For this third profile I’m veering away from novelists and writers actually born in Kyoto. Matsuda Michio is a transplant to Kyoto and he always qualified any writing he did about Kyoto by stating that he was not “Kyoto-born,” though his family moved to Kyoto when he was just six months old. It is evident that he developed an appreciation of Kyoto and he wrote a few books that expressed that. He may be an unlikely choice; none of his works seem to be translated into English, though it appears they’ve been translated into both Russian and Chinese. Matsuda doesn’t even merit an English Wikipedia entry.But when I first came to Kyoto in 1976, Kai Fusayoshi, a manager at the now defunct Honrayadō, plucked a copy of 京の町かどから(From the Corners of Kyoto) from the second-floor bookshelf and handed it to me, with the suggestion that I improve my Japanese reading ability by tackling some of the essays in said book.
I found it much too difficult to read and to this day I have not read all of this book. But I went on to read a few of this Kyoto-ish author’s other books which were intriguing to me due to their unexpected and sometimes bold content. For example there was an essay entitled “Women Have No Place in the Academic World.” This sounds dreadful, but if you read through the essay you realize that it is a bit of a click-bait title, because what he is actually saying is that academics must totally immerse in their studies and it would be impossible for any professor to do that if he didn’t have a wife at home taking care of and supporting his daily needs. Since women as a rule, don’t have wives (at that time) or that kind of support system, they would not be able to equally immerse; in this way it is an ode to the role women self-sacrificing-ly play in supporting others.
Biography
Matsuda Michio (October 26, 1908 – June 1, 1998) was born in Ibaraki Prefecture. However, his family moved to Kyoto when he was six months old, so he was thoroughly immersed in Kyoto life, at least outside of the home. He comes from a long line of physicians as it was the custom for doctors to inherit the family trade of medicine. His father was a pediatrician in Kyoto. Many of the medical doctors at that time were respected and prestigious as their practice was almost an act of charity. Matsuda followed in his father’s footsteps as a pediatrician, but also became a writer. His politics tended to be radical as he flirted with both Communism and Socialism, and in that sense I often think of him as comparable to our American Dr. Benjamin Spock. Both of them wrote bestselling books on baby and child care and had views that were ahead of their respective times.
During World War II, Dr. Matsuda was extremely conflicted internally over the practice of medicine in the war time system. He could not escape from serving the state that executed the war while his colleagues were exhausting themselves as they devoted themselves to working in the slums or in the laboratories.1
In 1967 he left his pediatric practice to become a full-time writer. Though most of his books had to do with pediatrics, they were largely geared towards the average parent and reader, rather than fellow physicians or academics. Climbing the ladder to become an esteemed academic was never his goal; he was always focused on being a neighborhood doctor, good citizen and free thinker. Two of the books he wrote were written in the voice of the child and one of them, 私 は二歳 “Being Two Isn’t Easy” was even made into a popular movie, directed by Ichikawa Kon. You may be able to find it on certain movie sites or you can rent or buy a copy from Amazon etc. It is quite interesting, especially if you are intrigued by danchi life in the Showa period.
Should any student want to take on a complete examination of his life and works, there is a Matsuda Michio Collection at Kumamoto University that houses his personal book collection and other documents. Personally, I think he is a Master’s thesis just waiting to happen.
Books on Kyoto
The first book I mentioned that is solely focused on Kyoto is called 京の町かどから and is an unusual collection of his essays that seems primarily geared towards explaining the habits of the people of Kyoto to outsiders. Contents include an essay on the well-known bubuzuke (ochazuke) story where the Kyoto host politely offers bubuzuke to a guest which is really a signal that it is time for that guest to leave.
Another book of his on Kyoto is called 『花洛—京都追憶(岩波新書, 1975) and examines some of the historical anecdotes of Kyoto. It was retitled and re-released in 1995 as 明治大正 京都追 憶.
His other books, while not focused on Kyoto per se, offer anecdotes and thoughts about the people of Kyoto in the context of childrearing or academics or broadly on everyday life. His views on women and relationships are oddly both behind and ahead of his time and are interesting to read. He is not shy about addressing controversial topics.
He also had a best-selling book using the dagashiya or traditional Japanese candy store as a vehicle for talking about how to live one’s life. It’s meant as a starting point for discussions about the future and the past and what lessons are offered.
The counterculture intellectuals of Honyaradō gave me a copy of 自由を子どもに “Give Children Freedom” which was published in 1970. Matsuda seemed especially taken with the opportunities the children of Kyoto had for all types of play on the banks of the Kamo River based on what he himself enjoyed in his Kyoto youth. Imagine, if you will, that Matsuda, in the late 1960s was already bemoaning and writing about the freedom children had lost–the freedom to explore on their own, cruise the neighborhood and beyond, and hang out without parents. He is probably turning over in his grave at the state of things today. I can’t help wondering what he’d think about the impact of smartphones and the like that we live with today. One almost wishes he was alive to share his thoughts.
Finally, I will add that the two books 私は赤ちゃん “I’m A Baby” and 私は二歳 “I’m Two Years Old” should be of interest to parents–and they are fairly easy to read.
Footnote
Nakao, H. (2024) Based on a personal email to Sara Aoyama, August 30, 2024 ↩︎
(Historical note: This story is set in the late 1580s, in the mountains somewhere between Kyoto and Nagoya. At that time, Japan had been for centuries a conglomerate of lots of little strongholds based on clans, much as England was before King Arthur. Three men emerged as “unifiers” of the country in the late 16th century, all from Nagoya. The first was Oda Nobunaga, the second (during whose time of power this story is set) was Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and the third was the ruler during the early Edo period, Tokugawa Ieyasu. Hideyoshi presided over Japan for many years, during which time (late 1580s) he put into practice the law that commoners were not allowed to carry weapons. There were searches of commoners’ dwellings (katana-gari) in those years, with some people being killed. It was not a wholesale bloodbath as in former times, however; Hideyoshi, then in his heyday, was turning his considerable talents away from fighting to political control and social structure. He thought up the precursor of the rigidly defined social strata that was made common practice in the Edo period, where samurai were at the top, followed by farmers. Hideyoshi, a commoner himself by birth, knew the importance of the common worker, especially the farmers, without whose support battles could not be won and campaigns would fail. This is the story of one such farming family.)
