The Demon at Agi Bridge and Other Japanese Tales (Translations from the Asian Classics) Read online

  The Demon at Agi Bridge

  A N D O T H E R J A P A N E S E T A L E S

  TRANSLATIONS FROM THE ASIAN CLASSICS

  TRANSLATIONS FROM THE ASIAN CLASSICS

  Editorial Board

  Wm. Theodore de Bary, Chair

  Paul Anderer

  Irene Bloom

  Donald Keene

  George A. Saliba

  Wei Shang

  Haruo Shirane

  Burton Watson

  Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation

  for assistance given by the Pushkin Fund toward the cost of publishing this book.

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Copyright © 2011 Columbia University Press

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-52630-2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  The demon at Agi Bridge and other Japanese tales / translated by Burton Watson ;

  edited, with an introduction, by Haruo Shirane.

  p. cm.—(Translations from the Asian classics)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-231-15244-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-231-15245-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-231-52630-2 (e-book)

  1. Folk literature, Japanese. 2. Tales—Japan. 3. Japanese literature—To 1600.

  I. Watson, Burton, 1925– II. Shirane, Haruo, 1951–

  GR 340.D43 2010

  398.20952—dc22 2010018857

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  CONTENTS

  Preface and Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Translations

  Introduction to Anecdotal (Setsuwa) Literature

  Record of Miraculous Events in Japan (Nihon ryōiki)

  On a Boy of Great Strength Who Was Born of the Thunder’s Rejoicing (1:3)

  On the Evil Death Visited Immediately on an Evil and Perverse Son Who, Out of Love for His Wife, Plotted to Kill His Mother (2:3)

  On Ransoming Some Crabs and a Frog and Setting Them Free, She Was Immediately Rewarded by Being Saved by the Crabs (2:12)

  On Receiving the Immediate Penalty of an Evil Death for Collecting Debts in an Unreasonable Manner and with High Interest (3:26)

  Tales of Times Now Past (Konjaku monogatari shū)

  Tales from India

  How the One-Horned Ascetic Carried a Woman on His Back from the Mountains to the Royal City (5:4)

  How Three Beasts Practiced the Bodhisattva Way and How the Rabbit Roasted Himself (5:13)

  How a Lion Showed Pity for a Monkey’s Children and Tore Out His Own Flesh for an Eagle (5:14)

  How a Nine-Colored Deer Came Out of a Mountain and Saved a Man from Drowning (5:18)

  Tales from China

  How Moye of China Made a Sword and Presented It to the King and How His Son, Broad-of-Brow, Was Killed (9:44)

  How Wang Zhaojun, Consort of Emperor Yuan of the Han, Went to the Land of the Hu (10:5)

  Buddhist Tales of Japan

  How a Monk of Dōjō-ji in Kii Province Copied the Lotus Sutra and Brought Salvation to the Snakes (14:3)

  How Kaya no Yoshifuji of Bitchū Province Became the Husband of a Fox and Was Saved by Kannon (16:17)

  How Ōe no Sadamoto, Governor of Mikawa, Became a Buddhist Monk (19:2)

  How a Palace Guard of the Takiguchi Unit Went to Collect Gold During the Reign of Emperor Yōzei (20:10)

  Secular Tales of Japan

  How a Child of Fujiwara no Chikakatsu, Having Been Taken Hostage by a Thief, Was Released Through Words Spoken by Yorinobu (25:11)

  How Minamoto no Yorinobu’s Son Yoriyoshi Shot Down a Horse Thief (25:12)

  How the Demon at Agi Bridge in Ōmi Province Ate Somebody (27:13)

  How Ki no Tōsuke of Mino Province Met Female Spirits and Died (27:21)

  How a Group of Nuns Went into the Mountains, Ate Some Mushrooms, and Danced (28:28)

  How Fujiwara no Nobutada, Governor of Shinano, Took a Tumble at Misaka (28:38)

  How a Thief Climbed to the Upper Story of Rashōmon Gate and Came on a Corpse (29:18)

  How a Man Was Traveling with His Wife to Tanba and Got Tied Up at Ōeyama (29:23)

  How a Poor Man Left His Wife and She Became the Wife of the Governor of Settsu (30:5)

  A Collection of Tales from Uji (Uji shūi monogatari)

  How Someone Had a Wen Removed by Demons (3)

  About the Priest with the Long Nose (25)

  How Yoshihide, a Painter of Buddhist Pictures, Took Pleasure in Seeing His House on Fire (38)

  How a Sparrow Repaid Its Debt of Gratitude (48)

  How a Man Received a Bounty After a Period of Prayer at the Hase Temple (96)

  How a Priest Falsely Stated That He Would Drown Himself (133)

  A Companion in Solitude (Kankyo no tomo)

  How a Woman Out of Deep Resentment Changed into a Demon in Her Present Existence (2:3)

  How a Court Lady of Royal Birth Demonstrated the Foulness of Her Bodily Form (2:9)

  A Collection of Things Written and Heard in the Past and Present (Kokon chomonjū)

