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.