Fu Shan

Over the weekend I visited the Met to see their new exhibit on Chinese calligraphy. It is a subject about which I wish I were less ignorant. Near the end of the exhibit (right before several pieces by Xu Bing), is a large and extremely eye-catching piece by the writer and intellectual Fu Shan (1607-1685). I’ve photographed a section of it for you to see. His most famous theoretical writing on calligraphy is an epilogue attached to a poem dedicated to his children. In it, he describes how his own technique was “ruined” by attempts to imitate the Yuan calligrapher Zhao Mengfu, instead of following the old masters of the Jin and Tang eras. He then continues:

然又須知趙卻是用心於王右軍者，只緣學問不正，遂流軟美一途。心手不可欺也如此。危哉！危哉！爾輩慎之。毫厘千裏，何莫非然。寧拙毋巧，寧醜毋媚，寧支離毋輕滑，寧真率毋安排，足以回臨池既倒之狂瀾矣。

But we must be aware that Zhao was actually devoted to [the sage of calligraphy] Wang Xizhi, but due to his studies being unorthodox, he eventually fell into sappy aestheticism. This is what I mean when I say that the heart and the hand cannot be deceived. Beware! Beware! This is where you must be cautious. A tiny misstep will eventually carry you a thousand miles off course. It is better to be clumsy than have artifice, better to be ugly than ingratiating, better to be incoherent than slick, better to be sincere than calculating—this is the only way to step back from the brink of disaster in your calligraphy.

Of course, try saying that to your 3rd grade cursive instructor and see where it gets you.

On reflection though, probably ink is toxic

A few years ago I read a translation of a famous story by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō called “Yume no ukihashi”—“The Floating Bridge of Dreams” (a reference to the last chapter of The Tale of Genji). There was one brief passage that stuck with me at the time:

Years later, after I was grown up, I came across this line of Chinese verse:
When she washes the inkstone,
the fish come to swallow ink.
Even as a child I thought how pleasant it would be if the fish in our pond came gliding playfully around her beautiful feet, instead of coming only when we fed them. (translation by Howard Hibbet)

The other day I remembered this fragment for some reason, and decided to track down the story to see the original:

後年私は大人になつてから、
洗硯魚呑墨（硯を洗へば魚墨を呑む）
と云ふ句を何かで見かけたが、その池の鯉や鮒どもは麩にばかり寄つて来ないで、この美しい足の周囲で戯れたらいゝのにと、子供心にもそんなことを思つた。

Like, I guess, every Tanizaki story, the foot fetish is always lurking just above the surface, but I really liked this scrap of poetry he quoted, and decided to track it down. If you put the characters in the quotation above into Google, you will get lots of Japanese and Korean sites about tea connoisseurship, as it’s apparently a very classy catch phrase to hang in the tokonoma of your tea room. (I eventually figured out that the character for “swallow” was giving me trouble—it’s subtly different in contemporary Japanese, and apparently that was enough to keep Google from seeing Chinese pages carrying the poem.) The source poem I finally located was the following, by the Song poet Wei Ye (960-1019):

書友人屋壁　魏野

達人輕祿位　居處傍林泉
洗硯魚吞墨　烹茶鶴避烟
閑惟歌聖代　老不恨流年
靜想閑來者　還應我最偏

Written on the wall of a friend’s house

This great man disdains wealth and rank,
Rather by a woodland spring he dwells.
Washing his ink stone, the fish swallow ink;
When he boils tea, cranes flee the smoke.
Idle, but for singing of a golden age,
Old, he does not begrudge the passing years.
But quietly thinking on his idle visitor,
He may yet consider me the hermit.

There appear to be numerous variant texts of this poem, so I’ve used the one from Li E’s Songshi jishi 宋詩紀事.

