The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction

The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon

William C. Hedberg

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231550260
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The classic Chinese novel The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan) tells the story of a band of outlaws in twelfth-century China and their insurrection against the corrupt imperial court. Imported into Japan in the early seventeenth century, it became a ubiquitous source of inspiration for translations, adaptations, parodies, and illustrated woodblock prints. There is no work of Chinese fiction more important to both the development of early modern Japanese literature and the Japanese imagination of China than The Water Margin.

In The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction, William C. Hedberg investigates the reception of The Water Margin in a variety of early modern and modern Japanese contexts, from eighteenth-century Confucian scholarship and literary exegesis to early twentieth-century colonial ethnography. He examines the ways Japanese interest in Chinese texts contributed to new ideas about literary canons and national character. By constructing an account of Japanese literature through the lens of The Water Margin's literary afterlives, Hedberg offers an alternative history of East Asian textual culture: one that focuses on the transregional dimensions of Japanese literary history and helps us rethink the definition and boundaries of Japanese literature itself.

Chapter One

SINOPHILIA, SINOPHOBIA, AND VERNACULAR PHILOLOGY IN EARLY MODERN JAPAN

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

—L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between

China is China, Japan is Japan; the past is past, and now is now.

—Hiraga Gennai, The Biography of Dashing Shidōken

It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of Chinese fiction and drama to the literary culture of early modern Japan. The rise to ubiquitous prominence of Chinese texts such as Shuihu zhuan, Xiyou ji (Journey to the West), and the short fiction of Feng Menglong (1574–1646) was a gradual occurrence, however, and the record suggests that Japanese readers’ first encounters with these texts were as fraught with uncertainty, contention, and misunderstanding as the importation of Confucian classics and the Buddhist canon had occasioned in past eras. The Edo-period fascination with Chinese fiction has been well noted (if less frequently discussed), and to a certain extent the place of novels like Shuihu zhuan and Sanguo yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms) in the Japanese literary canon is secure. What is considerably less studied, however, is the circuitous route by which these novels first rose to prominence. Shuihu zhuan, for instance, appeared in shogunal bibliographic records as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century, but it was not until well over a century later that the work was first translated into Japanese. This is certainly not to say that Shuihu zhuan was unknown in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Japan. The title was mentioned in numerous documents from the period, and imported copies of the novel excited considerable interest among connoisseurs of Chinese texts.1 What is less clear is the degree to which Japanese readers understood the novel. The difficult language of the text—which included numerous examples of more contemporary and colloquial usage—precluded any large-scale dissemination, and discussion of the text was limited largely to a small group of initiate readers. As late as 1757, when the scholar and enthusiast Suyama Nantō (1700–1766) compiled a reference guide to “difficult vocabulary” in Shuihu zhuan, his list of terms included some of the most elementary locutions found in Chinese fiction. Lest the mere acquisition of Chinese novels be mistaken for detailed comprehension, the preface to the work made mocking reference to Japanese readers who eagerly sought out new titles, only to “bundle them up and store them away, unable to read them.”2