Momo ran through the mud of the dooryard with a bundle of dried grass stems. She was helping her father, Shinbei, with repairs to the thatched roof of their farmhouse. Shinbei stood halfway up a handmade ladder leaning against the eaves, waiting for her. “Come on, hurry up, Momo! I have a lot of work to finish by nightfall!”
Momo put the bundle into his outstretched arm and as he climbed up the rest of the way, she raised her face to the sunlight and took a deep breath of the clean, piney, foresty scent that always surrounded the house, especially now that summer was almost here. The woods and the steep uphill paths of the mountains began just beyond their back door. She listened for the hammering sounds of woodpeckers looking for their lunch in the trees, and the sounds, which were everywhere, of hundreds of frogs trying to find their mates and fertilize the wobbly masses of eggs that would soon ring the swampy puddles, leftover from the recent rains, that had formed further down the valley.
Momo had just had her twelfth birthday (she was named for the peach blossoms that came out, magenta-colored and breathtaking, in May). She was barefoot in the mud and dressed in a hand-woven earth-colored kimono that came to her knees, a hand-me-down from her mother, with the extra material of the sleeves caught up and sewn at the shoulder, and the hem which flapped against her thighs heavy where it had been turned up and would be let down as she grew. Her long hair was tied at her nape with a spare piece of cloth. She had a flat, pleasant face, like her mother’s, now a little smeared with dirt.
Suddenly, a noise brought her father down the ladder and her mother stepping out of the doorway of the house, wiping her hands on her kimono. It was a noise of horses and shouting men, just within hearing distance, and it came from the mountain. As one, the little family turned toward the sound. From inside the house came the muffled cry of Momo’s youngest brother, two years old, awakened from his nap. The shouts turned to screams as they listened, and then they knew what they were hearing – not another military party come to requisition food, but a minor battle between samurai warriors in the years-long struggle for supremacy of the whole country of Japan. It was whispered that this involved all the high-class fighters in the region. Sometimes they heard the noises of fighting or marching in the mountains nearby, and occasionally a messenger would run through the village, carrying presumably important news from faction to faction. Sometimes they even heard popping noises, and Shinbei had told them, having heard it from someone in the village, that a new kind of weapon had been introduced after being discovered inside a shipwreck from far away – a kind of stick that was filled with black powder and could throw death from a great distance.
Shinbei herded his women into the house, pulled the door shut, and told Momo to make sure that her other two younger brothers, aged eight and six, were safe. They were – she had just seen them making rope from straw inside the house. The family would have to hide until nightfall, because there was a danger that wounded men would come down from the battle site and demand succor. So many military requisition teams had already come past their house, leaving want and destruction in their wake; if they couldn’t find what they wanted, they would push over an outbuilding or piss in the yard. The domestic animals – ducks and a pair of goats – were long gone, vanished down the throats of famished soldiers, and lots of other provender, carefully hoarded since last fall, was gone too. The hole where radishes had slept the long winter through under layers of straw was empty, and the mother and children had been foraging in the forest for ferns and fruits to eke out the time until the summer vegetables would be ready.
And that was not all. Momo’s two elder brothers had been taken as foot-soldiers, and her two elder sisters also taken by the armies, though Momo had no idea why. Those who were left of the family were either too old or too young to be of use to the military men.
The family hunkered down, breath caught and held, in the fragrant darkness pierced with a few lances of sunlight from the holes in the roof, listening for all they were worth as the screams died down and the ordinary sounds of birds and animals returned to the forest.
When the sunlight ceased to pierce the roof and darkness gathered in the corners of the house, Shinbei commanded his wife to light a lantern and took it in his hand, pushing the door open and conning the dooryard for signs of disturbance. There were none. Sighing, he stepped outside, took up a bundle of grass stems that had fallen from the roof, and said to no one in particular, “I hope it doesn’t rain tonight, I have to get that roof fixed tomorrow.” He handed the lantern to his wife and the evening’s tasks began.
* * *
The next day, and a few days after that, dawned bright and clear, and Shinbei, assisted by Momo, was able to fix the roof thatch. But as she ran to and fro with armloads of dried grass stalks, she noticed something new, and finally called up to her father.
“Father, do you smell something?”
“Like what?” he panted.
“Like when the goat’s baby died – something rotten.”
Shinbei sniffed the air, caught the ribbon of decay, and immediately stepped carefully over the straw to the top of the ladder. “That’s the smell of corpses that lie around after a battle,” he said as he climbed down. “Now that that smell has begun, dangerous wild animals have had their fill and won’t come near. Now is our chance!”
“Of what?” asked Momo, appalled by the vision of a whole valley of rotting corpses, lying in various awful poses among the trees.
“To go up there and see what we can take! Get ready to go, and don’t forget your foot covering.” Shinbei ran toward the house, where his wife was sitting on the bench by the door, busy with some task involving separating seeds from dried heads for planting. “Come on, we have to go now before some other villager notices that smell!” She stood up immediately, scooped up the baby from where he was playing in the dirt, and tied him onto her back, yelling for the other children to come as well.