Murder of a Loyalist

To celebrate finally finishing Shitaya sōwa, I thought translate one more little bit from it. Much of the book takes place in the years leading up to the Meiji Restoration, when political tensions were running very high in Japan. This part is actually itself a quoted passage from something by Mori Shuntō (Mori Kainan’s father), about Iesato Shintarō 家里新太郎, referred to here by another name Seiken 誠県:

...Enshuku was a retainer for the Matsuyama prefectural administration, and is now known by the name [Mishima] Chūshū. Afterwards, I returned to Owari. Seiken often sent me letters urging me to visit again, but I was busy with household matters at the time and couldn’t manage it. At this time with the “expel the barbarians” movement, the public mood became very agitated, and people tried to lay all the blame on the shoganate. But Seiken was of a totally different viewpoint on these matters. At the time, the governor of Matsuyama, General Shōsō, was a veteran supporter of the shoganate. Enshuku was sent here and there performing various missions on behalf of the shoganate. Because of this, some people became suspicious of [his associate] Seiken. Right then, Fujimoto Tesseki and Matsumoto Keidô were championing reverence for the emperor, and attempting to secretly raise an army; these were all nervous, rash men. One day, they were drinking and discussing citizens of Kyoto. Tesseki jokingly said, “Ieri Shōtō [Seiken]’s heart is in two places. So there’s nothing wrong with putting his body and head in different places.” At the end of the table was a man who hated Seiken. Hearing this, he was delighted, and that very night he unsheathed his sword and broke into [Seiken’s] home. There he found bare wall-hangings and a lonely pile of luggage; Seiken was sitting blankly in the bright lamp light. Worried about the strange direction events were taking in the capital, he must have planned to return to his hometown of Matuzaka to lie low, and was only waiting for the morning to set out. Seeing the arrival of the assassin, he was too shocked even to react. He only cried, “I have done nothing! My heart is pure and honest, I have nothing to hide! [kōdai-seidai hakujitsu-seiten nari]” But before his words were even finished, he’d already been cut down. It was the evening of the 19th, in the 5th month, Bunkyū 3 [1863]. He was 37 years old.

I really like the idea of a guy who’s such a pedant that his last words are not one, but two four-character compounds (chengyu), but this is probably Shuntō taking narrative liberties. 公明正大 and 青天白日 both mean something like blameless, but I haven’t tracked down a source text for either of them.
    When I was looking him up online, I found that Ienari was actually the older brother of Ienari Tsuguo 家里次郎, who was one of the Rōshigumi, a precursor to the Shinsengumi, the famous rōnin supergroup assembled by the shoganate to clamp down on the royalist movement. It’s funny Shuntō and Kafū don’t mention this, because it seems like it probably bears some relation to Ienari getting iced.

Dubious Etymologies of the Demimonde

From Tokyo suisho 東京粋書 [Notes on Tokyo chic] (1881), by Nozaki Sabun:

Ōraigi ["ōrai" courtesans]: What does ōrai mean? Perhaps to come by invitation, or perhaps to be expected to come? But this is not the case. According to my investigations, this word derives from the English phrase “all right.” “All right” is equivalent to “sore de yoroshi” or other expressions of possibility or assent in Japanese. So, when a customer wants to tumble a courtesan, if he pays a little cash and asks “How about it?”, the courtesan quickly gives assent. This assent is “all right”...

    He goes on a bit to talk about the fashionable use of English words lately, including “kame” for dog. (This one is still in the Kôjien dictionary. It’s apparently derived from hearing foreign sailors yell “come here” at their dogs.)
    I found this, by the way, in the incredible cornucopia that is the National Diet Library’s Modern Digital Library. I think it is no exaggeration to say that this is greatest thing ever put on an internet. Do you want to know what the style was in Shinbashi 125 years ago? Learn Esperanto through Japanese? Compare six different translations of the Arabian Nights?
Or maybe get this amazing illustration from Jinpingmei tattooed on your back? (If anyone does this by the way, you should send me a photo.)

Library Science of the Ancients

I’ve been using RSS feeds a lot lately to waste time more efficiently. One that I really like is to Aozora Blog. As I suppose most of this blog’s readership is aware, Aozora Bunko is a website that archives modern Japanese texts in the public domain. Every month Aozora Blog posts an update detailing what they’ve added to the site over the previous month. If, like me, you’re a little timid or lazy about hunting through their whole archive, the newsletter is a great way to uncover some of the wonderful things they have available.
    The most recent update mentioned a work by the East Asian historian Naitō Konan, called “Shina Mokurokugaku” 支那目録学 [Chinese Bibliography]. (“Shina” is a term for China that was used in the prewar period, and is generally considered politically incorrect in Japan today.) “Mokurokugaku” [muluxue] is an old Chinese term for the science or methodology of cataloging lists of texts (I believe the contemporary term for bibliography in Chinese is shuzhixue 書誌学, which parallels the Japanese usage). Naitō’s essay is very long and detailed (much of it beyond my own limited grasp of Chinese history), but I wanted to quote some of it here, as I was struck by what a passionate apologia it made for an easily overlooked field.

