Tales of Times Now Past

Front matter

Tales of Times Now Past

Marian Ury

TALES OF TIMES NOW PAST

Contents

Acknowledgments xiii Introduction l

A Note on Texts 22 Select Bibliography 24

KONJAKU MONOGATARI SHU

CHAPTER TWO 1 About the Death of the Buddha’s Father

King Suddhodana 39 21 How a God Heard the Dharma and Obtained the Clear Vision of the Dharma Eye 40

CHAPTER THREE 14 About King Prasenajit’s Daughter Ugly Adamantina 42 28 What the Buddha Said to the Sangha

When He Was About to Enter Nirvana 44

CHAPTER FOUR 9 How Bodhidharma of India Went to This Place and That Observing the Devotions of the Monks 46 24 How Nāgārjuna, While a Layman, Made a Charm for Invisibility 49 viii Contents

34 How Two Brothers, Men of India,

Carried Gold through the Mountains 5i 41 How a Man for Love of His Child Went to King Yama’s Palace 52

CHAPTER FIVE 2 How a King Went into the Mountains to Hunt Deer and Was Robbed of His Daughter by a Lion 54 13 How the Three Beasts Practiced the Way of the Bodhisattva and the Rabbit Roasted Himself 56 Tales of China CHAPTER SIX

34 How a Novice of the K’ung-kuan Ssu in China Viewed the Lotus-Matrix World and Returned to Life 60 35 How Sun Hsiian-te Copied the Wreath Sutra 61

CHAPTER SEVEN 18 How a Nun of Ho-tung in China Chanted the Lotus Sutra and How the Text She Read from Was Altered 64

CHAPTER NINE 4 How Someone in Lu-chou Killed a Neighbor

and Was Not Punished 66 44 How Mo Yeh of China Made a Sword

and Presented It to the King and How His Son, Broad-of-Brow, Was Killed 67 45 How Hou Ku Tricked His Father and Prevented an Unfilial Act 70

CHAPTER TEN 1 How Shih-huang of Ch'in Governed from His Palace at Hsien-yang 71 8 How Wu Chao-hsiao of China Saw a Poem on the Water and Loved Its Author 76

12 How Chuang Tzu Went to Someone’s House

and How His Host Killed a Goose to Serve with the Wine 78 13 How Chuang Tzu Observed the Behavior

of Dumb Creatures and Fled 79

Contents ix

Tales of Buddhism in Japan

Chapter Sixteen

How Kaya no Yoshifuji, of Bitchii Province, Became the Husband of a Fox and Was Saved by Kannon 102 How Travelers from Chinzei, Through Kannon’s Aid,

Escaped Being Killed by Bandits 105 How an Invisible Man Regained Corporeal Form through Kannon’s Aid 110

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN l

About a Monk Who Prayed to Meet a Manifestation of the Bodhisattva Jizō 114 x Contents

2 How Kino Mochikata Worshipped Jizō and Benefited from His Favor 115 44 How a Monk through Bishamonten’s Aid Begot Gold and Obtained a Means of Support 117

CHAPTER NINETEEN 8 How a Falconer in the Western Part of the Capital Renounced Secular Life Because of a Dream 121 24 About the Monk Whose Name Was Entered on a Petition to the God of Mount T’ai to Take the Place of His Master 124

CHAPTER TWENTY 35 How Shinkai, a Monk of Mount Hiei, Suffered Retribution in This Present Life for Jealousy 127

Secular Tales of Japan

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 8 How Great Minister Tokihira Got Major Counselor Kunitsune’s Wife 134

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE 14 How Taira no Munetsune, Lieutenant of the Left Division of the Outer Palace Guards, Escorted High Priest Mydson 139

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR 2 How Prince Kaya Made a Doll and Set It Up in the Ricefields 142 23 How Minamoto no Hiromasa Ason

Went to the Blind Man’s House at Osaka 143 24 How the Lute Genjé Was Snatched by an Oni 146

