Ueda Akinari (1734-1809)
Bewildering Stories biography
With his first major work, Ugetsu Monogatari (“Tales of Moonlight and Rain”), a collection of highly literary tales of the supernatural first published in 1776, Ueda pioneered the genre of yomihon (literally: books for reading) in Japan.
Prior to this, woodblock printed illustrated books, or kusazoshi, had been the norm and had covers that were colour-coded to indicate what kind of readership was intended, e.g. red covers were indicative of children's books, fairy tales and folk tales. Two of the stories in “Tales of Moonlight and Rain” — “The Reed-Choked House” along with “A Serpent's Lust” — formed the basis for Mizoguchi Kenji's 1953 film, Ugetsu.
In 1964 another Japanese film director, Masaki Kobayashi, released Kwaidan, a compilation of four tales of the supernatural translated into English by Lafacadio Hearn (1850-1904). The first tale, “The Reconciliation,” has a storyline very similar to “The Reed-Choked House” but, whereas in the latter the protagonist sleeps with a female ghost, in the former he wakes up to find his former wife a wasted corpse.
On the whole, Akinari avoids this kind of graphic horror in his stories, and he parodies the genre in “The One-Eyed God,” a late tale in his last collection, more concerned overall with ethical considerations and not published in its entirety until a long time after his death in 1809.
As a writer, he always preferred ga to zoku. As the 18th-century Japanese painter Gion Nankai (1677-1751) once said: “ga is neatness, propriety, elegance; zoku is vulgarity.”
Copyright © 2022 by Michael Wooff
