The Tales of Ise (Penguin Classics) Read online

  Translated and with a Commentary by

  Peter MacMillan

  * * *

  THE TALES OF ISE

  Foreword by

  DONALD KEENE

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Note on the Translation and Text

  THE TALES OF ISE

  Commentary

  Appendix 1: Glossary of Literary and Social Conventions

  Appendix 2: Historical Characters

  Appendix 3: Genealogies of the Historical Characters

  Appendix 4: Principles of Romanization

  Appendix 5: Romanized Transliterations of the Poems

  Appendix 6: Maps

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  THE TALES OF ISE

  PETER MACMILLAN is a translator, poet and artist. His previous translation, One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each (Hyakunin isshu), was awarded the Donald Keene Center Special Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, and the 44th Special Cultural Translation Prize from the Japan Society of Translators, both in 2008. He has also published a collection of poetry, Admiring Fields, and is active as an artist. His series of prints Thirty-Six New Views of Mount Fuji has been widely exhibited in Japan and other countries.

  DONALD KEENE taught at Columbia University for many years and is internationally renowned as an interpreter of Japanese literature and culture for the West. He lives in Japan and was the first foreign national to receive the Order of Culture (Bunka Kunsho) from the Japanese government for his contribution to Japanese literature and culture.

  List of Illustrations

  On the Plain of Kasuga. A scene from The Tales of Ise (Ise monogatari), late sixteenth century, Japan. Three volumes; ink, colours and gold on paper, CBL J 1050.1. (© The Trustees of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin)

  Could that be the Same Moon? A scene from The Tales of Ise (detail), Itaya Hironaga, Edo period, eighteenth century. One of two hanging scrolls; ink and colour on silk. Gift of Kobayashi Ataru. (Collection of Nezu Museum/© Nezu Museum)

  Irises in Bloom. Ise monogatari – nara ehon (illustrated booklet) of The Tales of Ise, seventeenth century. (Collection of Tesshinsai Bunko)

  Snow Still Covers Your Peak. A scene from The Tales of Ise (Ise monogatari), late sixteenth century, Japan. Three volumes; ink, colours and gold on paper, CBL J 1050.1. (© The Trustees of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin)

  Grasses of the Musashi Plain. A scene from The Tales of Ise: Musashino, Tawaraya Sotatsu, seventeenth century. Colours on shikishi (thick square sheet of paper used for paintings or poems); painting mounted as hanging scroll. (Collection of Idemitsu Museum of Arts)

  The Measuring Well. Ise monogatari – nara ehon, seventeenth century. (Collection of Tesshinsai Bunko)

  The Cherry Blossom Banquet. Ise monogatari – nara ehon, seventeenth century. (Collection of Tesshinsai Bunko)

  The Glow of Fireflies. A scene from The Tales of Ise (detail), Kobayashi Kokei, Meiji period, 1912. Colour on silk. (Collection of Yamatane Museum of Art)

  Fireflies, Please Tell the Wild Geese. Ise monogatari – nara ehon, seventeenth century. (Collection of Tesshinsai Bunko)

  Writing on Water. The Tales of Ise illustrations (shikishi). Attributed to Tawaraya Sotatsu, Edo period, seventeenth century. (Collection of Miho Museum)

  Love at a Hundred. Ise monogatari – nara ehon, seventeenth century. (Collection of Tesshinsai Bunko)

  Purge Me of My Love. Ise monogatari – nara ehon, seventeenth century. (Collection of Tesshinsai Bunko)

  Was It Real, or Just a Dream? Ise monogatari – nara ehon, seventeenth century. (Collection of Tesshinsai Bunko)

  The Heart Has No Colours. The Tales of Ise illustrations (shikishi). Attributed to Tawaraya Sotatsu, Edo period, seventeenth century. (Collection of Miho Museum)

  The Heart of Spring. Ise monogatari – nara ehon, seventeenth century. (Collection of Tesshinsai Bunko)