    Mokurokugaku has long existed in China, but even today does not exist in Japan. When I say mokuroku [catalogue] here, it’s not just a simple matter of taking inventory. The bibliographic studies of ancient China have a much deeper meaning. Without understanding it, there is no way to classify and describe documents. Indeed, in actual fact we are helpless to examine a great variety of [texts] today: much of Japanese bibliography is meaningless. Even Samura’s Kokusho kaidai seems to fail at its function, because it does not establish the individual characteristics of the works, but rather applies the same sort of description across the board.

The Beginnings of Mokurokugaku: In any event, the oldest extant example of ancient Chinese bibliography is found in the Han shu’s “Yiwen zhi” 芸文志. The Han shu was not completed in Ban Gu’s lifetime, but rather finished by his younger sister Ban Zhao, but the “Yiwen zhi” was probably written by Gu himself. It was completed in the middle of the Later Han, the end of the first century by the western calendar.
    However, the only part of the “Yiwen zhi” that Ban Gu actually composed himself was the opening preface; the vast majority of the text is derived from Liu Xin’s Qilüe 七略. Ban Gu included six of the work’s seven sections, but the first “Jilüe” 輯略 section is not included [this is apparently an introductory chapter explaining the work]. Liu Xin was himself actually not the true originator of the Qilüe, which was begun by his father Liu Xiang. Xiang began the work during the reign of Emperor Cheng of the Western Han, but it was completed by Xin under Emperor Ai. The final year of Emperor Ai’s reign is the year 1 B.C. by the western calendar, so the work was completed a little before the Year 0 by western reckoning.
    At this time scholarship was often passed down as a family occupation, as in Liu’s case, but Liu Xiang’s household was originally part of the Han imperial family, and mysteriously were actually a clan of scholars within the imperial family. His ancestor was King Yuan of Chu, the younger brother of Emperor Gao [founder of the Han dynasty]. Though he was brothers with Emperor Gao, who conquered the empire on horseback, Yuan was fond of learning, and his descendents continued this tradition. In Xiang’s time, Emperor Cheng entrusted him with the task of organizing and editing the documents filling the empire’s storehouses, and this is the beginnings of Chinese bibliographical method.

Liu’s Fundamental Principle: Of course this bibliographical method, as I explained above, is not a simple inventory (what’s called in China bulu 簿録). It’s true interest is in the branching lineages of literary texts. From a certain perspective, one can see this as the final culmination of scholarship 学問. Which is to say that, at least in China, scholarship had become progressively more advanced since the Spring & Autumn and Warring States Periods, but it is with Liu Xiang and Liu Xin that a science 学 was developed which could analyze this scholarship in its totality. Just from this fact, we can call [mokurokugaku] the endpoint of scholarship. However, if we consider its content more closely, when scholarship first achieved its full vigor in the Warring States period it was largely very philosophical, and took as its main objective the advancement of one school’s theory over the others; therefore, when attempts were made to classify learning, divisions were based mainly on the theories and contentions [of the various schools]. However Liu Xiang and Liu Xin did not stop at considerations of philosophical schools, doctrines, and theories in their classification, but also took into account the origin/derivation 由来 of [various bodies of] learning. They began to think of scholarship historically...

    Quite a cliffhanger, I know. Please check out the rest on Aozora if you’re so inclined. Later on in the essay, he opposes the methodology of Liu père and fils to that of Sima Qian, but I’m not sure I understood that part too well.

