Being Caught Between an Irresistable Force and Immovable Resistance: Inoue Yasushi’s ” Wind and Waves”

Inoue Yasushi won all the major Japanese literary awards during his lifetime (1907-91), but it was the New York Review Books reprinting of Tun Huang (winner of the 1959 Mainichi Press Prize) that brought him to my attention.

I went back to his earlier novellas set in (then-)contemporary Japan, including ‘The Hunting Gun’, for which Inoue won Akutagawa Prize, then undertook reading ‘Fūtō´ (which won the 1963 Yomiuri Prize, but was not translated into English until 1989, as Wind and Wave’s ). This novel does not fill in a gap in the historical record (as Tun-Huang did, providing an account of how a trove of Buddhist scrolls came to be sealed into a cave) with imaginary characters

The 200-page book begins with a dramatic personae running four and a half page. The only familiar name was Kubilai Khan (the Mongol Great Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, founder of the Y¼an Dynasty, whose name is usually rendered without the middle syllable in English, as Kublai; the current (pinyin) romanization is “Hūbìliè”). I knew that Kubilai twice sent large fleets to conquer Japan and that most of the soldiers drowned en route.

Surprisingly, especially in a book by a Japanese author (and one who wrote several books set in interior Asia, including Blue Wolf , about the early life of Genghis Khan), the focus of Wind and Waves is entirely on Goryeo (Korea), as its kings and their ministers attempt to preserve some autonomy and to reduce Kubilai’s demands for soldiers, sailors, and ship-building (stripping the forests of the south of the peninsula).Both kings journey to Kubilai’s court multiple times and feel some kindness from the Great Khan, though his sympathy waxes and wanes and keeps not only the kings, but various Koreans directly serving the Mongols guessing. (There are multiple plots to overthrown the Goryeo kings, vassals of the Great Khan).

Most of the book is preparations for the huge and disastrous attempted invasions of 1274 and 1281. There is very little about what happened to the armies or to the various delegations of Mongols the Koreans were forced to take and accompany to Japan (where most were not allowed onto Honshu, where the capital was). The Korean ships made it to the southernmost of the large islands of the Japanese archipelago, Tsushima and Ikiand, and unloaded 40,000 troops. The large Chinese fleet, transporting 100,000 troops was supposed to rendezvous there with them, but was delayed by storms.

With a tsunami of unfamiliar names, many official letters, and no sex, the book seems very much like a thirteenth-century chronicle, though to some degree getting inside the Korean kings, imagining what they and their chief ministers thought about their very difficult position-between the treacherous seas and demands from an overlord completely unfamiliar with seaworthy vessels and as unable to imagine resistance to what he was certain was a clear “mandate from heaven” or to conceive that the Japanese considered their emperor directly descended from the sun and Japan as impregnable. The Japanese writer ever explicitly makes no Japanese perspective in the book, and apparently the novel met with approval by Korean scholars (despite the considerable anti-Japanese animus in Korea).

Though the book is tough going, I doubt I would otherwise ever have considered what it was like to be vassals of Kubilai Khan ordered to outfit and partially man an invasion the Koreans dreaded, (The English title comes from the Great Khan’s demands that his emissaries to Japan be carried there without high winds and waves being an acceptable excuse for failure.).

©2016, Stephen O. Murray

Chinese Wild West: “Tun-Huang” by Inoue Yasushi

The history and the ethnic composition of the population of the interior of Asia are plenty complex. Keeping track of who is ethnically what and following the leadership of what king(dom) is rendered more difficult still by the multiple names. On top of that are the shifting romanizations of the various names.

It is fairly obvious that the region of what is now northwestern China romanized in the Wades-Gilles system as Tun-huang, the romanization used as the title for the 1959 Japanese historical written by Inoue Yasishi (1907-1991) is the same as Dunhuang in the pinyin system. From the documentary miniseries “The Silk Road,” I knew that the “Caves of the Thousand Buddhas” are also known as “the Dunhuang caves,” but the usual name in contemporary Chinese is “mogao.”

It is also fairly obvious that Uyghur, the Turkic people who had lost control of the area in which most of the novel takes place, is the same appellation as “Uighur” in the book (who are Buddhist, not yet Muslim). But it is less obvious that “Wéiwer” names the same people.

The Han Chinese protagonist of Inoue’s novel, Chao Tsing-te fell asleep while waiting for his name to be called for the last cut of imperial examinations held in the Song dynasty capital Chang’an (Xian). In very melodramatic fashion, the failed candidate came into a possession of a pass written in a script he could not decipher, though the characters look like Chinese ones. Rather than wait three years for the next imperial exam, he decides to go west and learn the language.

To make a long story short, Chao does learn the language, and comes to be in charge of translating Buddhist sutras from Chinese into “Hsi-hsia” (Tangut, the language of the Western Xia kingdom that was nominally a vassal of the Southern Song). Because of his literacy (in Chinese, then in “Hsi-hsian” now Romanized “Xi-Xian”) and his fearlessness, Chao Tsing-te becomes a trusted lieutenant of the Han commander Chu Wang-li, as well as an intellectual companion of the Han kinglet Yen-hui.