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE 11 -How Fujiwara no Chikataka’s Son Was Taken Hostage by a Robber and Freed through Yorinobu’s Persuasion 150

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX 9 How Men of Kaga Province Who Went to an Island Where a Snake Was Warring with a Centipede

Aided the Snake and Settled in the Island 153

Contents

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN 15 How a Woman Who Was Bearing a Child Went to South Yamashina, Encountered an Oni, and Escaped 22 How the Hunters’ Mother Became an Oni and Tried to Devour Her Children 29 About the Two Wet-Nurses in the House of Middle Captain Masamichi Who Looked Exactly Alike 41 How the Fox of Kayagawa Turned into a Woman and Rode on Horses’ Croups

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT 5 How Tamemori, the Governor of Echizen, Subdued the Junior Officers of the Six Companies of the Guards 11 How Kaishu, the Intendant of Gion, Was Given as a Fee for Chanting the Sutras 38 How Fujiwara no Nobutada, Governor of Shinano, Took a Tumble at Misaka

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE 18 How a Thief Climbed to the Upper Story of Rashé Gate and Saw a Corpse 23 How a Man Who Was Accompanying His Wife to Tanba Province Got Trussed Up at Oeyama xi

28 How a Beggar Who Lived in the Area South of Kiyomizu

Used a Woman to Lure Men into His House and Killed Them

CHAPTER THIRTY 5 Howa Poor Man Left His Wife, and How She Became the Wife of the Governor of Settsu 192

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

7 How the Minor Controller of the Right Moroie no Ason

Encountered a Woman and Died 31 About the Old Woman Who Sold Fish

at the Headquarters of the Crown Prince’s Guard 37 About the Great Oak in Kurumoto District

in Omi Province

Acknowledgments

This translation had its source in a suggestion made by Douglas E. Mills, to whom my debt remains kagiri nashi (to use a favorite expression of the Konjaku compiler}. Others whose names appeared in the Acknowledgments to the original edition were Zelda Bradburd, Gladys Castor, Bonnie Crown, Hisao Kawaguchi, W. Michael Kelsey, Joanne Lafler, Dan McLeod, Donald H. Shively, and Benjamin E. Wallacker; to this list I would like, belatedly, to add Phyllis Killen and the late Philip E. Lilienthal. I would also like to thank Robert Danly and Bruce Willoughby for their many acts of kindness.

June 1993

Introduction

Konjaku monogatari shiz, the work from which these stories come, is a collection of over a thousand brief tales from medieval Japan. Monogatari, literally “a telling,” is a word for tales or narratives of any kind; shit means collection or anthology; konjaku is the Sino-Japanese pronunciation for the two Chinese characters in the formulaic phrase with which each tale opens. (The phrase itself, read in Japanese, is ima wa mukashi, in my translation “at a time now past.”’) The collection is encyclopedic in scope and arrangement. We do not know exactly when it was compiled, although 1120 seems a not unlikely approximate date for its completion — if indeed it was quite completed. We do not know who the compiler was, or even whether he was one or many. If one, he was almost certainly not Minamoto Takakuni, to whom tradition ascribes the work, if only because Takakuni died in 1077. Takakuni was a devout Buddhist; the compiler may well have been a Buddhist lay-monk, someone who would have entered religion comparatively late in life at the end of a secular career. The compiler was almost certainly a monk of some sort, perhaps an archivist or the like, in one of the monastic establishments on Mount Hiei, the great center of the Tendai sect of Buddhism and thus of Japanese Buddhism in general during the Heian period (794-1185). Takakuni was an aristocrat; the compiler’s origins, however, were probably somewhat humbler. And furthermore, it can easily be demonstrated that Konjaku could not be the work of just one man, for no single individual could have had the energy to execute unaided so vast and varied a work; nor is it likely that the skilled storyteller who recorded the best and most complex of the stories could be the literal-minded drudge who recorded many of the others.

