Curio Stew

Another Realm

The China in Judith Gautier’s poems is China, and yet it is not China. Nor would anyone claim that the illustrations in Katsushika Hokusai’s Illustrated Water Margin reproduce China exactly as it is. The “China” evoked in the silent poetry and speaking pictures of that bright-eyed poet and that short-haired old master should rather be called another realm, where they wandered freely through their waking dreams. Happily, life contains such other realms. Who, then, need lament with Lafcadio Hearn for the mirage-tower of Horai that vanished beyond the blue winds and rolling waves, never to return? (January 22)

Superficiality

Li Kan of the Yuan dynasty saw dozens of Wen Huzhou’s bamboo paintings, yet none pleased him. Even after reading the praise of Su Dongpo, Huang Shangu, and others, he suspected that friendship had biased them. He happened to meet his friend Wang Ziqing, and their talk turned to Wen’s bamboo. “You have simply never seen an authentic work,” Ziqing said. “The example in the prefectural historian’s collection is wholly genuine. I shall borrow it tomorrow and show you.” When Li saw it the next day, the windblown branches seemed to brush away frontier mists, while the sparse, dew-laden leaves bore clear frost; it was as though he sat between the Wei and Qi rivers. He could not cease marveling and felt deeply ashamed of the narrowness of his experience. Li Kan may still be forgiven. But critics who look at a photographic reproduction of Cézanne and chatter endlessly about the values of his colors deserve contempt for their shallowness. We must take warning. (January 23)

A Philistine

When Balzac was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Interior Minister Baroche walked beside the coffin. During the procession he turned to Hugo, who was walking there too, and asked, “Was Monsieur Balzac a man of some ability?” Hugo answered with a snort: “A genius.” Perhaps offended by the reply, Baroche whispered to someone nearby, “This Monsieur Hugo is even madder than I had heard.” The cabinets of France, it seems, have not been free of philistines of this sort. The honorable ministers of the Empire of Japan may set their minds at ease. (January 24)

Homosexual Love

Anyone who loves Dorian Gray ought to read Escal-Vigor. No other book, perhaps, depicts so fully the love of one man for another. Were it translated, not a few passages would certainly offend our authorities. Its sensuous writing was also largely responsible for the famous trial provoked when the book appeared. Its author, George Eekhoud, is a major modern Belgian writer, whose reputation need not rank below that of Camille Lemonnier. Yet Japan’s literary world, crowded though it is with talented people, has offered not one word introducing a substantial work by him. Must literature display the splendor of the aurora borealis only beneath northern skies? (January 25)

Coterie Magazines

Young people pooling money to publish a coterie magazine seems to be one fashion of our day. Yet with paper and printing both far from cheap, many struggle to keep such ventures going. I hear that when the first issue of Mercure de France was brought to market, writers neglected by the literary establishment were naturally not flush with money. They were forced to solicit subscriptions of sixty francs a share from their members, but even Jules Renard, their sole major shareholder, held no more than four shares. Since that circle nevertheless included so many men of genius—Albert Samain and Remy de Gourmont among them—today’s fashionable coterie magazines have little reason to lament that their funds are not abundant. The truly rare thing is a single heroic Dars, capable of raising the great banner of Symbolism as Mercure did in those days. (January 26)

Pen Names

Most Japanese writers now use no literary pseudonym. One could almost distinguish newcomers from veterans in the literary world simply by the presence or absence of a pen name. Not a few who once had one have cast it aside. How short-lived the pen name has become! There is a Russian writer called Osip Dymov. If memory serves, he bears the same name as the protagonist of Chekhov’s short story “The Grasshopper.” Did Dymov borrow that name as his pseudonym? I would be grateful for instruction from someone widely read. (January 28)