In a few minutes Momo was following her father through the new bracken up the mountain, and the rest of the family were coming along behind. All of them wore hand-woven grass sandals to protect their feet from the brambles which were just starting to grow. They walked quietly, heads down, until they came to a clearing at the side of which a spring freshet bounced and tumbled over rocks. Here, under the morning sun, about twenty dusty and bloody heaps of rags were scattered about. A dead horse bulked next to the stream. The smell was much worse here, and Momo tied a piece of cloth, that she had worn around her neck, over her mouth and nose, which helped a little. She could see, out of the corner of her eye, the rest of the family doing the same. They advanced slowly into the clearing. Several ravens rose up cawing angrily at the intrusion.
Most of the corpses had already provided food for animals. Momo glimpsed an arm, half eaten, lying some distance away in the grass. The faces were not so bad, because the eyes were mostly gone, probably down the gullets of the very same ravens they had disturbed. Insects and worms had not had time to burgeon yet. Momo’s mother began to strip pieces of cloth from the corpses with her short knife. She and Momo collected pieces of cloth, tying them into bundles with other pieces. A few banners, white with indigo-dyed family crests on them, lay here and there. Cloth was mostly all that was left. Helmets, leather straps, metal fittings, and other gear would have been taken by the jackal people that always followed battles, looking for things to sell. But cloth, washed with ash in water and dried in the sun, could be sewn together to make raincoats or bedding. Momo’s mother was a thrifty woman, and woven cloth was valuable in ways that leather and gold weren’t.
Meanwhile Shinbei walked here and there with his sons, looking for something valuable that might have been overlooked by the jackals. He paused, looking sideways across the field to detect the glint of metal. Suddenly he straightened and ran toward the edge of the woods a little way away, where seedling scrub and young trees were just beginning to grow.
He let out an inarticulate cry as he came to a corpse that lay on its belly just where the mature trees began. The cloth that remained was better-quality than that which draped most of the other corpses. The arms and hands reached out toward the forest, as though the man had dragged himself this far in an attempt to escape. Protruding from underneath his body was a glint of gold.
Shinbei used his foot to roll the corpse over, and disclosed a short sword, scabbarded, with a golden hilt. It now lay on the ground half hidden in mud. Perhaps the man, who was obviously a high-ranking general, had had some idea of cutting his stomach in suicide if the battle didn’t go his way. But everybody had died in this battle, including this proud samurai. Nothing remained to show what clan he had belonged to. His face was almost unblemished except for a broad smudge of dirt down one cheek, and his fatal wound was in the belly, which had bled and stained the ground for a good distance around. His eyes, still intact, looked up at the sky. Shinbei bent and clutched the short sword as if in a dream. His family, attracted by his cry, gathered round.
“Look!” said the father. “We will be able to eat again!” He tucked the sword into his sash and looked off into the distance as his wife and Momo rapidly cut the trailing cloth from the body and rolled it up into a bundle. The family instinctively knew that the foraging was over, and they started down through the forest toward their house at the foot of the mountain.
As they walked, Shinbei thought long and hard about where to stash the sword until he could sell it to an itinerant peddler. He had no idea of using the weapon himself; it was so high-class that everyone would know he had stolen it. Best to get rid of it quickly, turning it into something that his family could use. We can’t eat gold and steel, he thought with a grin. He decided to hide the sword under a pile of trash, old moldy mats and straw, in the barn. When they arrived at home, he immediately went and did so, without a word to anyone.
* * * *
It took about a week for the smell of the decaying corpses to subside and for the breeze down the mountain to blow sweet again. It was a week of nightmares for Momo, but she knew better than to mention it to her parents. They resumed their spartan life. Shinbei asked discreetly among the villagers if a peddler was due any time soon. No one knew.
On a cloudy, humid morning a little while later, the sound of shouts came up from the village. A little while later, horses’ hooves sounded on the well-worn path that led to the little family’s dwelling. Shinbei looked up, startled, from his work of fixing a handle to a carved wooden hoe, and saw several men approaching. He put his hand behind his back and with it, motioned for his family to hide. He saw Momo move rapidly toward the house, but didn’t dare call out to give the alarm. The house door closed silently.
In a twinkling Shinbei was surrounded by three or four heavily armed men. One of them knocked him to the ground and put his foot on his back as he sprawled in the dirt. Another stood to one side and unfurled a piece of paper – it looked very white to Shinbei as he saw it from below, even though the sky was obscured by clouds. This man began to speak in a measured tone – he seemed to be reading from the paper, but Shinbei had never learned to read and didn’t know.
“By order of the supreme Shogun, all commoners are ordered to relinquish weapons! No commoner is permitted to possess a weapon from now on. If you have any weapons, get them out and give them to us!”
Shinbei thought quickly. Whether he gave them the short sword or not, he would probably be killed. They might not find it if they searched. His only chance was to lie. If he died, his wife might find the sword and sell it to save the remaining children.
“I have no weapons! I am just a simple farmer!” he shouted as best he could into the dust.
The man above him ground his heel savagely into Shinbei’s back. “Shut up! How dare you speak! We will search.” He jerked his head toward the others, who moved right away toward the outbuildings. Shinbei swallowed and closed his eyes.
In what seemed like a very short time, one of the men returned brandishing the short sword. “Look what I found!” He gave it to the leader with the paper, then turned to the others. “Anything else? Knives, anything?”
They said no. One of them picked up the hoe Shinbei had been working on and held it aloft. “What about farm tools? They could be weapons!”
“Our orders are not to leave the commoners, especially farmers, with nothing to continue their lives,” said the leader. He thrust the short sword into his belt on the right side. “However, this man must be punished – it’s clear that he stole this sword from someone much superior to him, and he lied about it! Off with his head!”
One of the men drew his long sword from his hip scabbard and swiftly brought it down on Shinbei’s exposed neck. He had no time to feel any pain – his head rolled under a nearby cart and his body shuddered and relaxed. The executioner wiped his shining blade on a tuft of grass and returned it to its scabbard. The men mounted and rode away.