  How Saeki Ujinaga Met Ooiko, a Very Strong Woman of Takashima, and of Ooiko’s Earlier Display of Great Strength in Water Disputes (15:377)

  How a Samurai Who Served Lord Kazan’in Tadatsune, Minister of the Right, Won at Gambling and Received the Tonsure Thanks to His Wife (18:423)

  How a Man Called Umanojō Shot a Male Mandarin Duck in Akanuma in Michinoku Province and Then Received the Tonsure (30:713)

  Tales of Renunciation (Senjūshō)

  The Venerable Zōga (1:1)

  The Woman of Pleasure at Eguchi (9:8)

  Collection of Sand and Pebbles (Shasekishū)

  The Scholar Who Loved Poetry (5:11)

  The Deep Meaning Underlying the Way of Japanese Poetry (5:12)

  Bibliography of Translations and Studies in Western Languages

  PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Demon at Agi Bridge and Other Japanese Tales is designed for both the classroom and the general reader who would like to experience the richness of the fascinating and influential body of Japanese anecdotal literature in compact form. I chose the tales in this anthology from the many thousands of stories that appear in setsuwa (anecdotal literature) collections for the historical importance and impact of a specific story on the larger tradition of Japanese literary and folk culture, the ability of that story to represent the character and function of a particular setsuwa collection, and, most of all, the stories’ readability in English and sheer entertainment value.

  I would like to acknowledge the aid of my good friend and colleague Komine Kazuaki of Rikkyo University, who helped me with the initial choices of these stories and whose scholarship has been a great inspiration to me. I would like to thank the outside readers of the manuscript, especially David Bialock, who made some key suggestions. I am indebted to David Atherton, who compiled the bibliography and who made very insightful recommendations for the chapter on Tales of Times Now Past. My thanks also go to Michiko Tsuneda, who was my research assistant in the final stages of this project. Most of all, I want to thank Burton Watson, the translator, for his patience and diligence over these years.

  With the exception of the illustration from the Konjaku
monogatari Picture Scroll (reprinted by permission of the National Diet Library), all the illustrations for Tales of Times Now Past, A Collection of Tales from Uji, and Tales of Renunciation are from Edo-period wood-block editions of those texts, reprinted with the permission of Komine Kazuaki.

  Haruo Shirane

  A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATIONS

  The translations are from the following sources: Izumoji Osamu, ed., Nihon ryōiki, Shin Nihon koten bungaku taikei 30 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1996); Ikegami Jun’ichi, ed., Konjaku monogatari shū, Shin Nihon koten bungaku taikei 33–37 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1993–1999); Miki Sumito et al., eds., Uji shūi monogatari, Shin Nihon koten bungaku taikei 42 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1990); Nishio Kōichi and Kobayashi Yasuharu, eds., Kokon chomonjū, Shinchō Nihon koten shūsei 59, 76 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1983, 1986); Koizumi Hiroshi et al., eds, Hōbutsushū, Kankyo no tomo, Hirasan kojin reitaku, Shin Nihon koten bungaku taikei 40 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1993); Nishio Kōichi, ed., Senjūshō, Iwanami bunko 30 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1970); and Watanabe Tsunaya, ed., Shasekishū, Nihon koten bungaku taikei 85 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1966).

  INTRODUCTION TO ANECDOTAL (SETSUWA) LITERATURE

  Setsuwa (anecdotes), which literally means “spoken story,” refers to stories that were first orally narrated and then written down. These recorded stories were often retold, resulting in new variations, which were again recorded. The result is that setsuwa frequently exist in multiple variants, with a story usually evolving or serving different purposes over time. In being told, written, retold, and rewritten, these setsuwa presume a narrator and a listener, but not necessarily a specific author. Setsuwa in this sense began as early as the Nara period (710–784), with the fudoki (local gazetteers), which gathered spoken or written stories from the provinces and recorded them in kanbun (Chinese-style writing) for the central government. Setsuwa as spoken-and-heard narration was stressed by Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962), the founder of minzokugaku (folklore studies) in Japan, who sought out “literature before the written word” and who was influential in the modern reevaluation of setsuwa. However, premodern setsuwa survive only in written form, sometimes in kanbun prose, providing a glimpse of the storytelling process but never reproducing it.

  Another significant context of setsuwa is the setsuwa-shū (collection of setsuwa), a written genre that had its own structure and conventions, inspired in part by Chinese encyclopedias (leishu). In contrast to the first meaning of setsuwa, which has its roots in oral storytelling, the setsuwa-shū was a literary form that provided a structured worldview and that categorized that world into different spheres and topics. For example, Tales of Times Now Past (Konjaku monogatari shū, ca. 1120), which contains close to a thousand stories, divides the world into India, China, and Japan, and separates Japan into Buddhist and secular spheres, with the latter being further divided into such secular topics as warriors, poetry, thieves, and humor. The first such setsuwa collection is Record of Miraculous Events in Japan (Nihon ryōiki, ca. 822), a Buddhist anthology that was compiled and edited by Keikai in the early Heian period (794–1185). The Nihon ryōki probably functioned as a sermon manual or sermon digest for Buddhist priests who used the stories to appeal to a broad audience. Although we sometimes know the editors of setsuwa-shū, such as Priest Mujū (1226–1312), the editor of Collection of Sand and Pebbles (Shasekishū, 1279–1283), the setsuwa themselves are anonymous. In short, there are three key elements to understanding setsuwa:

