Introduction
These ninety tales from medieval Japan have been selected and translated from the Konjaku monogatari shu (Collection of tales from times now past), which is believed to have been compiled around the year 1120, at the end of Japan’s Heian Period (794– 1185). The Konjaku monogatari shu is a huge collection of 1,039 tales that were gathered from India, China, and Japan. It thus ranks among the world’s largest collections of tales. In the past, many scholars had believed that it was compiled by Minamoto no Takakuni (1004–1077). Recent scholarship, however, argues against this claim, particularly because it is now thought that some of its stories were composed after Takakuni’s death.* It seems likely that the unknown compiler (or compilers) was either a Buddhist monk or an aristocrat. Although, for several hundred years, the Konjaku monogatari shu was not regarded as high literature in Japan, its value was rediscovered in the Meiji period (1868–1912) by critics and writers including Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927). Today, the Konjaku monogatari shu is highly regarded in Japan, along with works such as The Tale of Genji and The Tale of the Heike.
The original collection consists of thirty-one volumes, of which volumes 8, 18, and 21 are missing. The first five volumes are devoted to tales about India, the next five to tales about China, the next ten to Buddhist tales from Japan, and the remaining eleven volumes to secular tales from Japan.
We have selected what we feel to be the best and most interesting among the tales concerned with Japan. Certainly, the tales about India and China also have considerable historical and literary interest, but we chose to concentrate on the Japanese tales—both to give our collection a clearer focus, and because we felt that these selections have the greatest originality and literary appeal. Some, particularly the earlier selections, are closely connected with the Buddhist way of living and thinking in medieval Japan, while others are more secular and even vulgar in theme and language. But each of them reveals some striking aspects of the imagination, fantasy, and creativeness of medieval Japanese. They appeal, too, as powerfully entertaining tales, filled with keen psychological insight, wry sarcasm, and barely veiled critical commentary on the doings of clergy, nobles, and peasants alike. They suggest that there are, among all classes and peoples, similar susceptibilities to pride, vanity, superstition, and greed—as well as aspirations toward higher moral goals. At the same time, these tales provide a clear look into the lives and thinking of common people—peasants, farmers, soldiers, and common traveling monks of the medieval period—showing a face of Japan that was largely missing or obscured in the more well-known court tales and poetry collections such as Genji, Heike, the Manyoshu, and the waka and renga verse of the period. In the Konjaku tales, we can observe a wide range of human life—the low life and the high, the humble and the devout; the drinking, flirting, farting, and fornicating, as well as the yearning for wisdom, transcendence, and compassion—that are all parts of our shared human nature.
Although written almost a thousand years ago, the Konjaku stories have a striking freshness and a sense of connection to our modern personal and social cares and to our creative imagination. Late Heian society was in the midst of a chaotic and deeply troubling period of change. The decline of aristocratic society gave way to the rise of a countrified warrior class. Murder, theft, rape, and such troubles were on the increase. There was a general belief, supported by the Buddhist doctrine of mappo (final days of the Buddhist Law), that the world was undergoing a period of inevitable degeneration, and that the age was headed toward an end. Buddhist teachings began to change in emphasis. They dealt with themes ranging from praising the wonders of the world, to offering advice for living in the present world, and gaining redemption in the world to come. Buddhist teachers used such parable-tales (setuswa) as are found in this collection to transmit these ideas, along with practical advice, to the peasants and common folk. They drew on a rich mixture of old mythology, local tales, Shinto lore about local gods and demons, and actual historical figures and events. The stories were intended to offer advice for survival when dealing with devils, tricksters, phonies, demons, and other common troubling beings and events—whether human or supernatural.
Many of the stories refer to the benefits of following the teachings of the Lotus Sutra. Similar in some ways to the Konjaku monogatari shu, the Lotus Sutra is also composed of a wide range of parable-stories. These parables relate Buddhist teachings to the practical concerns of daily life, through the use of concrete examples. They are written in a narrative style that is understandable by a wide range of people, including the common folk.
There is a formulaic narrative structure that is evident in these tales, suited to their original use as religious parables. They all start with a set phrase; “In olden times . . .” and end with a moral message and a rather set ending, usually something like; “. . . and such is the tale as it has been handed down.” Although some modern readers may, at least at first glance, find the morals at the end of the stories to be simplistic and didactic, we should remember that the stories’ original function was as a parable. If we accept such stylistic requirements of the genre, we can also see the great artistic creativity and imagination of the tales. Many readers are likely to find considerable wry sarcasm, skepticism, paradox, and wit in these morals. Even, for example, when they overtly warn against such evils as the danger or stupidity of women, there is often a strong under-current of parody and satire, as well as ample possibility for reading intended ambiguities and opposing interpretations. The complex psychological insights and portrayals of dreams, greed, and lust give these stories particular modern appeal.
The Meiji era Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa—known particularly for his attention to psychological details and for his Edgar Allan Poe–like fascination with and descriptions of the darker aspects of life—wrote a number of short stories based on the tales from the Konjaku monogatari shu. His story “Rashomon” is based on the tale in our collection titled “A Robber Climbs to the Upper Structure of Rashomon Gate and Finds a Corpse.” Film director Akira Kurosawa based his famous movie Rashomon on Akutagawa’s adaptation of another tale included in our collection: “A Man Traveling With His Wife to Tamba Province Gets Tied Up by a Young Man at Mt. Ohe.” In all, Akutagawa wrote more than ten short stories based on tales from the Konjaku monogatari shu. The writer Sonoko Sugimoto (1925–) has written forty-four short stories based on tales from the collection.