Tanizaki on Japanese Orthography

I received a lot of guidance from observing Mori Ōgai’s [orthographic] method, and tried as best I could to learn from it and carry it out myself. And certainly even today most of my writing reveals his influence in this respect, but nevertheless I frequently find myself questioning my judgment, so that I end up just as confused as ever. But this is not necessarily just a problem of my own ignorance and laziness. I don’t want to go on and on, so I’ll refrain from giving a lot of examples, but to put it simply, no matter what methodology one chooses to follow, ateji and kana usage nevertheless remain persistent problems. If, for instance, one were to follow Ōgai’s method exactly, one would have to write hitoe [under-robe] as 一と重 rather than 単衣, awase [lined kimono] as 合わせ rather than 袷, and uchi [home] as 内 rather than 家, but I can’t bring myself to take things that far. Anyway, kun originally took the meaning of a Chinese character and read that character with a Japanese word which fit with that meaning, and so when people today read 卓子 as テーブル [table] or 乗合自動車 as バス [bus], nothing’s really changed. And if that’s the case, then there’s no reason to say that 家 can’t be read any way but “ie,” or that recently invented readings aren’t genuine. One can even accept that hitoe and yukata are just the readings that have been given to the compounds 単衣 and 浴衣. If one extends this line of reasoning, then there’s no such thing as a set kun reading, and in the end it would seem that one can use any sort of reading one likes, as long as it’s not flat out wrong. Similarly, even following Ōgai’s method doesn’t solve the problem of whether or how much to use okurigana, as in words like kuimono [food], deiri [movement], or ukeoi [contract]. Even if it did, we would be left with the problem of words like 寝台, for which the readings shindai or nedai [bed] are both legitimate. So in the end, there is no way to avoid the problem of multiple readings in written Japanese.
    For this reason, I have given up on trying to use characters logically for certain readings, and recently am pursuing another method entirely. That is, to select them based entirely on the visual and musical effect they will produce in my writing. I look at ateji and kana usage entirely in terms of tone, and in terms of the beauty of the characters themselves, and attempt to use them in harmony with the sensibility of the work’s content.
    To speak first of the visual effect, asagao [morning glory] has two different ateji, 朝顔 and 牽牛花, but I use the former when I want a Japanese, soft effect, and the latter to create a more Chinese, hard effect. The holiday tanabata is usually written 七夕 or 棚機, but if one were writing a story about China one could just as well use the characters 乞巧奠. Today we write the ateji for ranbō [violent] and josainai [tactful] as 乱暴 and 如才ない respectively, but in the Sengoku Era they were written 濫妨 and 如在ない, so in writing a historical novel this is the usage I follow. I follow the same principle in my use of kana, employing extensive okurigana when I want a passage to be clear, or pruning the okurigana when I am more concerned with achieving a particular tone. For this reason sometimes furumai [behavior] becomes 振舞, and sometimes 振る舞い. For example, in Shiga Naoya’s “At Kinosaki,” ateji like 其処で, 丁度, 或朝の事, and 仕舞った are used, but when he wants to give the text a more gentle feel, like kana writing, nothing stops him from writing そこで, ちょうど, 或る朝のこと, and しまった.
    ...However, [these orthographic decisions] are made based on how they harmonize with the work’s content, and I make no allowance whatsoever to the reader’s needs. Once one starts to worry about whether every reader will read a word properly, there is no end to it, so I simply leave it all up to the reader’s literary understanding. As I see it, a reader who lacks that sensibility or common sense wouldn’t grasp the substance of the work anyway.

From Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Bunshō tokuhon (1934).

Bokutō Cafe

Time perhaps to take a break from books and talk about food.
    The last time I was in Tokyo I visited this cafe in Kameido 亀戸 several times. It’s called Samurai 侍 and is located immediately south of the JR line Kameido station, east exit (one stop east of Kinshicho). By any objective measure, the shop is a conceptual mess. The name suggests some sort of warrior -blend coffee, and there are swords on the wall if I recall correctly, but what I liked was faux Sengoku-era language used in the placards decorating the walls (the whole interior is done in very subdued wood, which I must admit adds to the effect). Of course, any battle-weary samurai, after taking off mud-stained boots and blood-stained katana, does not want to sit on an uncomfortable bar stool. So the bar at Samurai is lined instead with rocking chairs (see the photograph). But my favorite element in this thematic mélange is the collection of English-style tea cups, of which the shop seems to have several dozen, no two of which match. The coffee was excellent, the barista well-groomed, and the breakfast special a steal.
    I had never spent much time in the eastern part of Tokyo before my last visit. The best part about it is the rivers and canals which run through the city east of the Sumida. These are an endless source of walks (and great atmosphere for reading certain old books). But mostly, I think I probably like the area because there aren’t so many young people around.