But then, it can with equal ease be demonstrated that Konjaku could only be the work of one man: only one man could have been so consistent in the use of narrative formulas, in the preference (a modern one) for showing over telling, dramatic presentation over explanation. Only one man, moreover, could have ordered the individual stories within the chapters so consistently and so minutely. Perhaps there was a committee of redactors headed by some forceful individual — although again, this explanation seems not quite satisfactory. But whoever and however many they were, there is obviously a controlling intelligence at work, which for the sake of convenience throughout this book I shall refer to as the ‘‘Konjaku compiler.” Whoever this hypothetical compiler was, he was a man of a lively, ironical, and pragmatic turn of mind, with an eye for the absurd and for the telling detail. He had a keen interest in the supernatural, especially its unpleasanter manifestations, and gave practical advice on how to deal with it. Living a century later than Lady Murasaki, the author of the Tale of Genji, in a different milieu, he was not unaware of those finer feelings her romance celebrates; if he did not, one suspects, experience them himself, he nevertheless appreciated them as part of the curious human scene. All bonds of love, he wrote, come from karma. For the most part, though, he counseled men to beware, for the promise of a love adventure was all too apt to lure you into a den of brigands— if not worse. He had a broad but often sketchy education. He lacked the aristocratic love of poetry, although he could appreciate the composition of a poem as a virtuoso feat, comparable to those performed by carpenters, painters, musicians, and Taoist diviners. His interest in the secular world was as vigorous as his piety.

The precise purpose for which the compilation was made is also rather a mystery, and perhaps if we knew it we would have better answers to the other questions about it. There is no preface. It has been suggested that the compiler may have worked simply for his own amusement, and it is true that what might be called a magpie tendency can be found throughout much of premodern Japanese literature. It is probable, however, that the motive was religious and that behind the compilation was a very practical intention: to provide a handbook of stories which preachers might use to enliven their sermons. But then, a third of the chapters are composed of stories on secular subjects. Perhaps they are there because the book burst the bounds of its original plan; or because secular stories could also be used by the preacher, to draw a crowd. The compiler’s stance, in any event, is determinedly didactic, and no doubt he felt that good advice is good advice, whether it has to do with accumulating good karma, or how to get on in the world (which may amount to the same thing), or how to keep from looking ridiculous, or keep from being cheated when you buy food. The stories comprehend the whole of life as the compiler envisioned it, representing all three countries of the known world, all the provinces of Japan, and the activities of persons of every class of society.

The use of a handbook is easier if it is systematically arranged. Konjaku was designed to be in thirty-one maki (a division which may be translated “books” but which I shall translate “chapters”). This is their order:

CHAPTERS ONE TO FIVE: Tales of India, beginning with the founding of Buddhism.

One. The birth, enlightenment, and ministry of Sakyamuni, the historical Buddha.

Two. The deaths of the Buddha’s parents; parables and other stories in which the Buddha teaches the workings of karma.

Three. More stories of the Buddha’s ministry, involving every class of believer. The chapter closes with the Buddha’s nirvana.

Four. Stories about the Buddha’s disciples after his death; miracle tales of the ‘‘three jewels” of Buddhism.

Five. Jataka tales, which take place before the Buddha’s birth; miscellaneous tales about India.

CHAPTERS SIX TO TEN: Tales of China, beginning with the establishment of Buddhism.

Six. The transmission of Buddhism to China; its propagation; miracle tales about the Buddha’s images.

Seven. Miracle tales about the sutras, especially the Mahaprajfidparamita and the Lotus (Saddharmapundarika) sutras.

Eight. [This chapter is missing. It is thought that it was intended to contain more miracle tales. ]

Nine. Secular tales teaching filial piety; tales of visits to hell; Buddhist tales teaching the principle of karma.

Ten. Secular history, beginning with the founding of the Chinese empire; biographical anecdotes and romance.

CHAPTERS ELEVEN TO TWENTY: Tales of Buddhism in Japan.

