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Otogi-Zôshi the Traditions of Heian Fiction, and Especially of the Tale Of

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Otogi-Zôshi the Traditions of Heian Fiction, and Especially of the Tale Of Otogi-zôshi The traditions of Heian fiction, and especially of The Tale of Genji, 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 Kamakura 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 Japanese literature 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 Japan 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.
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