In the writing of early eighteenth-century scholars of Chinese texts, Shuihu zhuan was invoked as an example of the linguistic registers known as zokugo and Tōwa, terms that have both been translated as “vernacular” but that might be better understood as “colloquial” or “contemporary” language. The term Tōwa, in particular, was associated with Japanese interest in Chinese spoken language. With the establishment of trade facilities at Nagasaki in the early years of the Tokugawa period, examples of Tōwa might be heard firsthand from Chinese sailors in Nagasaki, and as this chapter shows, a number of fiction aficionados had connections to the port city. Both Tōwa and zokugo also referred to written registers, including, but by no means limited to, the frequently incomprehensible argot of Chinese fiction and drama. The study of these texts was subsumed by the nascent discipline of Tōwagaku (the study of Tōwa)—a term that appears to have entered the general lexicon in the first decades of the eighteenth century. Although it originally signified the specific dynasty lasting from 618 to 907, the graph Tō was widely used in Edo-period Japan to signify a more general sense of cultural, racial, and linguistic Otherness. Keiko Suzuki discusses the use of the phrase “hairy foreigner” (ke Tōjin) as a common epithet for European visitors to Japan, and Ronald Toby has demonstrated that the name Tōjin was also applied to the Korean envoys who traveled to Edo.3 The deployment of Tō took on a special meaning, however, among scholars and translators of Chinese texts, who used it to refer to China as the contemporaneous entity that could be juxtaposed with more geographically and temporally abstract toponyms like Kara or Morokoshi. Tōjin referred to the Chinese sailors docked at Nagasaki, Tōsen denoted the boats that had brought them there, and Tōwa served as a blanket term to signify both the various dialects of Chinese spoken there as well as the written language of much of the literature that they imported. The term gaku suggests uniformity in focus and methodology and implies a cohesively constituted discipline, but in fact there was a wide spectrum of subjects grouped under this rubric. The common denominator uniting the professional interpreter in the maritime markets of Nagasaki, the Kyoto scholar studying the lecture records of Chinese neo-Confucians, and the Edo aficionado of Chinese fiction was concern with China as a contemporaneous entity and an interest in registers of Chinese more reflective of an oral context than the literary Sinitic that had functioned as a written lingua franca throughout East Asia for more than a millennium.

Although there was disagreement over the boundaries of the Tōwagaku scholar’s epistemological domain, there was widespread consensus that contemporary novels like Shuihu zhuan required training to read. “Retraining” might be a more apt characterization, however, as Japanese aficionados of Chinese fiction perennially complained that the classical scholars who had previously served as interpreters of Chinese texts were woefully ill-equipped to explicate these new works. The scholar and painter Yanagisawa Kien (1704–1758) sounded a familiar refrain in his set of occasional notes, Hitorine (Sleeping alone): “For those who wish to study the practice of [oral] interpretation, one should read Shuihu zhuan, Journey to the West, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and other novels using Chinese pronunciation.… Indeed, the zoku texts being imported from China are quite unreadable for today’s famous scholars, as a result of their not being familiar with the practice of interpretation.”4

While the term Tōwa could refer to a wide range of written and spoken registers, there was a broad consensus among scholars of Tōwagaku that their purview constituted a new area of research and a distinct break with earlier ways of approaching texts from China. For even as broadly read and knowledgeable an intellect as the Confucian scholar and philologist Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728), “China” was always an imagined location—a land whose inhabitants were out of immediate physical reach, save for the occasional brush conversation (hitsudan) with an Ōbaku monk. Many of the translators and minor scholars who acted as conduits for the influx of contemporary Chinese culture, however, spent extensive time in Nagasaki, sought out Chinese sailors and émigré scholars for conversation, and devoted themselves to the formal study of little-known texts that would hardly warrant mention in one of Edo’s Confucian academies. For such men, mastery of more contemporary registers provided a means of reimagining their place in Edo-period intellectual society by presenting themselves as direct links to a live and vibrant contemporary culture across the sea. In the fractious and cliquish world of early Edo-period classical study, what stands out in the prefaces and manifestos published by the self-proclaimed Tōwagakusha is the degree to which they attempted to position themselves as outsiders with respect to preexisting schools of scholarship. If Sorai’s standard criticism of his peers focused on their unreasonable fixation with abstruse principle and ahistorical universality, we can see men such as Suyama Nantō and Okajima Kanzan (1674–1728) advancing a parallel argument by emphasizing their personal experience and the immediacy of their connection to contemporary language as criteria for scholastic evaluation. The self-appointed custodians of this mission were quick to stress their own qualifications for the task, but they did so not with reference to traditional benchmarks of scholastic achievement but within the conceptual frameworks provided by the material they were digesting.