The Konjaku tales deal mainly with rural culture and nature. Along with the decline of the nobility’s power and the spread of Buddhist teachings to the common folk in rural areas, major ecological changes were transforming nature and culture in the countryside. Forests—along with their resident gods, spirits, ogres, demons, and other supernatural beings—were being cut down and pushed away to clear the land for cultivation. Rivers were being diverted, and waterways disturbed. This disruption of nature was accompanied by deep feelings of ambivalence. People felt an uneasy tension between their practical and spiritual callings. On the one hand, they faced basic survival needs through hunting and killing animals, and increasingly, by clearing forests and carrying out land-engineering projects that controlled and disrupted nature. On the other hand, they still held to traditional Shinto beliefs of respect for nature’s deities, along with a faith in the more recent Buddhist teachings regarding the sanctity of all sentient, and even all non-sentient beings. Buddhism not only urged abstinence from or restraint in eating animal meat, it also taught that “trees, grasses, and earth all become Buddhas” (somoku kokudo shikkai jobutsu).† Many of the tales in the Konjaku monogatari shu express feelings of the tension in being torn between competing strains of necessity and compassion toward animals, plants, people, and places. Examples of the many stories included in our collection that express the ambivalence toward humans’ relations with animals include, as their titles imply: “How a Man Copied the Lotus Sutra to save a Dead Fox,” “A Man from Michinoku Province, Who Catches Hawks’ Chicks, Is Saved by Kannon,” and “On Seeing a Wild Duck Mourning the Death of the Drake He Shot, a Man Becomes a Monk.” In the story “The Governor of Sanuki Province Destroys Manono Pond,” we can see an early example of a cautionary tale about how human greed can result in ecological and societal destruction. In the Konjaku tales, we see evidence of, and reflection on, how the worlds of humans, animals, plants, and places are inherently interwoven and interdependent.
The Konjaku tales have had a lasting influence on many aspects of Japanese culture. A popular, often-performed Noh drama is based on the Konjaku tale “A Monk of Dojoji Temple in Kii Province Brings Salvation to Two Snakes by Copying the Lotus Sutra.” It is an eerie story about a woman who loved a young monk so deeply that she turned herself into a snake when the monk didn’t come as promised to see her. In the form of a snake, she pursues the young monk, who hides in a temple bell. She burns the bell with the angry fire of her unrequited love, and the monk perishes in the flames. Then a high-ranking elderly priest from Dojoji Temple “dreams a dream” that a snake appears and begs: “I am the monk that hid in the bell. The wicked woman became a snake, and I was forced to become her husband . . . Please, I pray, show your great, merciful heart and copy the chapter on the Buddha’s life from the Lotus Sutra with your clean mind and body, and dedicate it to the Buddha to save us two snakes and release us from our sufferings.” And at that, the snake goes off, and the elderly priest awakes from his dream. The two snakes are saved by virtue of the elderly priest’s meritorious work.
In a number of other tales, the female bodhisattva, Kannon, saves people in miraculous ways. In one tale about a greedy county administrator of Tamba Province, Kannon gets her chest pierced with an arrow on behalf of a sculptor of Buddhist figures and thus saves his life. In another tale, she becomes a huge snake and helps carry a man up a cliff and allows him to return home safely.
In several tales, we find references to the close and respectful relations that existed between Japanese and Koreans in medieval times, such as in “A Turtle Repays the Kindness of Gusai of Paekche” and “A Human Skull Repays the Kindness of Doto, a Priest from Korea.” Such stories touch on a largely underreported history of positive Japanese-Korean relations and suggest possibilities for establishing bridges of reconciliation amidst the ongoing tensions between these countries in recent times.
In the final story of our collection, “The Great Oak Tree in Kurimoto County of Ohmi Province,” we see a clear expression of the ambivalence that people of the time felt toward the rampant deforestation that was occurring in Japan, and in particular, toward the cutting of the last giant trees. This short, compact tale tells of an enormous oak tree “three thousand feet in circumference” that casts its huge, dark shadow on three provinces, such that it restricts the farmers’ ability to grow crops. The farmers petition the emperor for permission to cut down the tree. When granted permission, they quickly chop it down, and this results in rich, abundant harvests. This event, we can imagine, heralds the historical triumph of agriculture and the increasing control of humans over nature. Yet the story also expresses a poignant whiff of nostalgia, mixed with feelings of awe and respect for the giant old trees that had once been respected and protected by the emperors and the people alike. Such feelings of ambivalence in the face of modernization are likely to strike sympathetic chords among readers today as we, too, face similar anxieties, compromises, and ambiguities in our relations with the natural world.
Steeped in such thematic and local variation, these tales encompass a great creative space as they deal with a wide range of psychological, religious, social, ecological, and practical everyday concerns. They cast new light on previously hidden aspects of medieval Japanese society and nature, while at the same time they possess a creative spirit that can excite and challenge contemporary readers. We translators sincerely hope our readers will fully enjoy these extraordinary tales of old Japan.
Naoshi Koriyama and Bruce Allen
* Shirane, Haruo. “Introduction to Anecdotal (Setsuwa) Literature,” in The Demon at Agi Bridge and other Japanese Tales, ed. Haruo Shirane, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia U. Press, 2011) 23.
† Shirane, Haruo. Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts (New York: Columbia U. Press, 2012) 124.