  Are Those Stars on a Cloudless Night? Ise monogatari – nara ehon, seventeenth century. (Collection of Tesshinsai Bunko)

  Blooms of Devotion. Ise monogatari – nara ehon, seventeenth century. (Collection of Tesshinsai Bunko)

  The Tatsuta River. Ise monogatari – nara ehon, seventeenth century. (Collection of Tesshinsai Bunko)

  The Truth-Revealing Rain. A scene from The Tales of Ise (Ise monogatari), late sixteenth century, Japan. Three volumes; ink, colours and gold on paper, CBL J 1050.3 (© The Trustees of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin)

  Much Less Today … Ise monogatari – nara ehon, seventeenth century. (Collection of Tesshinsai Bunko)

  Foreword

  The Tales of Ise is one of the most famous works of Japanese literature, and its influence in later times has probably been greater than that of any other work of the Heian period. Although the more than one hundred episodes in the Tales are poetic and agreeable to read, seemingly presenting no problems, a huge amount of scholarly research has been devoted over the centuries to elucidating its every particle – the mark of its unusual importance.

  The title itself is a mystery. Only two or three of the episodes have any connection with Ise, the site of the great shrine of the Shinto religion, but these few episodes are so striking that they may have caused some editor to name the entire collection of stories after Ise. They relate the love affair between the hero and the high priestess of Ise, a sacred virgin who was kept strictly from the eyes of men. The hero’s success in seducing a woman who is all but impossible to approach sets the tone of the work, even in the episodes that do not relate to the hero.

  The hero, the ninth-century courtier Ariwara no Narihira, is mentioned by name only once in the entire work; most often, he is simply ‘the man’. Many episodes begin with the plain declaration: ‘Long ago, there was a man.’ If nothing else, this sentence serves to set the events of the episode in the past, a time that was deemed to be far more elegant than the present. Yet the Tales was read not merely as the story of a Don Juan who always (or almost always) succeeds in his attempts to win the favour of ladies of the court but as an evocation of an era when beauty and the quest for beauty were the most important elements of life. The poetry in each episode makes it possible for us to believe that such people really inhabited this refined court.

  Many poems are attributed to Narihira, but some were added by other poets in the augmented versions of the work. The quality of the poetry is remarkably high, superior even to the poetry in The Tale of Genji. Some poems have inspired whole Noh plays and become familiar to every educated Japanese. The work has not been widely read outside Japan because of the lack of translations that are close to the qualities of the original.

  The first task of the translator of the Tales is to translate the poems – and, to a lesser extent, the prose – without losing their beauty. A strictly literal translation is impossible because of the great differences between the Japanese and English languages. In the past, some translators of Japanese enclosed words like ‘it’ or ‘the’ in brackets to indicate that they were not in the original, but such translations tended to be boring, if not completely unreadable. Even if one knows every word in one of the poems, its overall meaning may be difficult to understand. Scholars have more or less agreed on the meaning of the words of the poems, but not on their implied or hidden overtones.

  Variant texts must also be considered. Of course, translations must be faithful to the original, but faithfulness should be maintained not only in the individual words but also in the meaning of the whole poem, and in order for readers to under
stand the poet’s intent, it is sometimes necessary to add words that are not in the original.

  The great master of translating Japanese (and Chinese) works of literature into English was Arthur Waley (1899–1966). Today, his translations are sometimes criticized by scholars, who point out his mistakes or additions, but his work is in the tradition of the famous translations of the past (such as Edward FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam), which certainly move readers more than those that scrupulously follow every word of the original.

  Peter MacMillan’s Tales of Ise, of the school of Waley, is translated elegantly, as this exquisite work must be, and is on a par with Waley’s translation of The Tale of Genji (1925–6). His translations of the poems are particularly successful. And as Waley does in his translations, MacMillan has also made small but successful additions or adaptations. For example, he has given titles to episodes and occasionally uses personification to make the meaning clearer for the reader. However, his readings are extremely accurate and completely faithful to the original. In making the translations, he has made very extensive use of modern Japanese scholarship on the Tales (something that Waley could not do, in his Genji translation).