Eleven. The transmission of Buddhism to Japan, its propagation; tales about the establishment of the great temples.

Twelve. Tales about the establishment of Buddhist ceremonies and festivals; miracle tales about the various Buddhas and the Lotus Sutra.

Thirteen. Tales illustrating the merit to be acquired by reciting the Lotus Sutra.

Fourteen. More miracle tales, of the Lotus and other sutras. Fifteen. Stories of men and women reborn in Amida’s paradise. Sixteen. Miracles of Kannon.

Seventeen. Miracles of various other bodhisattvas, chiefly Jizé.

Eighteen. [Missing. It has been suggested that this chapter was to have been modeled on the two preceding ones.]

Nineteen. Tales of religious conversion; strange tales illustrating the principle of karma.

Twenty. A few tales of a kind of goblin called tengu; tales of visits to hell; tales of karmic retribution in this present life.

CHAPTERS TWENTY-ONE TO THIRTY: Secular tales of Japan.

Twenty-one. [Missing. It is thought that this chapter was to have provided an anecdotal history of the imperial house.]

Twenty-two. Anecdotes about the Fujiwara family (hereditary regents and prime ministers), from its founding.

Twenty-three. Anecdotes about feats of strength and daring.

Twenty-four. Anecdotes about masters of the sciences (e.g., medicine), crafts, and arts.

Twenty-five. Tales about warriors.

Twenty-six. Popular tales the events of which are explained through karma.

Twenty-seven. Tales of malevolent supernatural creatures.

Twenty-eight. Humorous stories.

Twenty-nine. Tales of robbery and violence; tales about animals.

Thirty. ‘‘Poem-tales” (tales derived from those of an older type, in which the central event is the creation or exchange of poems).

Thirty-one. Strange tales from the provinces.!

Some of the chapters (e.g., 22) are not fully extant; some must never have been completed.

The corpus of material available to the anthologist was of a different kind for each country; India, especially, was different because it was known by the Japanese only through religion. But granted this, it is obvious that the compiler has, at the very least, arranged the tales of each country so as to describe the same general movement. In each case the collection progresses from founders to followers; from major founders to lesser founders, from the sacred to the secular, from the highly edifying to the merely instructive. Much more precise symmetries have been discerned by painstaking scholars. It requires only a little effort to see in the fourth and fifth chapters, dealing with India, a parallel to the ninth and tenth chapters, dealing with China, and to the twenty-first through thirty-first chapters, dealing with Japan. The Japanese scholar who has devoted the most attention to the structure of Konjaku is Kunisaki Fumimaro, and one of his observations is that the chapters of secular tales of Japan in turn reiterate the Buddhist ones in overall arrangement, falling into three parts: history (the missing chapter 21, paralleling chapter 11 and the first ten stories in chapter 12); praise of persons (chapters 22- 25, paralleling the remainder of chapter 12 and chapters 13-18, praise of Buddhism), and instruction (chapters 26-31, paralleling chapters 19-20). He suggests also that, at the same time, chapters in this final section are constructed to form pairs; for example,

1. These descriptions of the contents of the chapters are adapted rather freely from those appearing in Mabuchi, I, 32-35. (For complete citations of books and articles cited in brief in the notes, see the Select Bibliography.) A similar list, with slightly different emphases, may be found in Mills, A Collection of Tales from Uji, pp. 24-25. There is a strong relationship between Uji shai monogatari and Konjaku monogatari shi, although its precise nature is highly problematical; Mills summarizes and discusses the significant modern Japanese scholarship on the origin of both texts, making some additional suggestions on the basis of his own research. Readers in search of detailed information about the controversies surrounding the very difficult question of the origin and authorship of Konjaku are referred to his painstaking study.

Chapters Twenty-two and Twenty-three illustrate two kinds of strength, political and physical, while the arts and skills of the city-bred in Chapter Twenty-four have their counterpart in those of provincial warriors, in Chapter Twenty-five.”