  • The act of narration (storytelling)

  • The act of writing, which records the spoken story or rewrites an earlier setsuwa

  • The act of editing, which brings together the stories in a certain order or by topic

  In late Heian and medieval aristocratic society, when hereditary family schools were established in fields such as waka (classical poetry) and music, the secrets of the family school were passed from teacher to disciple or from the head of the family to his successor by means of kuden (secret transmissions). When the line of transmission faced extinction, the family secrets were often written in the form of setsuwa in an attempt to preserve the knowledge of the past and of the school. In the late Heian period, this resulted in the Ōe Conversations (Gōdanshō), a setsuwa collection that records the stories narrated by Ōe no Masafusa (1041–1111), one of the leading scholars and poets of the time. In 1111, Ōe no Masafusa, at the age of seventy, fearing that the Ōe lineage would disappear with his death, narrated the family secrets to his top disciple, Fujiwara no Sanekane, who took notes, referred to as kikigaki (lecture notes; literally, “listen and write down”). The Gōdanshō takes the form of a dialogue between the narrator and the listener. This kind of setsuwa, which emerged in the late Heian period, was the product of an age in which knowledge about aristocratic culture and its historical precedents was held in high esteem but was quickly disappearing as the aristocracy fell from power. In this regard, setsuwa can be considered as a form of topical history, a history that is narrated before it is written.1

  The systematic attempt to provide knowledge of the past, particularly of the aristocratic past, is evident in A Collection of Things Written and Heard in the Past and Present (Kokon chomonjū, ca. 1254), which was edited by Tachibana Narisue, a low-ranking aristocrat and literatus who received the secret transmission on a biwa (lute). In the preface, Narisue asserts that Kokon chomonjū begins where A Collection of Tales from Uji (Uji shūi monogatari, early thirteenth century), the most popular of the setsuwa collections in the premodern period, leaves off and is intended to augment the official histories. The collection, whose structure shows the influence of Chinese encyclopedias, covers a variety of topics, beginning with Shinto, Buddhism, government, court matters, Chinese literature, classical poetry, and calligraphy, and ending with plants and trees (section 29) and fish, insects, and animals (section 30).

  In contrast to the narrational setting of the Gōdanshō, which was based on a vertical teacher–disciple relationship, other setsuwa were born out of an open relationship among people from different backgrounds—from commoners to samurai to aristocrats—who gathered to tell or hear stories. This was probably the setting that resulted in the setsuwa “How the Demon at Agi Bridge in Ōmi Province Ate Somebody” (27:13), which appears in book 27 of the Konjaku monogatari shū. These kinds of stories about demons probably had no particular value for a family or profession, but they were of great interest to those who heard them, and book 27, which is devoted to oni (demon) stories, provides a systematic glimpse into this aspect of the world.

  Storytelling in the Heian and medieval periods took various forms. One type was the “round-table” format, referred to as meguri-monogatari or jun-no-monogatari (tales in order), in which participants took turns telling stories, often with a listener who was an aristocrat and could write. In the preface to the Uji shūi monogatari, the Senior Counselor (Dainagon) of Uji, Minamoto no Takakuni (1004–1077), resting near the Byōdō-in Temple at Uji, south of the capital (present-day Kyoto), calls out to passers-by and has them tell their stories, which he writes down. The Uji shūi monogatari can be said to derive from Takakuni’s kikigaki on what he heard by the roadside. This format even pervades the court literature of the Heian period. The Great Mirror (Ōkagami, late eleventh century), a history written in vernacular Japanese that describes the age of the Fujiwara regents, who controlled the throne and political power in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and the rise of Fujiwara no Michinaga (966–1027), similarly begins on a rainy evening when nobles gather before the retired emperor Kazan (r. 984–986) to tell their stories. Frequently, the storytellers met in the evening and told stories into the morning, in a pattern called tsuya-monogatari (all-night tales). This custom of round-table or all-night storytelling continued into the Edo (Tokugawa) period (1600–1867) and resulted in such customs as the hyaku monogatari (hundred tales), in which each participant told a ghost story and, when all had finished, the candle was blown out, allowing a “real” ghost to appear.

  In the famous
conversations about women on a rainy night (amayo no shinasadame) in the “Broomtree” (Hahakigi) chapter of The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari, early eleventh century), Tō no Chūjō, Genji, and their male friends take turns telling stories about women whom they have known. As the example of Genji suggests, oral storytelling and story listening not only was the source of setsuwa, but was incorporated into Heian monogatari (court tales). Indeed, one of the major characteristics of Heian and early medieval court tales is the presence of a narrator or narrators through whom the action is viewed and the character’s words are heard. Often taking the form of female attendants, the narrators reside within the world of the characters.