  Despite the importance and enormous influence of The Tales of Ise, it is hardly read or studied any more in the original. MacMillan’s brilliant translation will help to re-establish the fundamental importance of this work of Japanese literature and surely garner a whole new generation of readers. It is the most poetic translation of this work to date, and adds to the treasures of Japanese literature that can now be enjoyed in English translation.

  Peter MacMillan is the premier translator of Japanese literature of his generation. His clear and lucid translations make this complex and difficult world accessible to English-language readers and transform our understanding of Japanese poetry.

  Donald Keene

  Professor Emeritus, Columbia University

  March 2016, Tokyo

  Introduction

  Though written by multiple hands over a long time span, The Tales of Ise (hereafter referred to as the Tales) is a work of great profundity, at once original, experimental, subversive, filled with wit and humour and, at the same time, a collection of elegance and beauty. Along with The Tale of Genji, the Hyakunin isshu (One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each) and the Kokin wakashū (Collection of Waka Ancient and Modern; referred to hereafter as the Kokinshū), the Tales is one of the four most important works in Japanese classical literature, and knowledge of it is a prerequisite for understanding Japanese cultural and literary history. It is also one of the most enigmatic works in the Japanese canon, and the aim of the introduction, commentary and supplementary material in this edition is to help bring to life more fully the beauty of the Tales and the pleasure to be found in reading it.

  Constructed as a series of poem tales (uta monagatari – see here), the Tales comprises 125 short narratives that function as suitable contexts for the mostly love poems, many of which depict the famous real-life poet Ariwara no Narihira (AD 825–80 – see here).1 Narihira is presented as having composed many of the poems himself, and the narratives can be read as examples of how he would have responded in various situations. However, some of the roles he assumes and circumstances in which he finds himself would have been impossible for a man of his elevated status, and we know for a fact that he didn’t compose all the poems. One way to read the Tales, then, is as a fictionalized, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, portrait of the great lover and poet Narihira.

  Another way is to dip in and out of the Tales, enjoying the poems in their various settings, and to view the work in much the same way that one would look at a series of rakuchu rakugaizu screen paintings. These depict a multitude of separate little scenes of Kyoto and its environs glimpsed through gaps in the clouds. At first the scenes appear to be disconnected until one realizes that they each reveal part of a single unified world – life in the capital. In the same way, the aggregate of the diverse episodes of the Tales creates a unified perspective of the cultural mores, aesthetics and the ‘way of love’ of aristocratic society in the early part of the Heian period (794–1185).

  The Tales was influenced by a large range of sources: the poetry of the time, mostly the Kokinshū anthology; earlier poetry, especially the Man’yōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves); and Chinese literature, Buddhism, folk tales and songs.2 Composed over a long period, it became a basic text in the éducation sentimentale of the Japanese and a fundamental part of the literary education for poets and men and women of learning for a thousand years. Ever since it was written, it has influenced all aspects of art and literature, from waka poetry and Noh theatre (see here) to diaries and fiction. Indeed, without the Tales it is difficult to imagine the creation of the greatest novel of Japanese literature, the eleventh-century Tale of Genji. Its author, Murasaki Shikibu (970/978–1014/1031), one of Japan’s most celebrated writers, refers to one of the Tales’ authors, Narihira, with the highest respect in her work. In the chapter called ‘A Picture Contest’, the Tales and the no-longer-extant Tale of Josammi are compared. Though, in Japanese fashion, no winner is actually proclaimed, the view of Lady Fujitsubo prevails when she declares that Narihira’s name must not be maligned.

  Over three hundred editions of the Tales were issued during the Edo period (1603–1868), nearly one a year, making it an outstanding success and the bestselling book of the era. Unlike the long chapters in The Tale of Genji, all the episodes in the Tales are short and highly readable, and it was often quoted in poetry, plays and other literature, making it required reading for sophisticated Edoites, who would have been expected to recognize such allusions. The romantic situations described in the Tales, and the words and phrases used to describe them, were essential knowledge for poets, and copies were even placed in the trousseaux of brides, as it was considered particularly apt for educating women in the ways of love.