Momo and her mother watched them go through a chink in the house wall, and when they were well away, opened the house door and rushed to the body of the father. Momo recoiled when she saw her father’s eyes looking at her from underneath the cart. The mother took her husband’s feet in both hands and dragged his body out of the dooryard. “I’m going to bury this in the radish hole,” she said over her shoulder. “That way the smell won’t give it away. Don’t worry, we will manage somehow.”
Momo took a deep breath and plucked her father’s head from the dust, closing the eyes and cradling it as she followed her mother around the side of the house.
The first installment of Ledger’s “Prologue to a War” was previously shared on our website in 2021. Our readers may wish to refresh their memories of the storyline at this link before moving on to the following.
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No less incontestable, awesome, and powerful, was the Imperial Will of His Majesty the Emperor, the living god, which had long sustained and nourished both the glorious war and the ruined nation. Beyond the superficialities of mere technique, beyond the single-minded exhilaration, effortlessness, and triumphant artistry of a master swordsman, his will slashed and vanquished opposition with the certainty and unquestioned authority of a thousand years’ obedience. The thin moustache, a mere line above the lips, the expressionless, glacial face inherited through generations, he was resplendent and proud in Field Marshall’s uniform and immaculate white gloves, his rimless glasses deflecting the judgement of an outraged world. His Imperial Majesty graciously took upon himself the nation’s tragic and unavoidable burden, even as he nudged “Snow”, his uncertain mount, forward, with mirror-like jackboots and precipitous back.
A living god, he existed above all law, all sanction, all reproach. The weight of his sighs alone could crush – and did. The puniness of the merely human frame, slight and boyish, with its own needs, desires, frailties, and ill-fitting clothes, was irrelevant to the indwelling presence of the divine – Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess. To bestow his personal name, Hirohito, on a child, even by mistake, was a sacrilege that could be expiated only by suicide. The entitlements and prerogatives of divinity were merciless and unforgiving.
As hierophant and Shinto High Priest, he alone communed with his immortal ancestor, the ultimate source of life. He was her mediator and interpreter. None might touch his sacred person – not even tailor or doctor – or meet the sacred gaze, any more than one might touch or look upon the sun itself. The mystic oracles and revelations of Amaterasu, mingling with the ceaseless susurrations of the mysterious wind at Ise Shrine, the Holy of Holies, he alone knew and bore. There, among the intense solemnity of the great black pines, he prayed for guidance in the conduct of the Just War being fought in his name. Before the sacred Imperial regalia of mirror, sword, and necklace, the Voice of the Crane, heard by few, carried whitely to the departed spirits of one hundred and twenty-three generations of ancestors far above the clouds. The sacred authority of the Chrysanthemum Throne was unequivocal and absolute.
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To view Malcolm’s poetry, please see the links here and here. Malcolm has also hosted some Writers in Kyoto events at his home (details here). In addition, Malcolm was the winner of the Japan Local Prize in our Seventh Annual Kyoto Writing Competition. His winning entry, “Plum Tree by the Eaves”, can be read at this link.
In this second entry in the series, I’m introducing a woman writer, Yamamura Misa. She is wellknown as a mystery writer and a very prolific one at that. Many of her books have been adaptedfor television mystery series and a few of them have also been made into video games. She hasbeen translated into Chinese, Russian, French etc. but I was unable to find any of her bookscurrently available in English. While many of her books are set in Kyoto, she has also set hermysteries in other parts of Japan, both near and far. Additionally, there are a few of hermysteries set overseas in such places as Paris and Guam.
Biography
Yamamura Misa (August 25, 1934 – September 5, 1996) was born in Kyoto City proper. During the war, her father served as a principal of a college in Korea, so she spent some time there as well. After graduating from college with a degree in Japanese Literature, she went on to become a junior high school teacher in Fushimi. Upon marrying at the age of thirty, she retired from her teaching position. She took up writing a few years after that and quickly found success as both a novelist and a writer of screenplays and drama. But her mysteries were what she was most well known for and perhaps unique for the times, one of her favorite recurring characters was an American woman named Katherine who was the daughter of a fictional American vice president. The ‘Katherine’ novels were adapted for television quite frequently and the role has been played by both Japanese and Western actresses, the most recent being Charlotte Kate Fox, an American actress and singer from New Mexico, who also appeared in the NHK morning drama, Massan.
Yamamura was also well qualified in Japanese arts such as flower arranging, tea ceremony and traditional dance, and this enabled her to incorporate traditional arts into her Kyoto mysteries. She passed away of heart failure, leaving behind her daughter, Momiji, an actress. In her will she requested that Momiji be given a role in any future dramatizations of her work.
I was drawn to Yamamura Misa’s works purely for her Kyoto settings, but I wondered if I could really read a mystery in Japanese and be able to follow the plot lines and pick up on the clues. Yamamura is a clever writer and her success is due to her so-called tricks that she employs when she writes. But with an American character, I found it easy to relate to her adventures and though it may be impossible for a budding Japanese language student to pick up on every clue, they are quite readable; it should be quite easy to find a copy of many of her books in a used bookstore. Should you happen to catch an airing of one of her dramas or find one on the internet, that will aid you in understanding her storytelling style. And finally, a few of her works have also been published as manga.
It is very difficult to find photos of this author. And she seems to have been somewhat of a mystery herself. Despite being a very popular author of her time, there is little written about her and it seems that this is how she wanted it to be. Although the Wikipedia articles are written decisively, it is possible that even her real age at death is unknown. Seeking to remedy this, a more contemporary Kyoto author, Hanabusa Kannon published a book in 2020 entitled ‘The Famous Mystery Writer of Kyoto that Nobody Really Knew.’ At one time there was an official website for Yamamura Misa, but it has (mysteriously) disappeared.