Within each chapter the stories are meticulously arranged. As a rule, they appear in pairs joined by a common theme; in addition, each member of the pair will have associations with the other story adjacent to it through some common motif. (Associative linking as a literary technique is well known to scholars of Japanese poetry,? although in general it might be wrong to make too much of the resemblance.) For example, in Chapter Twenty-eight, astory about a man who is afraid of cats owing to an enmity in a previous life (story 31) is followed by a story of a man who is afraid of snakes for the same reason (story 32). This pair in turn is followed by one in which the common element is outrageous behavior by servants: in the first, someone’s attendant kisses a tortoise and is bitten (story 33); in the second, a soldier unthinkingly spits in his master’s dish and, despite his valor, gets a reputation as a fool (story 34). The link between the two pairs is the two creatures, snake and tortoise.

There are instances in which recurrent themes are used throughout an extended sequence (and here the resemblance to the poetry anthology is more marked). Such a sequence (also in chapter 28) begins with two stories involving poisonous mushrooms: in the first, a poor monk eats them in the hope of enjoying nice funeral gifts (story 17); this is followed by its mirror image, the story of a wealthy monk whose impatient disciple tries to poison him with mushrooms only to be told that the master has been making a steady diet of them for years (story 18). The mushroom motif disappears a few stories later, and then reappears in a story of nuns who go into the mountains, eat mushrooms, and begin to dance (story 28). The link between that story and the one immediately preceding it is dancing: an official betrays his humble past as a traveling entertainer when, upon hearing music, he

2. Kunisaki Fumimaro, “Konjaku monogatari no setsuwa to soshiki no dokujisei,’’ in Kanda Hideo and Kunisaki Fumimaro, eds., Nihon no setsuwa, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Tōkyð bijutsu, 1974), pp. 240-262. A detailed exposition of Kunisaki’s major ideas about the structure of the work as a whole appears in Frank, Histoires, pp. 16-26.

3. See Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner, Japanese Court Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), esp. pp. 319-329.

starts dancing (story 27). In between these two pairs there arise and mingle contrapuntally such motifs as diet in general, embarrassing revelations, eccentric personal appearance and habits, and nicknames.

Stories that are known to have originated at a time later than Takakuni's are part of such closely integrated sequences, and this is a good reason for denying that the book could have been essentially completed by Takakuni, to be supplemented here and there by some later hand. The need to fill out sequences, moreover, is one possible explanation for the presence of dull and inferior stories along with the superior ones. Internal ordering so minute goes far beyond the demands of indexing. And the placing of a particular story in one chapter rather than another often seems determined by the need to form a particular sequence rather than by the most conspicuous aspect of its subject matter. The story “How Men of Kaga Province Who Went to an Island Where a Snake Was Warring with a Centipede Aided the Snake and Settled in the Island” (26:9, or chapter 26, story 9) might as easily have been put in Chapter Twenty-seven, for example, since it deals with supernatural creatures, the concluding remark that it was their karma that caused the men to go to the island and settle there is an obvious addition to a traditional story about origins. But the story was needed to form a pair with another, which is about the settlement of an island but does not involve supernatural beings (26:10). With so many possibilities, a story might easily appear in duplicate, had the compiler been inattentive — but there are no instances of inclusion of the same story in two different chapters.

The compiler’s care for arrangement is symptomatic of his ambitiousness. The surviving manuscripts show some damage from insects; nevertheless it is likely that the reason three chapters are lacking in their entirety and others are lacking in part is not that, once written, they were lost, but that they could never be written at all. Emperors, the subject of Chapter Twenty-one, can be a ticklish subject; and it is thought that the compiler must have expected that material to form Chapters Eight and Eighteen would be abundant and had then been disappointed. His ambi-

4. The story in question is of the founding of Imosejima, “brother-and-sister istand”’; a close parallel appears in Uji shūi monogatari and is translated by Mills, pp. 222-223.

tions for his book proved, in the end, to be larger than his ability to realize them.