The Green House

I am told that the French expression la maison verte for a brothel was coined by Goncourt, presumably as a translation of the title A Contest of Beauties of the Green Houses. Goncourt writes in his diary: “This year, 1882, the sum I spent in my pathological collecting of Japanese art reached three thousand francs—the whole of my income, leaving not even the forty francs needed to buy a watch.” Elsewhere he writes: “For several days now, in 1876, I have been unable to resist the desire to go to Japan. The journey would not merely satisfy my habitual passion for collecting. I dream of making a book, A Year in Japan, arranged like a diary: mood rather than description. Written so, it would be incomparable. But what am I to do with my age?” When one thinks of the delicate, solitary Goncourt, who loved Japanese prints, Japanese curios, and even Japanese chrysanthemums, the short phrase “green house” cannot help but carry infinite feeling. (January 29)

Language

Language naturally takes many forms: one may say mountain, peak, summit, or range. By choosing different characters with the same meaning, one can quietly conceal another intention. In Edo slang, a glutton may be called a “great pine,” and a forward person a “Saheiji.” Unless the listener is an Edokko, he may remain perfectly serene while being insulted to his face. Consider, then, a novel composed with vocabulary such as pinxiao, houtinhua, and daojiaozhu, or terms borrowed from The Plum in the Golden Vase and The Carnal Prayer Mat. How many censors would recognize the obscenity and the corruption of manners? (January 31)

Mistranslation

It was presumptuous of De Quincey to point out errors in Carlyle’s translations from German. Yet the philosopher of Chelsea treated his brilliant junior with exceptional kindness afterward, and De Quincey, won over by his magnanimity, formed a lifelong friendship with him. I do not know what Carlyle’s errors were. The funniest mistranslation I know rendered Madonna as “the missus.” The translator was hardly a servant-angel guarding the gates of Paradise. (February 1)

Playful Readings

Years ago Masao Kume assigned comic Sino-Japanese readings to foreign names: Shaw became “the wandering laugher,” Ibsen “the smoky hermit,” Maeterlinck “dimly shining phosphorus,” and Chekhov “abundant wisdom.” May we call these playful readings? Suzuki Shosan, author of Two Nuns, titled his polemic against Christianity Ha Kirishitan, using characters that suggested “destroy demons, reason, death, and extremity.” That too is an example of a malicious playful reading. (February 2)

Haiku

That Koyo’s haiku never attained the inspired mechanism of the old masters cannot be blamed solely on their Danrin manner. In his prose as well, one finds none of the art by which a few graceful strokes instantly become a pine. His strength lay in exact and meticulous finish: when painting a rock, he never forgot to add a single blade of grass. Was it not natural that he should fall short in the haiku form? Kyoka, the gifted pupil of Koyo’s school, ranks far above his master in the quality of his verse for the same reason. Stranger still is that Saito Ryokuu, for all his free-ranging talent, ultimately wrote haiku no better than the common run of door-to-door versifiers. (February 4)

Rows of Pines

I once read in a newspaper that the rows of pines along the Tokaido were to be felled. If road improvements require it, perhaps it cannot be helped. Yet when one imagines hundreds or thousands of those hundred-foot withered dragons falling victim to the axe, one can never regret it enough. When Paul Claudel came to Japan, he wrote a piece after seeing those Tokaido pines. He portrayed their lean crowns holding mist and their perilous roots overturning stones with brilliant vitality. Now the rows of pines are about to perish. Should Claudel hear of it, I fear he may heave a long sigh that the yellow-faced lads have not yet received the blessings of civilization. (February 5)

Japan

I have already spoken of the China imagined by Gautier’s daughter. The Japan of José María de Heredia is likewise another realm. Behind a blind, a beauty plays the biwa as she awaits the arrival of an armored warrior. The scene and feeling are not wholly un-Japanese in “Le Samouraï.” Yet that world colored in white silk, lacquer, and gold is still only the misty dreamland of a Parnassian. If Heredia’s dreamland could be located on a map, it would probably lie near France and very far from Japan. Even in Goethe’s Greece, the warriors of Troy still had a trace of Munich beer foam on their lips. Alas, imagination too possesses a nationality. (February 6)

Taiga

The East has produced many painters, yet it seems unlikely that another vessel as great as Ike no Taiga, the Hermit of Mount Kyuka, will appear. Even Taiga, however, at the age of thirty worried that his art was not advancing as he wished and sought instruction from Gion Nankai. How could anyone more hot-blooded than Taiga escape impatience when progress is slow? What we should study again and again is the discipline by which the Hermit of Mount Kyuka did not mistime the long nurturing of the sacred embryo. (February 7)

