WHAT GREAT FUN IT HAS BEEN translating Inoue Yasushi’s (1907–91) epic novel, Aoki ōkami (The blue wolf)! The Japanese original was published in ten serial installments in the renowned cultural journal Bungei shunjū from October 1959 through July 1960, then published in book form by the journal’s parent publishing company, Bungei shunjū shinsha, in 1960, by Shinchōsha in 1964, and by numerous other presses thereafter. To give an idea of its enormous popularity in Japan, Shinchōsha put the novel through its forty-seventh printing in 1987, and it still appears to be in print and available through online book-ordering services in Japan. Indeed, an Asahi shinbun report for February 28, 2007 indicates something of the extent of the novel’s popularity: during a state visit to Japan by the president of Mongolia, the topic of Aoki ōkami came up in conversation with the Japanese emperor and empress.1
Many of Inoue’s other novels and travelogues have been published in English translation over the past forty years, including The Roof Tile of Tempyō, Confucius: A Novel, Dunhuang, Flood, Journey Beyond Samarkand, The Tea Ceremony, The Izu Dancer and Other Stories, Lou-lan and Other Stories, The Hunting Gun, The Counterfeiter and Other Stories, Wind and Waves, Shirobamba: A Childhood in Japan, and most recently The Samurai Banner of Furin Kazan. One element of his work that has made him popular among ordinary readers as well as specialists in East Asian studies—a rare accomplishment—is the simple fact that, recognizing that he was a novelist and not a scholar of Chinese and Inner Asian (and, of course, Japanese) history and culture, he frequently consulted with leading academic historians about the subject matter of his works in progress. For example, his novel Dunhuang concerns the years in the Tang dynasty (618–907) just prior to that famous cave’s being sealed with many hundreds of manuscripts inside, only to be discovered at the dawn of the twentieth century; Inoue sought advice from Fujiwara Akira (1911–98), a specialist on Dunhuang manuscripts. For Wind and Waves, a novel about the Mongol subjugation of Korea, which was virtually enslaved at the time of the failed conquest missions to Japan, he consulted with Okada Hidehiro (b. 1931), one of postwar Japan’s best known Mongolists. And in writing The Roof Tile of Tempyō, about several Japanese Buddhist acolytes in the early eighth century who make the pilgrimage to China with one of the periodic embassies from Japan to pursue their religious studies, during which several members strive wholeheartedly to convince the great monk Ganjin (C. Jianzhen, 688–763) to return with them to Japan, he sought the advice of Andō Kōsei (1900–70), a specialist in Nara-period Japanese history who wrote a number of books on Ganjin and other aspects of Sino-Japanese religious history in this early era.2 One Japanese Mongolist wrote me that, in his estimation, and perhaps exaggeratedly, Inoue was a genuine “literary giant” (bungō), whereas other, more prolific historical novelists, who appeared frequently in the mass media, were merely “mass market authors” (taishū sakka).3
Does this attention to historical accuracy and authenticity make Inoue’s novels more readable or simply more satisfying? Explanations for his works’ popularity with the Japanese reading public must take into account these concerns as well as his writing style. Inoue has mastered a style that is simultaneously crystal clear—often about events and customs that are anything but familiar to an ordinary reader—and conscientious about historical and cultural detail. This is no mean feat and should not be underestimated—usually an author must dispense with one or the other, often sacrificing history to tell a good story.
Over the course of his career, Inoue won numerous literary prizes in Japan, such as the Akutagawa Prize in 1949, and his name was frequently mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature during the long period between its presentation to Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972) in 1968 and to Ōe Kenzaburō (b. 1935) in 1994, the only two Japanese to win this highly coveted award. Few authors of historical fiction, in which Inoue specialized, have received the Nobel.
As he explains in his own afterword, Inoue was drawn to write about Chinggis Khan precisely because there were areas of his character that historians had not explained or simply could not explain. Enter the historical novelist who need not be tied down by the hard-and-fast pull of facticity or the silence from documentation. Where the historical record dries up, the novelist takes over. Inoue wanted to get at the source of what drove Chinggis psychologically to virtually endless conquest and colossal mass murder. Needless to say, we have no contemporary documents describing the Great Khan’s psyche—indeed, for much of the history retold in this novel, the Mongols were preliterate.
