not even know the name of the woman. Monkey Genji reveals that he has investigated and found out that her name is Keiga, to which the father-in- law replies that she is the most famous courtesan in the capital, a favorite of the greatest lords of the land. He suggests that Monkey Genji disguise himself as a daimyo. The only problem is that a daimyo always travels with a great entourage. Monkey Genji has thought of that: he will suitably disguise two or three hundred of his fellow sardine vendors. The plan works. The resourceful Monkey Genji, disguised as the daimyo of Utsunomiya, is entertained at a teahouse by a dozen or more courtesans including Keiga. She visits him at his lodgings where they spend the night together. However, her suspicions are aroused by his plebeian manner after he has been drinking, and in his sleep he sings his sardine seller's song. He responds to her suspicions that he is a false daimyo by citing examples from Heian literature to explain his actions and his murmuring in his sleep. Keiga is convinced that no sardine monger could possibly know so much about classical poetry and she accords Monkey Genji her favors. The conclusion is that in love there is neither high nor low. Monkey Genji takes his bride back to Akogi Bay where they and their descendants prosper. And all this was brought about by Monkey Genji's knowledge of poetry; one can see just how important poetry is! The successful courtship by a sardine seller for the hand of the most beautiful woman in the capital is another dream-fantasy, but there is a strong and appealing suggestion of egalitarianism. Anyone, even a man with so humble a profession, can not only become rich but can pass as a daimyo if he puts his mind to memorizing poetry. Many other stories about commoners are worth describing, some- times because of an ingenious development in the plot, sometimes be- cause the underlying thought is refreshingly freer than in writings of earlier or later times. It is possible to find in these stories many examples of gekokujo, but this did not mean simply that the lower classes triumphed over the classes above; rather than a triumph that involved destruction, it was (as in the case of Monkey Genji) a conquest of the culture that formerly had been the exclusive possession of the nobles. Saikaku would warn of the dangers of a merchant's forgetting the proper way of life for merchants and aping his betters by trying to absorb their culture, and the government during the Tokugawa period frequently attempted by imposing sumptuary laws to keep the merchants from displaying their wealth; but in the otogi-zôshi no such caution is urged. Monkey Genji's knowledge of poetry, far from hindering him in his profession, was the source of his success. The stories are prevailingly optimistic; surprisingly so, considering that they were composed during an age of warfare and destruction. The otogi-zôshi had another importance. They (or similar works derived from these stories) include the first Japanese stories for children (otogi-banashi). Every Japanese child knows at least a few of the stories such as Urashima Tarô, the Japanese Rip van Winkle, who sojourned in the palace of the Dragon King only to discover when he returned to Japan that he had spent a whole lifetime under the sea; or Issun Bôshi, the Tom Thumb of Japan, only one inch tall but nevertheless a hero; or Tsuru no Sôshi, the story of the crane who is rescued by a man and, out of gratitude, transforms herself into a woman and becomes his wife. Otogi- zôshi adapted from such Chinese classics as the Twenty-four Examples of Filial Piety or from the Indian Jataka tales were also used in the education of children. Other stories that were not suitable as reading matter for children reached them orally in the form of folktales; some- times it is hard to be sure which came first, the oral or the written tale. The otogi-zôshi drew on many sources, some as yet not ascertained, and in turn supplied materials for the literature and drama even of recent times. The long neglect of the genre by most scholars has ended, and it seems likely that discoveries of new works will further enrich our knowledge of the fiction of the Muromachi period.

Donald Keene: Seeds in the Heart