Lit 365: Morrison
“There are moments when the radical gesture is to do nothing”–Slavoj
Žižek, March 14, 2007 interview with Soft
Targets.
Terms/Cultural
Particularities
1. Hachiman 八幡: “One of the most
popular Shinto deities of Japan; the patron deity of the Minamoto clan and of
warriors in general; often referred to as the god of war. Hachiman is commonly
regarded as the deification of Ojin, the 15th emperor of Japan. He is seldom
worshipped alone, however, and Hachiman shrines are most frequently dedicated
to three deities, the emperor Ojin, his mother the empress Jingo, and the
goddess Hime-gami” (Schadé).
2. Hachimangū 八幡宮。A Shintō shrine
dedicated to the gods of war; in this story, probably the Tomioka Hachiman
located in the blue-collar Fukagawa district of Tokyo. One of more than sixty
Hachiman shrines in Tokyo, the Tomioka Hachiman Shrine 富岡八幡神宮 was
built around 1625, and is dedicated to the war god, Hachiman. Many of Japan’s
major cities— especially cities that have served at the headquarters of the bakufu military government— have shrines
to Hachiman.
3. Firebombing of
Tokyo 東京大空襲: A total of sixty-seven Japanese cities were firebombed by
US forces during WWII. The firebombing of Tokyo began in early 1945 and
continued up through the final days of the war. The worst damage was suffered
on Mach 10, 1945, when approximately 100,000 civilians were killed and over 1,000,000
homes destroyed. Other than the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the
March 10 Tokyo air raids proved to be the deadliest single attack on the
Japanese mainland by US forces. The bombing referred to in this story is the infamous
March 10 bombing.
4. Kyōka 狂歌: “Mad poems. Waka with a
humorous or witty cast of language or thought,” and goes on to note that “word
plays involving several meanings were especially popular” (PCJL, 287).
The genre, it points out, was intended to “appeal to a popular audience” (287).
Among the major collections of kyōka,
which is said to begin with the Gyōgetsubō’s Sake Hyakushu in the early
14th century, is the joint work of Ōta Nampo and Akera Kankō, titled
Manzai Kyōkashū and compiled in
1783 (361). The PCJL also notes in the same entry:
“Kyōka – ‘mad waka’ – were
composed from fairly early times, as early as the Kamakura period. But at that
period waka was so highly esteemed
that ‘mad waka’ was a contradiction
in terms, an oxymoron. That fact explains why kyōka really developed in Muromachi, and chiefly in Edo, times.
Given the cultivation necessary to effect difference, and the desire to write
poems that made the difference, it will be clear that the practice was chiefly
that of the warrior aristocracy and of learned townspeople” (360).
5. Ōta Nanpo 大田南畝 (1749-1823), aka Shokusanjin 蜀山人: a late Edo writer of kyōka and kyōshi poetry,
who also wrote kokkeibon, hanashibon, kibyōshi and other kinds of prose. He is best remembered though for
his seminal works of poetry, most notably Shokusan hyakushu 蜀山百首 (1818), Manzaishū 万歳集 (A Thousand Centuries of Kyōka,
1783), and Neboke sensei bunshū 寝惚先生文集
(Professor Sleepy Head’s Poems, 1767) (PCJL, 216). According to Tyler, he
was “the grand master of the kyōka
coteries,” and was both a “samurai bureaucrat and a literary light” (188). He
was to twentieth-century
writers Ishikawa and Kafū the supreme model of Edo culture and elegance,
admired for his “anti-establishment stance and iconoclastic humor, his
cultivated air of aloofness, his uncompromising adroitness at playing the game
of public versus private personae (omote/ura), his disdain for personal
revelation, and his ability to generate fictions or fabrications that have an
artistic integrity independent of the author’s life” (189).
In a time when the I-novel dominated literary salons, “Ishikawa surely found
Nanpo’s ‘shadowless’ transparency to be enviably cool” (189).