The concern for order and pattern that can be seen in the arrangement of the chapters and the stories within them appears in the telling of the individual stories as well. Each begins with the same formula. (The exact meaning of ima wa mukashi is still a subject of debate among scholars, and I have chosen rather arbitrarily among their interpretations in translating; what is most important is just that it is a formula.) The formula is almost always followed by a stereotyped introduction of the protagonist (if a servant, sometimes of his master). It is worth remarking that this introduction is repeated with each new story even when the same protagonist appears in adjacent stories: the compiler was very conscious that his aim was to record individual stories, not to produce a naive version of narrative history or biography. Within the story there are frequent repetitions of such phrases as sono toki ni, “justat that time,” sono nochi, “after that,” shikaru aida, “now, however.” The phrases help make the telling explicit; the style contrasts with the flowing, allusive language of the court romances of the age. Such expressions underscore the rhythm of the events and provide breathing spaces.

The narration itself gives a prominent place to conversations; : events which in tellings of the same story elsewhere are only described are in Konjaku made into conversations. The stories are often blocked off into scenes, as a play might be: the compiler has a special love of scenes in which everything freezes, as in the kabuki drama of a later era,5 and, among these, especially scenes in which spectators stare open-mouthed or in which people are waiting expectantly for something that isn’t going to happen (19:24, 28:11). Often the end of a scene is signaled with the word kaerinu, literally “he/they returned home.” It has been suggested that if Konjaku was indeed a handbook for preachers, the telling of the story to an audience might have been accompanied by a display of pictures. Presentation of that sort would indeed have been best served by a style of narration that exploits the dramatic possibilities of individual scenes.

Each story ends with a moral; where no moral seems to have

5. Lam indebted to Professor Robert Brower for this observation.

come easily to mind, there may be a comment in the form of a moral: that the story has been attested to, that this is a queer happening, that the world is really like that. Sometimes this “moral” asks for an explanation. How could a man eat poisonous mushrooms and not die? Why is it that a man who was tricked by a fox on the first encounter was not tricked on the second? As often with the Aesopic fable, the moral sometimes applies to only a part of the story, or is not equal to the complexity of what the story itself teaches, or is one—and not the most obvious — of many possible morals. That the moral be there is at least as important as what it says: neither the compiler’s formal drive nor his didactic urge will allow him quite to relinquish the opportunity. Each story closes with a formulaic phrase, almost always to namu kKatari-tsutaetaru to ya. The phrase emphasizes the fact that the story is secondhand.

Konjaku monogatari shii belongs to a large and miscellaneous genre of collections of narrative that modern Japanese literary historians call setsuwa bungaku, tale literature. One of the characteristics of these works is that they were not thought of by their authors as literature —although when someone has put himself to as much trouble as has the compiler of Konjaku one is inclined to wonder. This genre, which flourished in the Heian and Kamakura periods (794-1333), includes small as well as large collections of tales, collections that are explicitly devoted to sacred subjects as well as those, like Konjaku, of mixed content, and some also essentially of secular content. A subgenre is that of the ōjōden: collections of biographies, den, of persons who have achieved 66, rebirth in paradise. In some collections the contents are systematically ordered; in some they are not. None is ordered quite like Konjaku. In some, the stories are written in Chinese (in premodern Japan the ordinary written language of educated men); in some, they are in Japanese (the medium for poetry and romance); in some, they are in Japanese influenced in varying degrees by Chinese usage and vocabulary. Konjaku falls into the last of these categories; it is written in a special orthographic style

6. For example, in many early collections of Aesop’s fables, the moral of the story about the fox and the grapes is not the familiar one about self-delusion but rather praises the wisdom of the fox for learning to be content with what he has.

called senmy6-gaki, a popular medium at that time among clerks and clerics. Whether Chinese or Japanese or some mixture, the language of setsuwa is usually unornamented, but this again is not an invariable rule. What the collections have in common is that the stories they contain are secondhand; are presented as true, or at least as possibly true; and are short.