  While the influence of the Tales on Western literature has yet to be felt, there is one striking exception. The Tales had an enormous influence on Noh theatre, not least in its witty use of wordplay and linguistic and thematic association. And one play in particular, Kakitsubata (The Iris), based on Episode 9 of the Tales, had a huge impact on James Joyce’s magnum opus, Finnegans Wake. Joyce had read Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa’s translation of the play and found in the Noh a confirmation of the possibilities of layered language that would become so central to the novel. As Eileen Kato comments, it is a marvel to see in Joyce’s masterpiece how the wanderings of Narihira are transformed and how the Iris spirit who attains enlightenment in Kakitsubata ‘goes on to achieve Celtic illumination in a new avatar in Finnegans Wake’.3

  In modern-day Japan, the original is relegated chiefly to academic study, but the Tales is still the source of endless inspiration in a large variety of media, from novels to poetry and even comics (manga). There are many contemporary rewritings and adaptations of the Tales, and it is also one of the most illustrated literary works in Japanese art history, with scenes from it appearing in many different forms, from paintings and calligraphy to ceramics, tea ceremony utensils and lacquerware.4 As in the past, the Tales continues to represent the epitome of high culture in Japan; it remains an excellent textbook for poets on how to write love poems; and it provides an indispensable introduction to Japanese aesthetics and literature of the Heian period.

  Waka Poetry and Poem Tales

  Waka – the most ancient and prestigious of the traditional poetry genres – constitute the literary heart of the Tales. The origins of waka stretch back to prehistoric times and its modern incarnation – tanka – still has many practitioners today. The term waka (literally, ‘Japanese poem’) can be used to denote all the various traditional verse-forms in Japanese (tanka, renga, haiku), but it usually refers to poems of five lines in a 5-7-5-7-7 syllabic sequence. (See the glossary, here, for more on this.)

  Since early times, it was common practice to collect waka poems in large anthologies (kashū). The first extant waka antholog
y is the Man’yōshū, completed in the mid eighth century. In the early tenth century, the first imperially sponsored anthology, the Kokinshū, was compiled. Official imperial sponsorship made waka a highly prestigious genre, a status that it retained for a thousand years until the modern period. The tradition of compiling selections of poems by famous poets (shūkasen) began in the early eleventh century with Fujiwara no Kinto (966–1041), whose Sanjūrokuninsen (Selected Verse of Thirty-six Poets; c.1009) can be considered the first work of this kind. By the time of Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241), the tradition was well established, and Teika produced various such selections, as did his father, Shunzei (1114–1204). It was Teika who would compile the standard editions of both The Tales of Ise and The Tale of Genji.

  When the poems were anthologized they were often accompanied by introductory headnotes (kotobagaki) giving the poem’s topic, date and circumstances of composition. Poems for which such details were unavailable were simply labelled ‘topic unknown’ (dai shirazu). An important feature of the Tales was that it developed these headnotes into short narratives built around poems or exchanges of poems – themselves based on the oral discussion of poems (utagatari – see here) – which displayed considerably more narrative complexity than the original headnote. Another distinctive feature of the Tales was that it often took a poem from an earlier compilation of poetry and changed the setting, creating a completely new context for the poem. This in effect altered – or even in some cases completely transformed – the meaning of the poem.

  When translated, some of the poems seem to be saying very little, but the originals often rely on a sophisticated use of rhetorical expression – especially wordplay and punning – to make them linguistically complex and aurally pleasing. In Japanese the skilful use of punning was admired as an expression of the poet’s skill. Unlike English, Japanese has countless homonyms, making punning very easy but posing a particular challenge for the translator. Whereas in English punning can be dismissed as light and even childish, for Heian-period poets such wordplay was a means of demonstrating their artistic mastery, intended to delight their readers, and the language and rhythm of a great many of the poems in the Tales are indeed exquisite.