Books set in Kyoto
The number of books set in Kyoto is so extensive that rather than list them here, I will list the Kyoto locations or events that are featured in a sampling of her Kyoto works. My suggestion is that you pick a locale that you are familiar with and dive in. There are also a number of works that at least partially take place in Kyoto but don’t refer to a location in the title. Examples would be Kyoto Gourmet Journey, Kyoto Engagement Journey, Kyoto Honeymoon Journey and Kyoto Divorce Journey etc.
Place
Title
Ohara
京都大原殺人事件 (1984)
Sanjusangendo
三十三間堂の矢殺人事件 (1984)
Sagano
京都嵯峨野殺人事件 (1985)
Kurama
京都鞍馬殺人事件 (1985)
Kitano
京都化野殺人事件 (1986)
Aoi Festival
京都葵祭殺人事件 (1986)
KitaShirakawa
京都北白川殺人事件 (1987)
Higashiyama
京都東山殺人事件 (1987)
Nishijin
京都西陣殺人事件 (1987)
Kōmyōji (Nagaoka)
京都紅葉寺殺人事件 (1987)
Daimonji
京都夏祭り殺人事件 (1987)
Maiko (Gion)
京舞妓殺人事件 (1987)
Miyako Odori(Gion)
都おどり殺人事件 (1988)
Murasakino
京都紫野殺人事件 (1988)
HanamikojiStreet
京都花見小路殺人事件 (1988)
Ninenzaka
京都二年坂殺人事件 (1989)
Kibunegawa
京都貴船川殺人事件 (1989)
Mifune Festival (KurumazakiShrine)
京都三船祭り殺人事件 (1990)
Kiyomizu-zaka
京都清水坂殺人事件 (1990)
Shisendō Temple
京都詩仙堂殺人事件 (1991)
Nishioji Street
京都西大路通り殺人事件 (1995)
The books that feature the fictional Katherine Turner may also be of interest as they reflect some of the gaijin experience in Kyoto. The Japanese wikipedia entry for Misa Yamamura has a list of the books in that series.
General Resources Consulted
Yamamura Misa — Wikipedia entry (English). A rather brief entry.
山村美紗 — Wikipedia entry (Japanese) Includes a list of her complete works.
From the Judges: “A series of seasonal haiku verses which conveys an entire narrative within its delicate descriptions and easily evokes images of Kyoto’s enveloping nature and pastimes while recalling the 17th century master of this poetic form.”
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Basho in Love
who could give a name to cherry blossom color or her sudden blush?
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empty cup and I’ve done nothing but think of you
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third date, fishing— dragonflies coupling on tip of the rod
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the black spaces between the stars whisper your name
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drift of wild cosmos butterfly and honeybee exchanging flowers
Photo Credit: Karen Lee Tawarayama
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Back in the last millennium John Savoie first came to Japan as a Mombusho English Fellow and went on to teach another five years at Kyoai Gakuen in Maebashi, Gumma. He currently teaches great books, Homer to Basho, at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. His first poetry collection, Sehnsucht, has recently won the Prize Americana.
For the full list of this year’s competition winners, click here. For this year’s original competition notice (with prize details), click here.
Almost every member of WIK has written something about Kyoto and while there are many famous authors writing about Kyoto both in the distant past and the present, there are also many that remain unknown to us simply because they haven’t (yet) been translated into English. Like many other readers, I love to immerse myself in a book with a setting that is familiar. So when I was learning to read in Japanese, I would search for books set in Kyoto. My criteria was not necessarily great literature; for me, this was purely reading practice. Through trial and error, I found that a setting in Kyoto and/or a novel with ample dialog was my best bet. I did not try to understand every word or look up each unknown character. The only time I picked up my dictionary was when an unknown word or character made multiple appearances and I felt a compulsion to know the meaning or the reading.
In this short series, I want to introduce a few authors who used Kyoto as their setting for a number of their books. Once you understand an author’s style, it becomes easier and easier to read their books. My hope is that this will encourage intermediate and beyond Japanese language learners to try some of these books out. They are, for the most part, older books, so it should be easy to find copies in used bookstores. Most of all, I hope this encourages you to browse a few bookstores and find other wonderful authors that are still unknown to most English readers.
I begin with Mizukami Tsutomu. Or, Minakami Tsutomu. There seems to be little consensus on how to read his family name, or even his first name. I have heard Kai Fusayoshi refer to him as “Ben-chan” and I believe he was, at one time, a patron of Honyarado. He is certainly a prolific and colorful author. Surprisingly, I found his books on the contemporary geisha world and bar hostesses in downtown Kyoto fairly easy to read.
Biography
Mizukami Tsutomu (March 8, 1919 – September 8, 2004) was born in Fukui Prefecture in a small village. He was the second son of five siblings. At the age of nine, he was sent to live with a relative in Kyoto and to become an apprentice priest at a sub- temple of Shōkoku-ji called Zuishunin. However, the hard life of an apprentice priest didn’t suit him and he ran away at age thirteen.
He was brought back, this time to Tōji-in and the library he found there drew him into the world of literature. In 1937 he entered the Department of Literature at Ritsumeikan University. Having had tuberculosis, he was not assigned to active duty in the military during wartime, but instead was assigned to an army unit stationed in Fushimi.
After the war, he moved to Tokyo where his first book was published. He worked in many different fields (he claimed to have held 36 different jobs) to support his family. In 1959 his first mystery was published and sold quite well, establishing his name as a writer. From then on he was quite prolific and often wrote mysteries taking place in Hokuriku and Kyoto. He addressed a wide diversity of issues in his writing depending on where his interests took him. His family life was also quite colorful. His literary works won him a great number of awards and stretched into just about any genre you could imagine, including works for children. Though his works have been translated into both Russian and Chinese, he is oddly ignored by English language publishers. Only a few of his stories have been translated thus far.1 I note that there was also a translation published of a selection from his book called ‘Eating the Seasons’ in the Kyoto Journal Issue 83 on Food.