The word setsuwa may be translated “tales” if it is kept in mind that they are tales of a particular sort. Or, depending on what aspects of the tales one has in view, the word may be translated “legend” or “anecdote.” In form, they are anecdotes. Anecdote may be defined as the narration of an individual event, or a series of events. It is sometimes said that anecdote does not concern itself with character, but this, I think, is wrong. Its subject is in fact character — as delineated by the event. And the character need not be of an individual man only; it can be that of a class of men, a situation, a dilemma, or a world. John Aubrey’s Brief Lives is an attempt to delineate its author’s world through anecdote. The anecdote sees its subject in terms of observable action. Significantly, the ōjöden, as has been pointed out, pay little attention to their protagonists’ state of mind or even their holy life; what interested the authors was the specific event of the rebirth in paradise: the deathbed portents and the reactions of the witnesses.’

The anecdote proceeds from the conviction that there is something remarkable about its subject. At its best it is both typical and astonishing. “Yes, that’s the sort of thing he would do,” the reader should think to himself. “That’s the sort of thing persons of that sort would do.” “That is the sort of thing that is always happening to people who get themselves into that kind of fix.” But at the same time, “I would never have guessed he was capable of quite that!” “Fancy such things existing!” The best anecdotes, revealing aspects of their subject that would otherwise have remained hidden, extend our knowledge. Massed together, they can form portraits which are complex and comprehensive. Boswell’s Life of Johnson is anecdote depicting a man; Konjaku monogatari shit is anecdote depicting a world.

The English word “legend” has two senses, both of which are

7. Ikegami Jun’ichi, ’“Konjaku monogatari shi no hohd,” in Kanda Hideo and Kunisaki Fumimaro, eds., Nihon no setsuwa, vol. 2, pp. 263-292.

appropriate to Konjaku. Setsuwa are legends in the sense of the German word Sagen, that is the counterpart in folklore of written history (as opposed to Märchen, the counterpart of written fiction). Those in the first twenty chapters of Konjaku are also legends in the sense of the German Legende, the pious tale, such as in the West appears in the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine, intended to be read and read aloud. Not all setsuwa in all collections are didactic, but when they are, the way in which they teach is related to the fact that they were meant to be true accounts of events. Konjaku has the practicality of its wisdom in common with Aesop; but unlike Aesop or the medieval Gesta Romanorum, which has sometimes been suggested as the Western counterpart to Konjaku, it does not teach by allegory. Its method is example; the compiler shows us how someone has behaved and whether the result of his behavior was reward or misfortune, and bids the reader take heed. The compiler is giving information about the real world, and his intended reader's belief is an essential ingredient in this process. The reader need not believe fully — but he has a commitment to try. (This is true even where the story is improbable—perhaps especially where the story is improbable. The task for the purveyor of marvels is to strain the reader’s credulity without breaking it.) Stories that are obviously fiction lack this sort of monitory value. The point is worth making because it bears on the way that setsuwa function as literature. A number of the stories in Konjaku work very well when we read them as we read fiction: an example might be the story of a young couple who escape from bandits (16:20); but for the original readers it would surely have added to the excitement to know that this could happen to you too if you traveled in remote places. Even such a story as that of the fish-vendor who is discovered to be selling snake meat (31:31) can be read in the modern way: though there is no attempt by the compiler to elicit sympathy for the old woman, we are likely to engage in musings on the social conditions that induced her to engage in such repellent trickery, and we may be struck, as was the essayist and short-story writer Akutagawa Ryiinosuke, by the starkness and brute vigor of the scene. But, strictly speaking, a story that chiefly relates that a crone has been selling tainted food—or that a holy man has cultivated meritorious karma through some odd religious practice —is not of interest if it is known to be fiction; it is of interest if it is telling us something we did not know about the world, and it is especially so if it is telling us something we would scarcely have suspected without it.