Eight Dogs, or "Hakkenden"

Part One—An Ill-Considered Jest

Kyokutei Bakin, Glynne Walley

• Publisher: Cornell East Asia Series
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781501758935
  9781501755170
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501755187
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: Literature

Kyokutei Bakin's Nans? Satomi hakkenden is one of the monuments of Japanese literature. This multigenerational samurai saga was one of the most popular and influential books of the nineteenth century and has been adapted many times into film, television, fiction, and comics.

An Ill-Considered Jest, the first part of Hakkenden, tells the story of the Satomi clan patriarch Yoshizane and his daughter Princess Fuse. An ill-advised comment forces Yoshizane to betroth his daughter to the family dog, creating a supernatural union that ultimately produces the Eight Dog Warriors. Princess Fuse's heroic and tragic sacrifice, and her strength, intelligence, and self-determination throughout, render her an immortal character within Japanese fiction.

Eight Dogs is the culmination of centuries of premodern Japanese tale-telling, combining aspects of historical romance, fantasy, Tokugawa-era popular fiction, and Chinese vernacular stories. Glynne Walley's lively translation conveys the witty and colorful prose of the original, producing a faithful and entertaining edition of this important literary classic.

INAUGURAL VOLUME

The Inaugural Volume of Hakkenden was originally published by Sanseidō, proprietor Yamazaki Heihachi, who went on to publish the next four volumes before the work changed hands. The Inaugural Volume, later known as Volume I, was reprinted a number of times while Sanseidō owned the blocks, with several different cover designs. The earliest and the best-known of the Sanseidō covers for the first volume is this, a puppy in falling snow.

Bunkeidō, proprietor Chōjiya Heibei, took over publication with Volume VIII in 1832. Shortly thereafter the blocks for Volumes I–VII came into his possession, allowing him to reprint from them. He gave Volume I this new cover design showing several puppies frolicking in snow.

Center, in green: The Lives of the Eight Dog Warriors of the Satomi of Southern Fusa.

Right of the title: Text by Master Kyokutei [Master of the Crooked Pavilion].

Left of the title: Illustrations by Yanagawa Shigenobu.

On the red Chinese ceremonial offering vessel, bottom left: Sanseidō [publisher Yamazaki Heihachi].

Preface to the Lives of the Eight Dog Warriors

When the Satomi clan first came to prominence in Awa, they led the multitude with rightminded virtue; they put down the recalcitrant with ingenious strategy. They took over both provinces of Fusa1 and passed them down through ten generations; they held dominion over eight lands, and thus became crowned above a hundred generals. At this time they had eight courageous retainers, each of whose surname included the character for “dog.” Therefore they were called the Eight Dog Warriors. Even if their cleverness was not as that of Yu Shun’s Eight Virtuous Ones,2 so loyal were their spirits, so virtuous were they to the depths of their bowels, that they could well be spoken of in the same breath as the Nan3 clan’s eight retainers. Alas, it was rare in those days for anyone to put brush to paper. Thus it is only through war chronicles that have survived in the towns, and Mister Dian’s Thoughts on Characters,4 that we even know their names at all, and there is no way for us to know of how they began, and how they ended.

I came to lament this; I desired to polish the scratched gem, as it were. Therefore from that time on I hunted ceaselessly through ancient records, but found no settled proof. I spent a day in such a fugue, and then began to think of sleep. As I stared with bleary eyes, I had a visitor from Southern Fusa. The course of our conversation ran to the facts surrounding the Eight Dog Warriors, and his explanation of them was not that which is handed down in the war chronicles. When I pressed him on it, he said that it was all as per the oral transmissions of the elders of his village. He then ventured to ask if I would write it down. I consented, saying I would certainly endeavor to spread his strange report. Rejoicing, my visitor withdrew. I escorted him as far as my brushwood gate, beside which lay a hound. Preoccupied, I trod on its tail; a cry of pain immediately erupted from beneath my foot. Startled, I came to my senses—it had all been a dream, as of South Branch.5 I looked all around me and saw that there had been no guest beneath my thatched roof, no howling dog by my brushwood gate.

As I pondered my visitor’s tale, however, it seemed to me that I ought not simply ignore it, dream though it was, but indeed that I should record it. Already I had forgotten the greater part of it, and nothing could be done about that: and so I have stitched my story together with incidents from Chinese antiquity that I have stealthily appropriated, as when I base the discourse on dragons delivered by the Minamoto official of the Department of Rites on the Classic of Dragons of Wang Danlu,6 or the delivery of a letter to Castle Long7 by means of spirit-doves on Zhang Jiuling’s flying servants.8 I modeled Princess Fuse’s betrothal to Yatsufusa on Gaoxin’s giving his daughter to Panhu.9 There are too many examples besides these to bother enumerating.