Mizukami’s works set in Kyoto are by no means considered to be his best books or the most representative, but I present them here because they are not terribly difficult for a student of the Japanese language to read. In fact, they provide an excellent introduction to the Kyoto dialect spoken in the geisha quarters and by some Kyotoites today. The story lines are quite simple and the settings provide a good introduction to different areas of Kyoto. Here are a few that I read many years ago when I was learning the Japanese language. It should be easy to find copies of them in used bookstores in Kyoto or elsewhere in Japan.
Books on Kyoto
五番町夕霧楼 [Gobanchō Yūgirirō] Published in 1962. Considered to be his representative work on Kyoto, it was written as a contrast to Mishima Yukio’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. A young girl from Tango is sold into servitude to the Gobanchō District in Nishijin. In fact, she is sold into prostitution. There are love triangles, suicides, and misbehaving priests, all culminating in a fire at Hōkakuji Temple. With all of these elements it is no surprise that it was made into two different TV dramas (1968 and 1974) and a Shochiku film in 1980.
沙羅の門 [Sara no Mon] “Sara’s Gate” Published in 1964. It’s a tearjerker of a story about an unwanted pregnancy of a woman lodging in a temple near Yasaka Shrine. There was also a film adaptation made the same year and directed by Seiji Hisamatsu.
京の川 [Miyako no Kawa] “Kyoto River” Published in 1965. The life and troubles of the geisha world in Kyoto. This was also serialized for the NHK Ginga Drama in 1969 with a total of 25 thirty-minute episodes.
女の森で [Onna no Mori de] “In the Forest of Women” Published in 1969. A two- volume work on the lives of the Gion geisha. This was serialized for the NHK Ginga Television Novels series in 1975 and has a total of 20 twenty-minute episodes. It’s an excellent book to immerse in.
波影・貴船川 [Namikawa Kibunegawa] Published in 1969. A collection of five short works. A good starting point as the works are shorter and you can pick and choose.
出町の柳 [Demachi no Yanagi] “The Willow of Demachi” Published in 1989 Another collection of five short works.
Also notable is 土を喰ふ日々, published in 1978 which was made into a film starring Sawada Kenji as recently as 2022 entitled The Zen Diary in English about a writer living in the mountains and what he cooks throughout the seasons. See the trailer.
General Resources Consulted
Mizukami Tsutomu — Wikipedia entry (English). A rather brief entry.
水上勉 — Wikipedia entry (Japanese) Includes a list of his complete works.
戦後の京都と「赤線」の町 ―水上勉「五番町夕霧楼」論 — An article on post-war Kyoto and the red-light district where Gobanchō Yūgirirō takes place.
The Temple of the Wild Geese and Bamboo Dolls of Echizen. Translated by Dennis C. Washburn in 2008. ↩︎
This event, taking place in a blessedly cool classroom of Ryukoku University Omiya Campus, showcased Susan Ito, author of I Would Meet You Anywhere, a memoir of her youth as a bicultural Japanese-American who was adopted by Japanese-American parents and grew up in New Jersey. (See below for more information on the book, which recently was a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award.)
Susan Ito, a teacher of writing and now at Mills College/Northeastern University, this year taught a summer program (“Food in Japan”) through the university at various locations in Japan, including Tokyo, Fukui, and Kyoto. Her students (international) read from their writings completed during the course, many of which were restaurant reviews. Suzanne Kamata, a noted writer of fiction (her most recent published novel is Cinnamon Beach, soon to be reviewed by WiK) and other genres, and member of Writers in Kyoto, collaborated with her in the online journal Literary Mama, and after the student readings, they talked together about Susan Ito’s book and life. Susan also read some sections from her book. The event closed with a question-and-answer session.
Thanks are due to Paul Carty and Ryukoku University for making the venue available, and to all who attended from Ryukoku and from Writers in Kyoto.
I Would Meet You Anywhere by Susan Ito (Ohio State University Press, 2023) Finalist for National Book Critic Circle Award
Susan described her book, which spans several decades and takes in the realities of adoption and the Japanese concentration camps in America during WWII, as “a search for truth.” It is reviewed by Suzanne Kamata in Goodreads in part as follows: “The memoir reads like the most gripping of novels, and would be of interest to anyone interested in adoption, motherhood, Japanese culture, and what it’s like to be biracial.” It’s definitely all of that, and also would appeal to “anyone who has felt rootless, questioned their place within their family, or longed for deeper self-understanding” (cover blurb by Nicole Chung).
That’s a pretty broad spectrum of appeal. It would certainly extend to those who have struggled to be part of a Japanese family by marriage, or to anyone who felt rootless when living long-term in another country, or to those who know who their parents were but don’t know anything about previous generations, for example never having met their grandparents on one side or the other. Everyone has experienced past loss, and everyone has holes in the fabric of their family, whether “actual”, adopted, or in-laws by marriage. Thus this book tells an extreme version of a story that many of us, especially in this time of the world, can relate to.
Susan’s story, one of being mixed race by birth (Japanese and American) and also adopted by parents who themselves had their own questions of identity (Japanese-Americans), is a heroic search for self, exhaustively researched and written over many years. Particularly referencing her search for, and finally meeting with, her birth mother, and also dealing with her complicated emotions surrounding her adoptive parents, and with Japanese culture that is both foreground and background, it is also a complex story, full of emotional twist and turns and many heartrending anecdotes.
In the preface to the book, she describes it as “a story which holds a secret at its core” and also says “The risk of telling the story comes at a great cost, but the cost of not telling it is equally painful.” She is also careful to point out that this is not an autobiography per se, but deals with only one facet of her many-faceted life.