How to read a Tang poem

As is well known, Ernest Fenollosa’s “The Chinese written character as a medium for poetry” is the single most fantastic, least accurate thing that has been written on the subject. It contains the following charming paragraph in its introduction:

One modest merit I may, perhaps, claim for my work: it represents for the first time a Japanese school of study in Chinese culture. Hitherto Europeans have been somewhat at the mercy of contemporary Chinese scholarship. Several centuries ago China lost much of her creative self, and of her insight into the causes of her own life; but her original spirit still lives, grows, interprets, transferred to Japan in all its original freshness. The Japanese today represent a stage of culture roughly corresponding to that of China under the Sung dynasty. I have been fortunate in studying for many years as a private pupil under Professor Kainan Mori, who is probably the greatest living authority on Chinese poetry.

The reader will no doubt be curious to know just how the Japanese school has come to interpret Chinese poetry. (The reader may also be curious to know, if the Japanese had only achieved a Song level culture, just how far back the unfortunate Chinese had regressed. Northern Wei, maybe?) Anyway, I looked around a bit.
    Mori Kainan 森槐南 (1863-1911) was the son of Mori Shuntō, one of the most famous poets of the late Edo period. Unfortunately, if he had his own ideas about written Chinese’s absorption of the “poetic substance of nature," he doesn't seem to have set them down in any real accessible format. However, I did get my hands on Tōshisen Hyōshaku 唐詩選評釈, an annotated edition of Li Panlong’s Tangshi xuan, the most widely used anthology of Chinese poetry in Japan during the Edo and Meiji periods. So, if I cannot give you Kainan’s own view on the relative advantages of pictographic writing, we can at least get a taste of the Japanese school’s method by seeing what he has to say about The Most Famous Chinese Poem of All Time:

What poetry accomplishes with its “spirit” 神 is to allow one to grasp its “meaning” 意 outside of its “language” 言. It is as if it were both far and near, both absent and present, like the clouds in the sky or the moon in the water, even if one grasps it with the mind, it is impossible to speak it aloud: this is how the jueju should be, especially those in the pentasyllabic form. Thus Hu Yinglin once declared that Cao Zhi’s gushi, Du Fu’s lüshi, and Li Bo’s jueju were gifts from heaven utterly beyond human capability. And with a work like “Thoughts on a Quiet Night,” it is as if the author’s thoughts as the pen touches the page have already moved beyond the horizon, and it is quite beyond any one else to follow him to his destination.

Kainan goes on to praise the interpretation of one Kyokuen Yuetsu 曲園兪樾, who argues:

First he sees the bright moonlight before his bed but thinks it’s only frost, then he looks up and sees the moon, then he lowers his head and thinks of home: all of this is actually because looking upon the moon’s beauty affects him deeply. If one tried to explain how deeply affecting it was by simply saying, “Oh, how moving,” it would actually be quite shallow. Feeling emerges when one speaks of emotion unemotionally, and the meaning is only true when one describes it unintentionally. ［無情を以て情を言へば則はち情出て、無意より意を写せば則はち意真なり］

Kyokuen is the Qing scholar Yu Yinfu (1821-1906) 兪蔭甫, of whom I know nothing, but at least one can assume Kainan probably didn’t have quite the contempt for contemporary Chinese scholarship Fenollosa expressed (especially since he goes on to disparage the interpretation of the Japanese monk-scholar Daiten 大典—but maybe that’s just politics).
    Of course, the best part about the Japanese school, as others before me have noted, is that Fenollosa’s essay (or at least Pound’s recension of it) contains only one complete poem, and it is Japanese. The poem (which begins 月耀如晴雪) is the first item in the collection of Sugawara no Michizane, who records that he wrote it for a class assignment when he was eleven.