Lotus And Other Tales Of Medieval Japan. - Review - book review

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1998 by Francis J. Bosha

LOTUS AND OTHER TALES OF MEDIEVAL JAPAN by Takeshi Umehara. Translated by Paul McCarthy. Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle, 1997. 200 pages. $16.95.

In the course of his career as a scholar and academic administrator in Japan, Takeshi Umehara (b. 1925) has tended to write about some of the more obscure aspects of Japanese early history, literature and religious thought. During this past decade he has show himself to be adept as a creative writer as well and has published three plays: Yamato-takeru (1988), Gilgamesh (1988), and Oguri Hangan (1991), which traced the lives of ancient Japanese, Sumerian, and medieval Japanese cultural figures. Umehara has most recently turned his attention to short fiction.

In Lotus and Other Tales of Medieval Japan--which has been smoothly translated into English by Paul McCarthy--Umehara revisits the medieval short narrative forms known as setsuwa and otogi-zoshi, which became increasingly popular in the twelfth to seventeenth centuries in Japan and bear some resemblance to such Western works as The Canterbury Tales. Umehara has developed eight of these short pieces to reflect his own postmodern--at times, shocking--vision, and the results are decidedly mixed.

One of the more frequently retold--and, indeed, more popular--of the otogi-zoshi is "Monogusa Taro," or, as McCarthy has colloquially translated it here, "Lazybones Taro." Despite its various interpretations over the years, the story's basic plotline concerns a young man so lazy that he would sooner die of starvation than stir himself to find food. Yet this character is not merely some rural oaf, but is, rather, an engaging man whose quick wit and apt puns ultimately serve him well.

The Umehara version, however, emphasizes Taro's extreme indolence, almost to the complete exclusion of the traditional tale's focus on the hero's capacity for verbal repartee. Umehara goes to great lengths to explain graphically, for example, the consequences of Taro's lying around in his hut day after day, never getting up even to retrieve dropped food, let alone to use the toilet. In fact, Umehara writes, "to minimize the energy used in going to the bathroom," Taro "had a long narrow hole dug in the earth below his sleeping mat." Since ease is emphasized over hygiene, it is not long before "Taro's room was a world where feces and rice, urine and tea were jumbled together." Not surprisingly, his principal visitors are flies and not people, so Taro "was able to form friendships with the flies and engage them in conversation."

Late in this tale, the local villagers send Taro to the capital as their representative "for a period of obligatory service," as is the custom. Oddly enough, Taro does well and even finds a bride after "an exchange of poems," as Umehara puts it, and then tersely adds that "she was gradually won over by his evident cultivation and gentleness." While lying in his filth for five years, it seems that Taro "also read a little once in a while, just for fun." The tale ends abruptly with Taro, recognized as the son of an exiled prince, appointed governor of his home province.

While "Lazybones Taro" is certainly readable, Umehara focuses excessively on Taro's filth and his borderline-psychotic conversations with the flies at the expense of the original version's emphasis on wit, which is the traditional hallmark of this tale. The result may well owe more to the likes of William Burroughs than to anything in the classic genre, and as such it is not particularly satisfying.

Umehara is on surer footing with such traditional tales as "The Nun Oyo," which concerns a young hermit who has renounced worldly desires in order to chant the Buddhist nembutsu, and thereby be reborn "in the Pure Land of Perfect Bliss." This tale ultimately pokes fun at the monk's being easily distracted

from his path to paradise, and it serves as a timeless object lesson in restraint and self-discipline.

The young monk's plan to meditate and gradually reduce his food intake until he can "die naturally, quietly sinking like the setting sun" is undone by a strong-willed woman, "looking somewhat over sixty," with a plan of her own. His weaknesses for food, comfort and, eventually, sex, break his resolve, and Umehara traces his fall from grace quite nicely.

Another classic in this collection is the decidedly scatological farce, "A Tale of Luck and Riches." The hero here is a poor, elderly man who finds (with the help of his wife) that his only talent is in his ability to control his thunderous flatulence. He comes to be known as the "master farter" capable of producing "high and lovely" sounds. Such characters actually had real-life counterparts at medieval carnivals in Japan, and Umehara's rendition of this sort of grotesquerie is considerably helped along by McCarthy's onomatopoetic transliteration of a typical performance: "Aya-chu-chu, nishiki-sara-sara, goyo-no-matsubara, toppin-parapin-no-ppuuu!"

The master farter's "Art of Wind-breaking" soon makes him a fortune entertaining the nobles of Kyoto, but also engenders envy in his humble neighbor who tries to compete with the master. Ultimately, the neighbor fails with a colossal disaster presaged by the sound of "loose bowels exploding."