Witches

The English word witch is generally translated as an old sorceress, but young and beautiful witches are by no means rare. Merezhkovsky’s The Forerunner, D’Annunzio’s The Daughter of Iorio, and, on a much lower level, Crawford’s The Witch of Prague all portray witches with faces like jewels; further searching would find many more. Yet it is hard to deny that few have the vigorous character of the white-haired, ashen-faced crone. Leaving Scott and Hawthorne aside, perhaps the finest old witch in modern British and American literature is the one in Kipling’s “The Courting of Dinah Shadd.” Hardy, too, often drew material from witches; Elizabeth Endorfield in the famous Under the Greenwood Tree belongs to the type. Japan’s mountain hags and demon women are not witches in the pure sense. In China, the Yexingzi described in Continuation of Tales Told by Lamplight comes fairly close. (February 8)

Jujutsu

I hear that whenever Westerners think of Japan, they inevitably remember jujutsu. Thus, in a chapter of Anatole France’s The Revolt of the Angels, an angel arriving in Paris from Japan seizes a French policeman and splendidly throws him down. Maurice Leblanc’s gentleman thief Lupin, hero of the detective stories, also learned his command of jujutsu from a Japanese. Yet among modern Japanese novels, the only hero who masters the art is Kiritaro in Kyoka Izumi’s Song of the Peony. Must jujutsu too lament that no prophet is accepted in his own country? How amusing, how amusing. (February 10)

Yesterday’s Elegance

Zhao Oubei writes in his “Miscellaneous Poems of Wumen”: “Having surveyed the courtesans and judged them finely, I first learn that beauty too is an empty name. From now on I shall dream no dreams of splendor, but enjoy one pure wisp of tea smoke.” In another poem on Shantang he writes: “Entering pleasure quarters in old age makes feeling swell; I still remember former visits among the flowers. The rouged women once seen in the wine houses now resemble monks retired from their Zen cloisters.” This vein of poetic feeling almost brings Kafu Nagai to mind. (February 11)

Pronunciation

I hear that after Poe’s name was printed “Poë” in the Quantin edition, the pronunciation “Po-eh” spread through France and elsewhere. I sometimes heard the late Professor Lawrence, who taught us English literature, pronounce it that way. Foreign names are admittedly easy to mispronounce, but it felt utterly wretched that a man who revered Whitman and Emerson should misplace even the accent in the name of our literary Buddha. We must take care. (February 13)

Arrogance

At a gathering, a young writer began, “We men of letters—” Balzac, sitting beside him, instantly interrupted: “Your attempt to rank yourself among us is absurd. We are commanders of modern literature.” I hear that two or three gentlemen in our literary world have long been criticized for arrogance. Yet I have not seen a single one who resembles Balzac—though naturally I have also heard of no Human Comedy produced by those gentlemen. (February 15)

Tobacco

Tobacco came into use throughout the world only after the discovery of America. Claims that smoking had existed in Egypt, Arabia, or Rome are merely the mistaken words of the willfully blind. When Columbus reached the New World, its native peoples already had cigars, cut tobacco, and snuff. Curiously, the word “tobacco” originally named not the plant but the pipe used to enjoy its shredded smoke. Thus Europe’s white peoples introduced only one true innovation in smoking: the convenient cigarette. According to the Illustrated Sino-Japanese Encyclopedia, the first thing brought to Japan by Portuguese and Dutch captains seems also to have been the cigarette. Before the Murata pipe appeared, our ancestors may already have strolled through the warm spring streets of Yamaguchi with cigarettes in their mouths, looking up at the cross of a Jesuit church and exclaiming over the ingenious civilization of the West. (February 24)