Within a few months’ time I had drafted five Books’ worth, which, however, only constitute the stream, hardly wide enough to float a cup on, that shall nonetheless grow into a mighty river; I have not yet created the serial biographies of our Eight Warriors. In spite of this, the booksellers wrested the pages from me by main force and delivered them to the engravers. Now that the book is on the blocks, they ask me for a title. I have only the vaguest of notions, but I dare not refuse, so I name it The Lives of the Eight Dog Warriors.

On the nineteenth day of the ninth month of Bunka 11 (a wood-dog year),10 in the autumn, I wash my brush in Purple Drake Pond, below Opus Hall.11

Selected and Interpreted by Saritsu12 the Old-Fashioned

The first preface is written in kanbun (with minimal glosses). For a discussion of the wording of the title, and variations thereon, see the Introduction. This seal represents a cicada, and the four characters within it read “caper in the fields in the autumn wind.” It refers to the last line of the poem “Reporting to Court, I Tread Moonlight on the Luo Embankment” by Shangguan Yi (608–665). The last line in full is: “Cicadas caper in the fields in the autumn wind.”

1. I.e., the provinces of Kazusa (“upper Fusa”) and Shimōsa (“lower Fusa”).

2. Yu Shun or Shun of Yu was a legendary early Chinese emperor. His reign is discussed in the first chapter of Sima Qian’s classic Han-era history Shi ji (J. Shiki), where it is noted that he employed as advisors eight virtuous men, sons of former emperor Gaoxin.

3. Another name for the Kusunoki clan. To assimilate them into Sinitic practice, Bakin here uses only the first character of their surname. The reference is to eight famous families of retainers of Kusunoki Masashige (1294–1336), who supported Go-Daigo’s efforts to topple the Kamakura shogunate, then died resisting former ally Ashikaga Takauji’s campaign to establish a new shogunate in his own right. Masashige was remembered as a figure of legendary loyalty. Their story is related in the late fourteenth-century war chronicle Taiheiki.

4. Shogenji kō setsuyōshū (1717), a dictionary compiled by Makishima Terutake (whose surname is given in an abbreviated and Sinitic fashion; see note 4).

5. A reference to the Tang-era story Nanke Taishuo zhuan (J. Nanka Taishu den) by Li Gongzuo. The story tells of a former soldier, Chun Yufen, who fell asleep beneath a tree and dreamed he had been made ruler of South Branch, and who then awoke to find that he had been dreaming beneath the tree’s southern branches.

6. Longjing (J. Ryūkyō), a book of dragon-related lore by Wang Danlu found in volume 50 of the early Qing compendium Zhaodai congshu (J. Shōdai sōsho).

7. As with personal names, he abbreviates the name of Takita Castle in a Sinitic fashion.

8. Poet Zhang Jiuling’s childhood nickname for the pigeons by which he sent messages, as recorded in the Song-era miscellany Kaiyuan tianbao yishi (J. Kaigen tenpō iji).

9. Volume 14 of Gan Bao’s Jin-era collection of supernatural tales, Soushenji (J. Sōshinki), tells how Gaoxin promised his daughter to anyone who could bring him the head of his enemy. When his dog Panhu brought the head, Gaoxin balked at fulfilling his promise, but his daughter insisted that he keep his word. The Panhu story is also related in volume 86 of the Liu Song-era history Hou Hanshu (J. Go Kansho). For further details, see Chapter IX.

10. 1814.

11. “Opus Hall” (Chosakudō) was one of Bakin’s pen-names, and also his nickname for his residence.

12. Saritsu (raincoat and rainhat) was another of Bakin’s pen-names. “Interpreted” also nods toward Bakin’s personal name, Toku (written with a character meaning “interpret” or explain).

On Bakin’s seals: The seal on the left reads, in seal script, “Seal of Kyokutei Bakin, Chosakudō.” The one on the right consists of a thatched hut between the Daoist trigrams for Heaven and Earth. It refers to a couplet from a poem by Tang-era poet Du Fu: “Myself and the world: a pair of tangled tresses;/Earth and Heaven: a single thatch pavilion,” from the third of the five poems headed “Late Spring: On My Newly Rented Thatched Cottage at Rangxi.” Stephen Owen, trans., The Poetry of Du Fu, Volume 5 (Boston/Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 81.