There are epic battles among Buddhists. Muslims mounted on elephants do not show up, though the Han good guys foresee invasion from the southwest (and the area of what is now Gansu province was Islamized both before and after the Buddhist Mongols from the north conquered it). There is not one but two great loves for a Uyghur princess that contribute to fervent enmity for a governor who forced her into concubinage. And there is a very mercenary Silk Road trader from a deposed ruling family with whom Chao Tsing-te travels four times. The first two take Chao to and from learning Hsi-hsian), the last two provide a story of how the vast trove of scrolls found early in the 20th century came to be walled in within one of the Thousand Buddhist caves of Dunhuang nine centuries earlier. Inoue even provides a plausible explanation for the mix of written materials (what were rare Buddhist manuscripts in the eleventh century with administrative documents, Daoist manuscripts, and Nestorian Christian documents).

I did not learn much about what life on the frontier of the Song was like nearly a millennium ago, and am puzzled at the start date of 1026, since the Tangut writing system was not created until 1038 (on the orders of Jingzong (formerly Li Yuanhao; he cast off his Chinese name, this is not just another confusion induced by differing romanization systems), who at the same time dubbed himself emperor of Da Xia (Song officials eventually bribed him to give up the title “governor” instead while de facto paying rather than receiving tribute). The shifting condition of Han Chinese, who had recently been subservient to Uighurs and would become subservient to Tangut (Hsi-hsian in the book) and the spread of Buddhism in central Asia are accurate and made interesting in this fiction’s solution of the mystery of the trove of scrolls in the Dunhuang caves.

What Inoue’s novel is most like is a segment of The Romance of Three Kingdoms (written by Luo Guanzhong during the 14th century, spanning centuries and including more than a thousand named characters), which is set eight and more centuries earlier and further south, but also features shifting fortunes, fearless warriors, and civilian populations recurrently forced to flee.

©2016, Stephen O. Murray

 

Early, Short Fiction of a Japanese Master, Inoue Yasushi

I cannot claim to have discovered or rediscovered the fiction of Inoue Yasushi (1907-1991), since someone(s) had to translate it from Japanese for me to read. And it was the New York Review Classics edition of Tun Huang that attracted my attention to his work. Inoue won the Akutagawa Prize (the most prestigious Japanese literary prize) in 1950 for the short novels Ryoju and Togyu (The Hunting Gun and The Bullfight in English, though only the former book has been translated into English, alas).

I realized that I’ve seen two Japanese movies based on Inoue novels, The Samurai Banner of Furin Kazan (filmed as “Samurai Banner” 1969) and Blue Wolf: A Novel of the Life of Chinggis Khan (filmed in 2007 in Japanese as “The Blue Wolf: To the Ends of the Earth and Sea”) and that there are sixteen more Japanese movies based on Inoue novels, including “Death of a Tea Master” starring Mifune Toshio (1989) and “The Warrior and the Wolf” (2009), that I have not seen. Most of Inoue’s fiction was set in the Chinese past, including a novel about Confucius, as well as the one about Chinggis (Genghis) Khan, and Tun Huang (which provides an explanation for the trove of Buddhist, Nestorian, and Daoist scrolls sealed into one of the “Buddhist caves” near Tun Huang.

The Hunting Gun (Ryōjū) is a contemporary (as of 1950) tale that has very little to do with the titular (Churchill) rifle, though it occasions the owner of the gun, a businessman named Misugi Yosuke contacts a poet who wrote about seeing the hunter along a river at the foot of Mount Amagi. Josuke sends the poet three lengthy letters from three women, Shoko, the mousy daughter of his recently deceased mistress, who leanred of the course of the affair from her mother’s diary; Midori, his much-neglected wife; and one from his mistress, Saiké,written on the day she killed herself. The multiple perspectives are more cumulative than conflicting (in contrast to Kurosawa’s “Rashômon,” also released in 1950). The daughter knew least about the love triangle, the wife was slow to learn of it, and the mistress knew she was betraying her friend by having an affair with her friend’s husband, but writes that she was happy. And the recipient of the three letters cannot have learned much from them, though he wants the poet to understand his loneliness and the pain he caused to the women.

Loneliness is also central to the novella The Counterfeiter and two short stories translated and introduced by Leon Picon in 1965. The narrator of The Counterfeiter was commissioned by the heirs of Onuki Keugaki to write a biography of the revered painter, but became more interested in Hara Hosen, an early friend of the painter’s who counterfeited works because they sold better than paintings signed with his own name. “The Full Moon” shows the fall of a large business’s president (Kagebayashi) as evidenced in the company’s annual moon-viewing parties (a tradition he initiated). Both of these are sharp stories of failure and resentment.

The narrator of “Obasute” is obsessed with the abandoned tradition of old people going up a mountain to die rather than burden their families with taking care of them (also the subject of Kobayashi’s  Imamura’s films “The Ballad of Nariyama”). He comes to believe that his own mother is tired of him and that there was more to leaving than consideration for the next generation scratching out a living.

On the basis of the four volumes I have read, Inoue was a modern (and in his fiction set in the Japan of his time, modernist) writer, as good as and less obsessive than Kawabata Yasunari (1899-1972), who became the first Japanese to win the Nobel Prize for literature (in 1968).

©2016, Stephen O. Murray