Written by a person who has done a lot of work in order to come to grips with her own story, this book is an inspiration to everyone, but particularly (I would suggest) writers.
by Allen S. Weiss. Stone Bridge Press, p179 Reviewed by Stephen Mansfield
Early in ‘Illusory Dwellings,’ Allen S. Weiss, writing of the journey and the environs it takes us to in the quest for identity, states, “We map a city according to our fantasies and desires, and in turn the city frames our lives and inflects our destinies.” This collusive process could as easily be applied to art and aesthetics, the author’s primary interests in this book.
Weiss’s work is difficult to categorize, but might be termed one of the higher forms of rumination on art and aesthetics, a practice restricted to a small group of writers, critics and polymaths, stretching from Walter Pater and John Ruskin to Alain de Botton. Geoff Dyer and Teju Cole come to mind for their considered meditations on states of being.
The beauty of Weiss’s prose, which is evident throughout this book, is an enticement to proceed to his ideas, a process that is a form of ensnarement, forcing the serious reader to reexamine their muddled thinking. Whether he is pondering the transformative work of an ikebana master, an iconoclastic ceramicist, or John Cage’s abstract score for Ryoanji, a composition played in chance-determined sequences based on the perception of the garden and its fifteen stones as a pre-existing form of musical score, or commending the experience of restaurant interiors, tableware, calligraphic displays and flower arrangements, an entrée into the refinements of Japanese culture, he does so with an uncommon refinement. Here is a book that doesn’t present itself as a work of literary merit, but cannot fail in being one. Books like this are a supreme rarity.
With deft hands, Weiss peels back the fine layering of opaque membrane that wraps the core of Japanese aesthetics, and takes us, in the case of the tea ceremony, into a “utopia with a single ritualistic purpose, a space that prepares one for enlightenment.” Eschewing the anointed look of the culturally mesmerized, and, thereby, compromised, Weiss writes of the practice, that the purity of its origins have been, “corrupted by the commodity aspect of tea utensils and the utilization of the private space of the tea room for political and financial intrigues.” The author understands the dilemma faced by the more aesthetically conscious tea masters, trapped between material forms, consumer valuations, and a striving for “pure connoisseurship, which can appear “mannerist, even decadent.” Does one adhere to a form of ritual so formally correct and minimalist it compromises the social leveling of the event, or stage a presentation so opulent, you end up with over-stewed leaves?
Could this very fastidiousness, the sedulousness of a practice that keeps the unschooled hordes from the door, amount to, not just an affectation, but an over-attention to perfection? This put me in mind of a tea ceremony I attended earlier this year, in which the master, an elderly woman, apologized profusely for the condition of the winter camellia chosen for the event, which had suddenly blossomed that morning into a showy, unintended efflorescence. She hoped that the raku ware tea bowl that was being passed around, with its more muted tones, would moderate the over-exuberance of the flowers.
Is the appreciation of such aesthetics in decline? Or, more to the point, how long has it been in decline? The appreciation of limited morsels of light in the Japanese home, for example, had already begun to lapse into a cult of quaintness by the time Junichiro Tanizaki published his long 1933 essay, ‘In Praise of Shadows’. Tanizaki, whom Weiss references, celebrates the merits of meager light and perishable, organic materials, noting in the case of the zashiki, the Japanese tatami room, that walls are deliberately made from soil and sand, in order to, “let the frail, melancholic, ephemeral light saturate the solemn composure of their earthy tones.” There is no question that, today, the appreciation of such refinements is confined to a very small number of Japanese. One would have to go to considerable lengths to experience the aesthetic sensations celebrated by Tanizaki, and now by Weiss.
In an age in which the publishing industry, indiscriminate in its eagerness to bring out books on Japanese culture, to provide instant gratification, Weiss demands a great deal more from his readers. Spearheading a cerebral, unsparing school of intellectual inquiry, one you might term, “extreme erudition,” you’ll have to have your wits about you when encountering, for example, a sentence like, “If it is neither diegetic nor adiegetic, would it be paradiegetic?” which concerns the function of the frame in the visual arts.
As someone who grew up in a house totally bereft of books, I have spent a lifetime filling empty rooms with the written word, with titles that turn barren emptiness into what Donald Richie termed “the nourishing void.” The aptly named ‘Illusory Dwellings,’ is a fine addition to this improvised library.
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Writers in Kyoto were very fortunate to welcome Allen S. Weiss to speak on ‘Illusory Dwellings’ and a variety of other topics in May 2024. Reflections on the event can be found here. A listing of Allen’s books can be viewed on his Amazon author page here.
Photojournalist and author Stephen Mansfield’s work has appeared in over 70 publications worldwide, on subjects ranging from conflict in the Middle East to cultural analysis, interviews and book reviews. To read more from and about Stephen Mansfield on the Writers in Kyoto website, please refer to this link.
In Kokoro (Chapter 4 Section 6) Hearn writes of ‘Dai-Kioku-Den’, which is how Heian Jingu was known on its establishment in 1895. Hearn was in town for the celebrations to mark the grand opening of a monument to mark the restoration of imperial supremacy. (Shrine and temple were used interchangeably in early Meiji, before the terms became standardised as shrine for Shinto and temple for Buddhism.)
The normally reliable Hearn appears to have made a mistake about Emperor Kammu’s succession, since officially he was the 50th of the imperial line, not the 51st. He also writes of the ‘original scale’ of the palace, whereas Heian Shrine is slightly scaled down and modelled on 5/8ths of the Heian-era building. The description below not only shows Hearn’s remarkable gift for colourful description (‘architectural necromany’), but also his fascination with the part played by ‘ghosts’ (i.e. the dead) in Japan’s spiritual culture.