This direction might lead one to write a novel of utterly no use whatsoever. Imagine a comparable novel about Napoleon or Hitler, both mentioned by Inoue in his afterword, that explained their penchant for conquest as based on a single psychological source. Many readers might reject it out of hand; at best, it might attract those drawn to monocausal explanations of great events or people. Inoue does manage to penetrate the character of his fictional Chinggis without either completely demonizing him or idealizing him; there is similarly no effort to explain away any of his obviously monstrous behavioral traits by invoking some form of historical relativism. And where the facts are available, Inoue sticks to them. I give but one example. There is a famous story—recounted every year in East Asian survey courses around the world—of Chinggis’s plan, once he completed his conquest of the state of Jin in north China, to depopulate the entire area and turn it into a massive pastureland for the nomadic Mongolian people; he is said to have been dissuaded only by the intervention of his aide, the Khitan nobleman Yelü Chucai (1190–1244), who makes repeated appearances in the novel. This story would have made great copy in Aoki ōkami, but to his credit Inoue makes no mention of it, presumably because it has no basis whatsoever in fact.4
The enduring popularity of Inoue’s psychological take on the driving force behind Chinggis Khan, the conqueror, is attested by the nearly four-and-a-half-hour television drama based on the novel, entitled Aoki ōkami, Chingisu Kan no shōgai (The blue wolf: The career of Chinggis Khan). Appearing initially in four installments on Asahi TV in 1980, it was directed by Morisaki Azuma and Harada Takashi, and it starred Katō Gō in the title role.
On a far grander scale than the small screen, however, is the release on March 31, 2007 of a major motion picture shot entirely on location in Mongolia, putatively to commemorate the 800th anniversary of the founding of the first Mongolian state: Aoki ōkami, chihate umi tsukiru made (The blue wolf: Till the end of land and sea). The story is based both on Inoue’s novel and on a more recent novel by Morimura Seiichi entitled Chihate umi tsukiru made, shōsetsu Chingisu Kan (Till the end of land and sea, a novel of Chinggis Khan).5 The blockbuster was directed by Sawai Shin’ichirō, a veteran screenwriter and director, and runs over two hours.6
As Inoue was periodically aided by experts in various histories, I too was fortunate enough to have recourse to the assistance of specialists. Although there have been Mongolian, French, and three Chinese translations of this novel, I assiduously did not consult them until the copyediting stage of production. The modern Mongolian rendition is beyond my abilities in any case, but I did not want to be unduly influenced by the French or Chinese translators’ take on the events portrayed. In matters concerning Mongolian toponyms, ethnonyms, and other proper nouns, I frequently consulted with Christopher Atwood of Indiana University. Despite considerable attention by highly trained specialists over the years to many of the details of early Mongolian history, rendering these proper nouns is no mean feat. Like all living languages, Mongolian has changed over the eight centuries since Chinggis lived, and chronolectal difficulties only added to the problem. Chris’s advice made it possible for me accurately to romanize the terms I was reading in Japanese syllabary form. If I have done this correctly, it is all to his credit; where I have failed, it is because I misunderstood or mistranscribed one of his renderings. For the Central Asian terms that appear in the latter chapters, I have relied (at Chris’s advice) on John Andrew Boyle’s (1916–78) translation of the Persian historian Ata-Malik Juvaini’s (1226–83) Genghis Khan: The History of the World-Conqueror.7 My only addition to Inoue’s original text are the (rather simple) names of the chapters; in the original they were merely numbers.
I do not know if Japanese read more historical fiction than Anglophones, but I do know that the percentage of historical novels translated from Japanese into English (vis-à-vis all novels rendered from Japanese into English) is much lower than their comparative numbers in the original language. For example, only two historical novels by Chin Shunshin (b. 1925) and only three or four by the most prolific of all, Shiba Ryōtarō, have appeared in English-language editions. Like films with historical themes and personages, historical novels can be used in teaching with great efficacy, but only if they are approached critically. They help us to imagine the inner workings of historical actors in a way that less accessible academic works cannot. But they are novels, not chronicles. One should no more confuse the Napoleon and the Mikhail Kutuzov (1745–1813) of Tolstoy’s War and Peace with the real men than the men and women surrounding John F. Kennedy (1917–63) with the characters in Oliver Stone’s (b. 1946) film JFK.
Enjoy, enjoy.
Joshua A. Fogel
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