Lady Nicotine

From Baudelaire’s poem on the pipe to Lyra Nicotiana, Western poets’ delight in smoking makes a fine counterpart to Eastern poets’ delight in preparing tea. In fiction, Barrie’s My Lady Nicotine is the best known, though its light touch merely brings an easy smile. The name nicotine comes from the Frenchman Jean Nicot. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Nicot was dispatched to Spain as ambassador, obtained tobacco leaves brought from Florida, discovered their supposed medical benefit, and promoted their cultivation so energetically that for a time the French called tobacco Nicotiana. De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater once inspired Haruo Sato’s strange work “Fingerprint.” Who will appear after Barrie to write a tobacco novel surpassing him by several degrees, as a Havana surpasses a Manila? (February 25)

Master of a Single Character

The Tang poet Ren Fan visited Jinzi Peak on Mount Tiantai and inscribed a poem on a temple wall: “At the summit, new autumn gives birth to night’s chill; cranes turn among pine dew that drips upon my robe. The moon over the forward peak shines on one river; a monk in emerald mist opens his bamboo chamber.” After traveling several dozen li, he realized that “one river” was inferior to “half a river” and immediately returned. Someone had already erased the character for “one” and replaced it with “half.” Ren Fan sighed deeply: “There is a true man in Taizhou.” From this we may imagine the painful care the ancients gave to poetry. Seisei’s collection Tsumaki includes the haiku, “First dream—red cords tangled and tied.” I think one character is wrong: the final ru should be changed to re. Whether Seisei will bow to me and make me his master of a single character, I do not know. A laugh. (February 26)

Repartee

One evening Hugo held a banquet at his home on Avenue d’Eylau. When all the guests raised their glasses to the host’s health, Hugo turned to François Coppée beside him and said, “The two poets at this table shall now drink to each other’s health. Would that not be fine?” He meant to toast Coppée. Coppée demurred: “No, no. There is only one poet present,” meaning that Hugo alone deserved the name. The author of Les Orientales suddenly smiled and replied, “Only one poet? Very well—then what am I?” He neatly reversed Coppée’s words to display his own self-deprecation. Our literary world now has innumerable gatherings—the “Autumn at the Monastery” group, the “Miura Silk-Mill Proprietor” group, the Cats’ Club, the Ladles’ Club—yet one never hears such deft repartee at any of them. Someone at my side laughs and says, “Please begin with yourself.” (February 27)

White-Rain Zen

Kano Hogai always taught his pupils: “The divine principle of painting must be awakened to; it cannot be handed down by a teacher.” One day Hogai lay ill. A sudden white downpour tipped the heavens, and the deep lane grew still, emptied of passersby. Master and pupils silently listened to the rain for a long time. Suddenly someone strode past the gate singing loudly. Hogai smiled, turned to his pupils, and asked, “Do you understand?” His words carried the Zen force that kills beneath a phrase. Here is our house’s hair-splitting sword, bought by the Xiongnu king for a thousand pieces of gold, making goblins weep beneath the moon. Behold its single ray of cold light. (March 3)

Criticism

Piron’s sarcasm was famous. A writer told him he intended to accomplish something no predecessor had ever done. Piron replied coldly, “Easy enough: write your own praise.” In our present literary world, I hear, there is partisan criticism, purchased criticism, courtesy criticism, and echoing criticism. Amid the noisy blame and praise, even a mediocre talent’s self-advertisement may begin with one dog barking at a shadow and end with ten thousand dogs repeating it as truth. That is hardly the unprecedented achievement Piron meant. Juryo Yoshi was born into these latter days; how difficult it is to become another Piron. (March 4)

Errors

One teacher explains that “sparrows before the gate chirp the Mengqiu,” while another scholar argues that a phrase means “like fire burning across a field.” An agricultural doctor praises the timber for Meiji Shrine by saying, “How elegantly balanced are culture and substance,” while a Diet member debating military expansion declares, “The warships must be allowed no rest.” In old China, when Jiang Du had a son, Li Linfu wrote, “I hear you have the joy of playing with a tile.” The guest covered his mouth, laughing because Linfu had written the character for “tile,” associated with a daughter, instead of the “jade tablet” used for a son. Today, when a minister laments the age, he describes the spread of dangerous thought by saying, “The disease has entered the blind spot; the nation’s rise or fall hangs upon the next dawn and dusk”—using the wrong character in a classical phrase—yet no one in the realm finds it strange. Classical Chinese learning has fallen into grave neglect. Young men and women now understand the English on a label but falter when reciting the Four Books; Tolstoy’s name is familiar to their ears, while Li Qinglian’s sobriquet is strange to their eyes. Recently I saw several old magazines in a bookshop, titled issues of Kōchō, published by the Kōchō Society. Did they not know that in Chinese hongchao, “red tide,” means a woman’s menstruation? (April 16)