Kyoto, April 21. The noblest examples of religious architecture in the whole empire have just been completed; and the great City of Temples is now enriched by two constructions probably never surpassed in all the ten centuries of its existence. One is the gift of the Imperial Government; the other, the gift of the common people. The government’s gift is the Dai-Kioku-Den,- erected to commemorate the great festival of Kwammu Tenno, fifty-first emperor of Japan, and founder of the Sacred City. To the Spirit of this Emperor the Dai-Kioku-Den is dedicated: it is thus a Shinto temple, and the most superb of all Shinto temples. Nevertheless, it is not Shinto architecture, but a facsimile of the original palace of Kwammu Tenno upon the original scale.
The effect upon national sentiment of this magnificent deviation from conventional forms, and the profound poetry of the reverential feeling which suggested it, can be fully comprehended only by those who know that Japan is still practically ruled by the dead. Much more than beautiful are the edifices of the Dai-Kioku-Den. Even in this most archaic of Japan cities they startle; they tell to the sky in every tilted line of their horned roofs the tale of another and more fantastic age. The most eccentrically striking parts of the whole are the two-storied and five-towered gates, – veritable Chinese dreams, one would say. In color the construction is not less oddly attractive than in form,-and this especially because of the fine use made of antique green tiles in the polychromatic roofing. Surely the august Spirit of Kwammu Tenno might well rejoice in this charming evocation of the past by architectural necromancy!
Looking lost, my husband wanders outside with a wet rag he’d just used to clean the bathroom sink.
I pop my head out of the window.
“Otoosan”, I say, “hang it over there near the washing machine, near the other rags. When there’s more, I’ll wash them all together”.
As I close the window, it occurs to me, not for the first time, how odd it still feels to keep calling my husband the Japanese equivalent of “Dad”. But I’ve been doing that ever since our first child was born around 26 years ago! I’ve gotten so used to it, yet also, it does still occur to me that it seems strange.
Of course, I know that it’s common for older couples with kids here in Japan to call each other “Otoosan” (Dad) and “Okaasan” (Mom) while younger couples with kids typically prefer the more modern “Papa” and “Mama”. When our daughter was born, we were living in the smallest prefectural capital in a rural and very traditional part of western Japan, Yamaguchi. I’d often hear women in my neighborhood sing out “Otoosan!” when they were calling their husbands. Or I would hear them in shops: “Otoosan, look at how cheap these apples are today!” At first it seemed awkward to me, but soon I got totally used to it. It’s true, though, that I didn’t hear the reverse as much, the men calling “Okaasan” to their wives. I put it down to men’s naturally being less talkative. And also, I’ve sometimes heard men here calling their wives by nicknames, such as “Mi-chan” for “Miwako”.
I remember learning that calling your spouse—or indeed anyone―by his or her first name is kind of bad luck here so obviously I didn’t want to call my husband by his first name, Takeshi. I noticed that his family members mostly called him “Take-chan”. For a few years, before our daughter was born, I tried that for a while too, (my husband seemed amused by this), but that seemed strange to me as well. We’d lived in Chicago for four years before we’d moved to Japan, so I was quite used to calling him “Takeshi”. But when we moved here and I heard that using first names with your spouse was perhaps bringing bad luck, calling him “Takeshi” suddenly seemed like not only a brazen flouting of cultural norms, but possibly an invitation to disaster.
So, when our daughter was born, it was a relief to turn to the safe term “Otoosan”, and later, when I heard younger couples using “Mama” and “Papa”, perhaps I felt outdated, but I didn’t mind.
Still, I can’t help but feel, as a foreigner, maybe a little self-conscious still, about calling my husband “Otoosan”, which after all means “Dad”.
So what does my husband call me? Usually it’s, yes, “Okaasan”. But occasionally he will use my name, Marianne. Perhaps he’s not as superstitious as me? Or perhaps, as I’m a foreigner, there’s not so much bad luck attached to my name?
Now that having kids has become rarer in Japan, I’m also curious about what younger married couples would call each other since they might not ever become “Mama” and “Papa”. I feel like the answer is nicknames.
I investigated the topic of “bad luck surrounding first names in Japan” by asking my husband. He said that traditionally when kids were young, it was considered bad luck to use their first names because they still belonged partly to the spirit world, and using their real names could function somehow to call them back there.
Still, I remember clearly reading (but I don’t remember where) that it is even bad luck for a wife to call her husband by his first name. But is this merely an “old wives’ tale?”
And now so much water has gone by under the bridge, as they say, that I can’t call him “Takeshi” naturally any longer!
Here is what I found on Quora about this topic. The answer is written by a Japanese man in his 50s:
My mother still refers to my father by our surname when she is talking to her friends or siblings.
Among ourselves, she calls him “Granddad” and me “Eldest Bro.” Within a family, we call each other by our roles from the viewpoint of the youngest member. When I was a kid, they would call each other “Dad” and “Mom” respectively, and now “Granddad” and “Grandma” from the viewpoint of my kids. I had two younger brothers so hence “Eldest Bro” even now.
So, in a nutshell, Japanese people avoid using their first names by any means. It’s almost like an obsession, on par with those wizards at Hogwarts against calling the noseless villain his name. My uneducated guess is that it has something to do with the culture’s strong propensity for high-context indirectness mixed with a sense of deity that we associate with people’s names.
The samurai class of old days had this unique tradition where they gave children “childhood names” that were exclusively used until they finished coming-of-age ceremony (genpuku) and were granted a real adulthood name. The childhood name was for protecting children from the evil, while the adulthood name was treated as a sort of taboo, and it was not supposed to be mentioned until after the person was deceased.
I believe there was a similar “taboo name” culture in China, too.[1]
For other writings by Marianne Kimura on the Writers in Kyoto website, please see here. Marianne also has a sizable following on TikTok, describing herself as a Shakespeare performer and academic witch, and can be found under the name uguisu77.
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