This chapter explores the epistemic shifts engendered by Edo-period Japanese engagement with Chinese fiction, through a focus on Shuihu zhuan. Deemed the repository par excellence of contemporary Chinese language, Shuihu zhuan was quickly enlisted in larger discussions of linguistic change and Japan’s cultural relationship to China. Starting in the first decades of the eighteenth century, the work received unique attention as the focus of specialized lectures and reading groups, a process seemingly inaugurated by a “Translation Society” (Yakusha) established by Ogyū Sorai in 1711.5 During the first half of the eighteenth century, at least, the ability to read and explicate a work like Shuihu zhuan constituted cultural capital, and most documented instances of Japanese interest in the novel occurred among the educated elite. The diffusion of interest in both Shuihu zhuan and other aspects of contemporary Chinese culture was enabled chiefly by the serial publication of dictionaries and reference works written with the goal of initiating a wider circle of readers into the previously abstruse world of contemporary Chinese. Although devoted to noncanonical and, in the case of Shuihu zhuan, overtly subversive texts, the prefaces to these reference works explored the relationship between the language of contemporary China and the registers of literary Sinitic familiar to classical scholars—a line of interrogation that collapsed distinctions between elite and popular branches of knowledge and contributed to a wider exploration of the relationship between the refined and canonical (ga) and the common and vulgar (zoku) in Edo-period cultural production.6

I argue that these guides to the language of Shuihu zhuan and other contemporary Chinese texts represent a deliberate attempt at severing the nascent discipline of Tōwagaku from its roots in the study of the Chinese Confucian classics (keigaku)—an attempt possessing important implications for the study of early modern Japanese literary culture, intellectual history, and eventually sinology. In many ways, the status of Tōwagaku as an academic discipline vis-à-vis earlier classical studies mirrored the uncertain institutional standing of its participants. By incorporating noncanonical Chinese texts into a curriculum aimed at ethical cultivation and political statecraft, scholars such as Sorai, Itō Jinsai (1627–1705), and his son Tōgai (1670–1736) unquestionably imbued works of Chinese fiction with an aura of elite respectability. On the other hand, the proponents of Tōwagaku were never able to completely distance their field of expertise from its associations with the heterodox, plebeian, and morally dubious. The potentially subversive content of Shuihu zhuan, for example, which chronicled the insurrectionary actions of a group of outlaws during the twelfth century, engendered considerable unease among Edo-period readers. On a more institutional level, the fact that the most knowledgeable readers of contemporary texts were often commercial interpreters, merchants, and amateur aficionados with connections to the port city of Nagasaki contributed to an unclear and potentially antagonistic relationship with the traditional custodians of Chinese knowledge.

By culling through the writing of these scholars of contemporary Chinese, a consistent strategy for dealing with this exclusion and marginalization emerges. Instead of subsuming their area of interest to the political and ethical concerns of classical scholarship, students of contemporary Chinese often argued that their specialty was ontologically distinct: an epistemological domain overlapping, but by no means perfectly isometric with earlier branches of study. What ultimately emerged from this line of argumentation was a new theorization of what it meant to study China as a contemporary entity, and a new understanding of the applications of philological research.7 For Ogyū Sorai, whose scholarship provided a set of foundational concepts and vocabulary for nearly all the writers discussed in this chapter, study of contemporary Chinese was a small part of a broader curriculum undertaken with the primary goal of better elucidating the archaic Chinese political and ritual institutions that constitu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Formatting
• Introduction: Entering the Margins—Reading Shuihu zhuan as Japanese Literature
• Chapter One: Sinophilia, Sinophobia, and Vernacular Philology in Early Modern Japan
• Chapter Two: Histories of Reading and Nonreading: Shuihu zhuan as Text and Touchstone in Early Modern Japan
• Chapter Three: Justifying the Margins: Nation, Canon, and Chinese Fiction in Meiji and Taishō Chinese-Literature Historiography (Shina bungakushi)
• Chapter Four: Civilization and Its Discontents: Travel, Translation, and Armchair Ethnography
• List of Titles, Names, and Selected Key Terms
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index