6. Epiphany: “A
Moment of sudden insight. With an upper case ‘e’, Epiphany is a Christian
festival that celebrates the appearance of Christ in this world to the Magi,
and is celebrated on January 6. In a literary context, it retains a sense of
higher, sometimes mystical awareness of how the world actually is (a form of
subjective truth). There are many authors, such as George Herbert and William
Wordsworth, whose poems seem to contain epiphanic moments. But the term is specifically
associated with James Joyce, who used the term himself, and whose characters
(particularly those in Dubliners) undergo moments of epiphany. Joyce thought it
was the writer’s task to record these flashes of truth when they appear”
(Auger, 100).
7. Transcendent Impulse:
My term for the impulse (toward transcendence or some sort of mystical
experience) that is discernible in many of Ishikawa’s narrators. Needless to
say, this impulse is always thwarted by the conditions of reality.
8. Emperor Mu of the Zhou Dynasty
(周穆王; circa
985-907 BC) and the Eight Stallions: “The Eight horses of Emperor Mu was a popular decoration
on porcelain from the Transitional into the Yongzheng period (1723-35). The
story originates from a historical romance, the Mu tianzhi zhuan (An Account of Emperor Mu), which
describes the journeys of the fifth emperor of the Zhou dynasty (1023-983 BC)
during which he met Xi Wang Mu,
the Queen Mother of the West, at Yaozhi (the Jade Pond).
During these travels the
emperor’s chariot was pulled by eight horses named after the color of their
hair. Another account, the fourth-century book the Shiyiji (Researches into Lost Records) has it
that the horses’ names reflected their unusual talents; Number 1 gallops
without touching the ground; Number 2 runs faster than birds; Number 3 goes
especially fast at night; Number 4 goes as fast as the shadow of the sun;
Number 5 is especially well-groomed with a splendid mane; Number 6 runs so fast
that one can see a row of ten images of him; Number 7 rides on a cloud; Number
8 has wings.
The Eight Horses of Wang Mu
became a popular subject among later poets and artists and a symbol for the vehicle
or journeys of any emperor” (Gotheborg).
9. The Toribeno
Cemetary 鳥辺野: the customary site for
cremation and burial in Kyoto, in the western slopes of Higashiyama. It appears in Genji
monogatari and is referred to in the Hōjōki.
10. Bunjin 文人: Literati; Japanese
term equivalent to the Chinese wenren,
designating those who devoted themselves to studying literature and the arts”
(Frédéric, 91).
11. Superfluous Man
(or lishny chelovek in Russian): “a
character type whose frequent recurrence in 19th-century Russian literature is
sufficiently striking to make him a national archetype. He is usually an
aristocrat, intelligent, well-educated, and informed by idealism and goodwill
but incapable, for reasons as complex as Hamlet’s, of engaging in effective
action” (Encyclopedia Britannica). Though Watashi gives us no clues regarding
his family’s social status, he certainly fits the rest of this description.
Study Questions
Answer all of
the following.
1. Describe the narrative
structure. Where is the narrator situated temporally in relation to the
events he is describing?
2. Give a concise summary
of the story.
3. Discuss the symbolic significance of the bicycle. Discuss Watashi’s interaction with it.
4. Describe the
character referred to as “Boots.”
What ideas/institutions does he embody? How is he a marked contrast to Watashi?
5. Describe the persona
of the narrator. Is he a comic or
tragic figure?
6. Discuss the epiphany-like scene on page 48.
Consider it in relation to the following scene in which Watashi has his first
successful ride.
7. Discuss the
significance of the title. What do
the moon, moonbeams, etc. represent to the narrator? Identify and discuss other
associated images in the work.
8. Describe the young girl and her relationship with Watashi.
Why does she say “we won” (52) after the bombing raid?
9. Can this story be
read as an allegory? Explain.
10. Explain the
significance of poetry/kyōka in the story. Why is Watashi able to compose comic verse again by
the end of the story?
11. Discuss the
character Gūka. What is Gūka to
Watashi?
12. Discuss the ending. Why is Watashi now ready to give
away the bike?
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