Those known to the world as the Eight Dog Warriors of the Satomi were as follows: Inuyama Dōsetsu [CHILDHOOD NAME: MICHIMATSU] , Inuzuka Shino [CHILDHOOD NAME: SHINO], Inusaka Kōzuke [CHILDHOOD NAME: KENO], Inukai Genpachi [CHILDHOOD NAME: GENKICHI], Inukawa Sōsuke, Inue Shinbei [CHILDHOOD NAME: SHINPEI],1 Inumura Daikaku [CHILDHOOD NAME: KAKUTARŌ], and Inuta Bungo [CHILDHOOD NAME: KOBUNGO]. Their names appear in the war chronicles,2 but only in cursory fashion, with no details given about their places of origin, their beginnings or their endings. Is this not greatly to be regretted? I have thus fashioned this novel, patterning it after the ancient Chinese tale of Gaoxin betrothing his daughter the princess to Panhu [THIS IS THE NAME OF A DOG]. Throughout, I have speculated as to karmic causes and elucidated their effects, in order to awaken women and children from their slumbers.

In the five Books of the Inaugural Volume, I tell of the origins of the Satomi Clan in Awa. I have modeled my work on Chinese books of romance, and so it differs from the war chronicles in its particulars, although in general it is similar to them. Moreover, I have employed mad language and embellishments, intermingled with vulgar expressions and sayings, stitching them all together with oafish humor—this is after all but an amusement.

Chapters VIII, in which Horiuchi Kurando Sadayuki finds a puppy in the village of Inukake, through X, in which Yoshizane’s daughter Princess Fuse goes into the depths of Mount To, comprise the beginning of the whole tale. However, from beginning to end nothing is missing—the whole is complete and entire. In the IInd and IIIrd Volumes will be found the serial biographies of each of the Eight. This coming spring I shall begin to put them together, and within two or three years shall have made the whole book.

Reinscribed by Saritsu the Old-Fashioned

This preface is written in Japanese.

1. Inue Shinbei’s childhood name is written with characters that could be read “Shinhei,” “Shinpei,” or (conceivably) “Shinbei.” Bakin glosses them as “Shinhei,” both here and when the name reappears in Chapter XXXVII, but the difference between the voiced (b) and unvoiced (h) consonant is not consistently marked in early modern orthography. Most later readers seem to assume that Bakin intended the name to be pronounced “Shinpei,” so I have followed that reading here.

2. While Bakin is here referring to chronicles of the historical Satomi such as Satomi gunki (1631), Hamada Keisuke notes that the only source that has yet been found for the eight dog-named Satomi retainers is Shogenjikō. Hamada, “Kaisetsu,” in Shinchō Nihon koten shūsei bekkan: Nansō Satomi Hakkenden, 3:551.

The Lives of the Eight Dogs of the Satomi of Southern Fusa

Illustrated

Inaugural Volume

Table of Contents

Chapter I:

Suemoto dies steadfast, leaving behind a moral;

A white dragon flies southward home, threading through the clouds1

Chapter II:

A gallant looses an arrow and kills a white horse;

A craven usurps two districts and approaches the scarlet gate

Chapter III:

Kagetsura and Nobutoki secretly obstruct Yoshizane;

Ujimoto and Sadayuki calamitously submit to Tateyama

Chapter IV:

In Kominato, Yoshizane gathers the righteous;

In a bamboo thicket, Takayoshi seeks his revenge

Chapter V:

A good general foils a plot and his soldiers learn benevolence;

A tame pigeon delivers a missive and a rebel surrenders his head

Chapter VI:

Yoshizane opens the granaries and stirs up two districts;

Takayoshi accepts his lord’s command and executes three bandits

Chapter VII:

Kagetsura sells Nobutoki—a nefarious plot;

Takayoshi quits Yoshizane—unbending righteousness

Chapter VIII:

At the Ascetic’s Grotto, an old man divines for Princess Fuse;

Near Takita, a tanuki nurtures a puppy

Chapter IX:

Kagetsura breaks his oath and lays siege to two castles;

Yatsufusa believes a jest and offers up a head

Chapter X:

Ignoring a ban, Takanori loses a woman;

Slitting her belly, Princess Fuse looses eight dog children

A list of the headings covered in the Inaugural Volume, complete in X Chapters.

This is a translation of the original table of contents. Unlike modern tables of contents, this one does not include page numbers, but is simply a list of the contents of the Volume. In any case, in the first woodblock printed edition, each Book was bound as a separate fascicle, and...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Translator’s Introduction
• Inaugural Volume
• Volume II
• Appendix: Characters in Eight Dogs, Chapters I–XIV