Entering the Month

Whether the West has poems on a woman’s menstrual flow, my limited reading does not tell me. In China, poems from the palace and women’s quarters occasionally sing of menstruation. Wang Jian writes in a palace poem: “Secretly she informs the sovereign that her month has entered; she calls a companion to help wash her skirt.” The spring wind stirs the pearl blind and swings its silver hooks, while a fine-browed palace woman washes her robes: is the monthly matter not elegant too? (April 16)

Nocturnal Emission

Whether the West has poems on a man’s nocturnal emission, my limited reading does not tell me. Japan’s haikai collection Kinshūdan contains the line, “Startled by emission from a dawn dream—Shinshuku.” I am not certain, however, whether the term carried precisely its present meaning at that time. I would be grateful for instruction from someone knowledgeable. (April 16)

Posterity

Do you not see? Hon’ami’s certificates of judgment change their value from age to age. The Romantics arise and Shakespeare’s name thunders across the four seas; the Romantics pass away and Hugo’s works fall everywhere like frost-bitten leaves. Boundless is the spectacle of change. The present is foam; what follows death is a dream. True understanding is unattainable, and the multitude of fools is beyond salvation. When Fragonard set out to study art in Italy, Boucher bade him farewell with the words, “Do not look at Michelangelo’s works. A man like that is merely mad.” It is easy enough to laugh at Boucher as a philistine. Yet who can promise that a thousand years hence the whole world will not flock to Boucher’s opinion? To roll one’s eyes at the present and whistle grandly while awaiting posterity is only another livelihood within a demon’s cave. Better to mingle with the vulgar without becoming vulgar oneself. Chrysanthemums grow by the hedge; the zither has no strings; whenever South Mountain comes into view, it is eternally serene. Juryo Yoshi sells prose from a mean hut. May he never speak of posterity, but instead discuss Tolstoy and Saikaku with the countless nobodies of the literary world, chatter over the right and wrong of this doctrine and that tendency, and rest in the realm of complete absorption in play. (May 26)

Crime and Punishment

Issue forty-seven of Shigarami Zōshi, edited by Professor Ogai, contains several seven-character quatrains by Takuten Jōsen under the title “Reading the First Part of Crime and Punishment.” They may be the earliest Japanese poems written on a Western novel. To quote a few: “A thought flashes in like lightning; dazed, he flies into the old woman’s room. He tells of his own crime—is it truth or illusion? He murders the officer—is he mad or not?” (chapter 13). “A poor girl, a sick wife, sad tears red; wheels clatter and the father of the house falls. Emptying his purse, the guest comes to the rescue—what a gallant man, met only once in a tavern.” (chapter 14). “The pitiful little girl goes to summon the guest; the benevolent student is half dead. He sees not one object in the room; the grateful person is a person moved by feeling.” (chapter 18). Leaving aside their quality as poetry, when one reflects that Japan’s literary world was already discussing Dostoevsky in 1893, surely Juryo Yoshi is not alone in breaking into a broad smile at these verses. (May 27)

Devils

Devils are exceedingly numerous: there are 1,745,926 in all. They form seventy-two companies, each commanded by one captain. So wrote the German Wierus in his demonology at the end of the sixteenth century; no account, ancient or modern, Eastern or Western, can rival it for detailed intelligence from the demon world. Sixteenth-century Europe had many masters of demonology besides Wierus, including Italy’s Pietro d’Abano and England’s Reginald Scot, both men of thunderous fame. Wierus also says: “A devil can change freely into a lawyer, a Black man, a black horse, a monk, an ass, a cat, a hare, or even the wheel of a carriage.” Since it can become a carriage wheel, why should it not become the wheel of a motorcar that tempts people at midnight and carries them away into the city of smoke and flame? Fear it; beware. (May 28)

Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio

Everyone knows that Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, together with New Tales Told While Trimming the Lamp, reaches the highest art among Chinese tales of ghosts and fox spirits, until even the cold lamp seems to burn blue. Yet Japanese readers often overlook how Pu Songling, disgusted with the Manchu court, entrusted hidden satire of palace affairs to his stories of monsters and spirits. “The Chivalrous Woman” in volume two, for example, is said to adapt the secret history of the eunuch Nian Gengyao’s daughter attempting to assassinate the Yongzheng Emperor. The words in Kunlun Waishi’s prefatory verse—“Was Dong Hu alone a mirror of human relations?”—surely hint at the same matter. Spain has Goya’s Los Caprichos; China has Liuquan’s Strange Tales. Both borrow mountain spirits and wild ghosts to curse treacherous ministers and rebellious subjects. They are a matched pair of white jade, worthy of preservation in a golden casket. (May 28)

Portrait of a Beauty

Spain had a beauty named Doña María Teresa. While young she married Don José Álvarez de Toledo, eleventh Marquis of Villafranca. Her eyes were bright, her lips crimson, and her fragrant skin white as tallow. Queen María Luisa envied her beauty and eventually had her poisoned. In the long sorrow left by one sachet of fragrance, how did she differ from Yang Guifei? The marchioness had a lover, Francisco de Goya, already celebrated throughout Spain as a painter, who often painted Doña María Teresa during her life. If popular legend may be trusted, both The Clothed Maja and The Nude Maja preserve her matchless beauty. Later, France had a painter named Édouard Manet. When he obtained Goya’s portrait of the marchioness, he was beside himself with joy and immediately copied it into a portrait of a springlike beauty. Manet was then a leader of the Impressionists and counted many talents of the age among his friends. One was the poet Charles Baudelaire. Manet treasured the portrait of the marchioness like a magnificent jade disk. When Baudelaire succumbed to madness and died in his Paris lodging in 1866, that celestial portrait, with cinnabar lips and snowy skin, also hung upon the wall. Its starry eyes forever cast an amorous glance as they watched the poet of The Flowers of Evil die, just as once, at the court of Madrid, they might have watched a sallow-faced dwarf turn somersaults. (May 29)

Prostitution and Phoenix-Fragrant Cakes

In China, a boy who sold same-sex favors was called a xianggong. The word originally came from xianggu, “image-girl,” describing a beauty as alluring as a maiden. Because xianggu and xianggong sounded alike, the latter was adopted as another name for a male prostitute. A woman who sold springtime by the roadside was called a “wild pheasant,” presumably because she wandered about enticing passersby like such a bird. Japanese calls the same class “night hawks,” an almost identical turn of thought. Once “wild pheasant” became current, the term “wild-pheasant cart” appeared. What was that? An unlicensed, dubious rickshaw puller who haunted Beijing and Shanghai. (May 30)

Hellish Sins of Speech

Juryo Yoshi has now written “Curio Stew” three times for the magazine Ningen. By citing miscellaneous books from East and West, past and present, and letting the flames of pedantry leap high, he has tried to resemble the witches’ cauldron in Macbeth. The wise avoid its stench from three thousand miles away; the ignorant take its poison in the snap of a finger. Surely this is a hellish sin of speech. If Luo Guanzhong’s writing of The Water Margin condemned him to be born mute in three lives, what dark punishment awaits Juryo Yoshi for writing “Curio Stew”? Will he be ignored? Exterminated? Will not one copy of his story collections sell? Better to cast down the brush at once and, alone in drunkenness before an embroidered Buddha, cherish the leisure of escaping into Zen. Repent yesterday’s wrong and recognize today’s right. Why hesitate even for an instant? I cast away my household’s curio stew. If you savor it today and call it precious, tomorrow a holy radiance may shine above the privy. Behold the relics in the dung, masters all! (May 30)

