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- Convenor:
-
Patrick Schwemmer
(Musashi University)
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- Section:
- Pre-modern Literature
- Sessions:
- Friday 27 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
Kirishitan literature is usually excluded from the canon of Japanese literature, but we examine it together with stories borrowed from Confucian classics into the uncontroversially canonical Tales of the Heike, with attention to the many "futures of the past" in which our texts are implicated.
Long Abstract:
The body of Sino-Japanese narrative known as setsuwa has a storied (if complex) history of reception within the modern canon of Japanese literature, despite drawing on a tradition of Sinographic storytelling whose roots reach across the Eurasian continent. By contrast, the body of Christian narrative literature in Japanese which survives from the late-medieval missions—Kirishitan bungaku—has always been kept at a distance by the discipline of Japanese national literature (Sugiyama in Komine & Miyakoshi ed. 2017). With the modern, postmodern, and post-postmodern implications of this canonical wrinkle firmly in mind, this panel takes a fresh look at the broader archive: sources long known and newly discovered; written in Roman letters, kana, and Sinographs; in Latin, Romance vernaculars, Chinese, and Japanese; and from the Confucian classics, Japanese martial ballads, and Christian saints' lives—with none of these sets of factors showing easy correspondences. After paper presentations by three scholars from three continents, an extended open discussion session will examine this complex textuality in the context of its troubled futures, which involve the simultaneous disavowal and embrace of at least three heritages in modernity: Confucianism was something to be left behind (Leaving Asia), but also the basis for a pan-Asian futurism (Paramore 2016). Japanese warrior culture was both a feudal atavism, as well as Bushidō, the zaibatsu answer to Anglo-American bankers' "Chivalry" (Benesch 2016). Finally, Christianity was at first seen as an ideological prelude to colonization, but then as a harmless religious accompaniment to a Western heritage of enlightenment and reason which is valuable because it is supposedly the cause of capital accumulation and industrial development. Still with the specificities of our primary sources in mind, we consider the role of Setsuwa, the Kirishitan heritage, and Japanology in general, in the Cold War, the End of History, and our own age of renewed "Great Power Competition".
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 27 August, 2021, -Patrick Schwemmer (Musashi University)
Paper short abstract:
The Japanese Life of Alexius of Edessa survives in Roman-script print and manuscript (1591), as well as in a 1614 kana manuscript. We consider its Iberian sources and evidence of oral transmission which is visible in the three versions, in light of the canonical issues raised by the panel topic.
Paper long abstract:
Fascinating issues of translation, reception, and our own historical memory are raised by the body of Christian narrative literature produced in Japanese by the Jesuit mission of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Scholarly attention has thus far focused on explicitly ideological texts like manuals of doctrine or apologetic treatises, whereas works of narrative literature have been studied if at all for their linguistic features and conspicuously excluded from the canon of Japanese narrative literature. Here, we explore the genre of saints' lives through the Life of Alexius, a Syriac Christian ascetic who lived in fifth-century Edessa (modern Şanlıurfa, Turkey) at the western end of the Silk Road. The medieval Japanese Life of Alexius is extant in three versions: in Roman script we have one version handwritten and one printed, both from 1591, and then there is a kana-script chapbook copied in 1614 by the shogunal authorities. This paper examines these texts, their Iberian sources, and finally the eyewitness accounts in the vast and largely-unexplored archive of Jesuit Japan Letters, to see what we can reconstruct about the process of translation and oral transmission of the Life of Alexius in Japan, its conversion to writing in preparation for printing, and its further life in oral transmission after the prohibition of Christianity. Finally, we consider the non-canonical status of the Kirishitan saints' lives within the discipline of Japanese national literature in modernity, the postwar, and the present.
Renata Cabral Bernabé (University of São Paulo (Brazil))
Paper short abstract:
This paper the manuscripts of Tenchi hajimari no koto—a collection of oral Christian narrative written by some communities of kakure kirishitan—and the changes these stories underwent since their introduction to Japan by Catholic missionaries.
Paper long abstract:
In March 1865, Domingos Mataichi, a member of a hidden Christian (so-called kakure Kirishitan) community from Nagasaki, handed a manuscript to the French Catholic priest Bernard Petitjean. According to Mataichi, it had been written between 1822 and 1823 by a Japanese Christian who knew its contents by heart. This manuscript contained a cycle of Christian stories which later became known as Tenchi Hajimari no koto (The Beginning of Heaven and Earth). In the early twentieth century, scholars found other copies of the same manuscript with few variations, so it seems to represent a cycle which circulated among the kakure kirishitan communities of Sotome, the Gotō Islands, and Nagasaki. It is thought to have been composed in the second half of the seventeenth century, when no Catholic missionaries (European or Japanese) were left in Japan, in which case its authors would have had no help or supervision from a Catholic priest or brother. Its narrative sources appear to include some of the books printed by the Jesuit mission press, especially the Dochirina Kirishitan and some prayer books, as well as the memory of the Japanese Christians who survived the persecution, which they passed on orally through the generations. They will have compiled what they remembered of the missionaries' teachings into a concise sacred history, from the beginning of the world until the Passion and Ascension of Jesus Christ. These stories were often told by the missionaries in the form of theatrical performances at Christian festivals such as Christmas and Easter. This paper traces the sources of the Tenchi Hajimari no koto and analyzes how some Christian stories, brought to Japan mainly by Iberian missionaries, changed through the years as they were retold by the Japanese kakure kirtishitan until they were written down in this manuscript.
Naoyoshi OOHASHI (Wakayama University)
Paper short abstract:
The story of Monk Mongaku's conversion in certain versions of the Tales of the Heike features a story of female chastity conspicuously lifted from the Chinese tradition. We explore the process by which it was imported and the ways in which it is being presented and appraised here.
Paper long abstract:
Some versions of the Tales of the Heike, like the Engyō bon or the Gempei jōsuiki, feature the story of the religious awakening of the monk Mongaku, who first convinced Minamoto no Yoritomo to raise his rebellion against the Heike. In secular life he was Endō Moritō, and he was in love with a married woman. The woman's parents happen to be living as hostages of Moritō, so if she refuses his advances their lives will be in danger (or, alternately, her parents order her to betray her husband and remarry with Moritō), and naturally if she accepts then she will offend against her husband. Caught in this double bind, the woman tells Moritō to kill her husband but then takes his place, so that Moritō unwittingly kills her instead. In horror at what he has done, Moritō becomes a monk under the name Mongaku. This story is lifted from Liu Xiang's Biographies of Exemplary Women, which entered Japan via the commentarial tradition for Filial Exemplars by the same author, then spread widely in the setsuwa tradition: Konjaku 10:21, Chūkōsen 1:67, Kingyoku yōshū 4, etc. Finally, it becomes the basis for this story in certain Heike variants, but it is always followed by the original Chinese story, or in the Nagato bon and the Nanto bon the woman herself references the Chinese story in an aside. In this paper, I argue that the Tales of the Heike present this Chinese story as a citational point of reference not for the composition of the story of Mongaku's conversion, but rather for the woman within the story as she chooses her course of action. I also show how the Engyō bon in particular has changed the conflict between filial piety and justice, to one between filial piety and chastity, and argue that this is typical of an early-medieval emphasis on the "chaste woman" as seen in the story of Tian Dan in the Records of the Grand Historian, and of a view of women found consistently in the unique portions of the Engyō bon Heike in particular.