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The Pilgrim’s Progress

Does the Japanese title Tenro Rekitei for Pilgrim’s Progress follow the title of the Chinese translation published by the Shanghai Chinese Book House in 1869, the eighth year of Tongzhi? That edition contains several copperplate illustrations in which all the people and landscapes are rendered in Chinese style. Pictures such as “Entering the Narrow Gate” and “Entering the Beautiful Palace” may not equal the red-haired foreigners in Nagasaki prints, but they possess a peculiar charm. Its prose, too, uses Chinese to describe the West, and the more one reads, the more unexpectedly absorbing it becomes. The translations of the English verses may be worthless as poetry, yet their special flavor matches that of the pictures. A poem on the River of the Water of Life, for instance, runs: “Beside the road the Water of Life flows clear; the traveler on Heaven’s road gladly pauses here. A hundred fruits and wondrous flowers offer delight; fortunate are we to wander on this ground.” Speaking of this kind of pleasure will probably invite laughter from bystanders. Yet remember that the book Oscar Wilde kept beside him in prison, wherever he walked, sat, or lay, was an unwieldy Greek Bible. (January 21)

Shikitei Sanba

Several young men gathered and declared, “To depict the minds of the ancients through the eyes of modern people is surely the most striking tendency in literature since Naturalism.” An old man nearby interrupted: “And what of Shikitei Sanba’s Backstage Explorations of the Great Thousand Worlds?” The young men did not understand where his remark came from and could only stare at one another in stunned silence. (January 27)

Ozaki Koyo

Nearly twenty years have passed since Koyo’s death. Yet when one rereads Passions and Sorrows, The Kyara Pillow, or Two Wives today, each remains like a tortoiseshell peony in full bloom, its brilliance incapable of fading. “A man dies and his work becomes manifest”—the phrase truly applies to him. Those works possess a method of construction and a model of movement; even their utmost variations never abandon proportion and rule. That, I think, is why they can endure. I have always believed that in the realm of art there is no such thing as an unfinished product. Was Koyo not proof of it? (February 3)

Books That Instruct in Lust

Leaving aside The Plum in the Golden Vase and The Carnal Prayer Mat, the Chinese novels I know that have been accused of teaching obscenity include Apricot-Blossom Heaven, The Strange Monk of the Lamp Wick, Biography of the Foolish Old Woman, The Strange Affinity of the Peony, Biography of Lord As-You-Wish, Peach-Blossom Hermitage, Precious Mirror for Judging Flowers, Unexpected Affinity, Retribution for Killing a Child, A Strange Tale of Flower Shadows, The Foremost Strange Book for Awakening the World, Wondrous Spectacles of Joy, A Strange Affinity of Proud Success in the Spring Wind, Dream of Mandarin Ducks, The Rustic’s Exposed Words, Dark Secrets of the Signboard, and others. I hear that works imported long ago already have Japanese adaptations, and that in recent years some adaptations of the same kind have secretly been put to press. Anyone wishing to read these translated erotic novels should knock at the doors of our censors—the demon-revealing mirrors of the age—and respectfully borrow the prohibited books in their collections. (February 12)

History of the Theatre

Many books on Western theatre are now available, but the pioneer was probably Toru Nagai’s History of the Theatres of Various Countries. Above a copperplate cover depicting drums, trumpets, harps, and other instruments, the title appears in Roman letters: Kakkoku Engekishi. The book covers changes in theatres, machinery, and stage equipment; the condition of male and female actors through the ages; and the origins of drama in various countries, with the fullest treatment apparently devoted to England. One sample reads: “In 1576, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, a theatre was built for the first time expressly for dramatic performances on unused land belonging to Blackfriars monastery. This was the progenitor of England’s orthodox theatres. . . . Among the actors was a man called William Shakespeare. At that time he was a child of twelve, but he had completed the elementary study of Latin and Greek at the school in Stratford.” The book contains many passages that bring a smile. Published in January 1884, it gains another touch of interest from the fact that its author, Toru Nagai, was an assistant police inspector in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. (February 14)

Juryo Yoshi

1920