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"Samurai Fiction."
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Casting Spells
Within the history of medieval Japanese storytelling, including early medieval martial tales and late medieval kōwakamai, sekkyō, and otogizoshi, there is a tradition of employing prayers and supernatural spells to boost an ally or bring down a foe. While in early medieval works like Heike monogatari and its variants curses and other esoteric formulas tend to be invoked by monastic practitioners on behalf of laypeople, from around the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century a small number of extramonastic warriors can be seen using mudras to cast spells on their own, without professional (monastic) assistance. In the present article, I explore the nature and rhetoric of curses, spells, and secret scrolls—including Heihō hijutsu ikkansho (Single Scroll of Secret Martial Techniques)—in several works of principally late medieval martial fiction in the genres of kōwakamai and otogizoshi. In doing so, I seek to illuminate what I argue was a new development in the conventions of an emerging genre fiction of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and to provide nuance to our understanding of the vast and diverse body of medieval martial prose literature, which, in English-language scholarship and translation, has tended to be overwhelmingly represented by the great canonical works of the early medieval period.
Journal Article
Spectatorship and Entanglement in Thoreau, Hawthorne, Morris, and Wells
This article traces the metaphor of entanglement as it appears in the writings of four nineteenth-century authors who were differently involved with the utopian tradition. The connotations of entanglement range from the sexual and political, encompassing the difficulty of reconciling the competing demands of autonomy and solidarity, to the evolutionary and eugenic. William Morris's comments on Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854) offer the basis for a comparison of the divergent utopian strategies articulated by Morris and Thoreau, setting up the opposition between spectatorship and entanglement. The sexual connotations of entanglement are on display in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852), which, when observed, illuminate the existence of a similar problematic, albeit differently resolved, in Morris's News from Nowhere (1890), recalling Morris's response to Thoreau. Thoreau's utopian strategy of individual withdrawal and secession is at odds with Morris's assertion of the political value of collective social transformation through the agency of social revolution. Thoreauvian traces, however, are clearly detectable in the practice of the Samurai in H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia (1905), in which the metaphor of entanglement has unmistakably eugenic implications, prompting reassessment of the connection between Morris and Wells, particularly in relation to their differing class politics.
Journal Article
The Romanian Version of Chūshingura: Signa Propria and Signa Translata in Gheorghe Băgulescu’s Suflet Japonez (Japanese Soul) (1937)
The present study is a hermeneutical analysis of the primary meanings (signa propria) and the secondary meanings (signa translata) in the novel Suflet japonez (Japanese Soul) (published in 1937 and republished in 2004), written by General Gheorghe Băgulescu (1890-1973), an interwar diplomat and a writer with an impressive reputation. Given the fact that the hermeneutical mechanism can define the aesthetic value of a text, by trying to capture a final meaning (if there is one), the present study wishes to explore the cohesion of the narrative unity in this historical novel, which was well known at the time but has now been forgotten. My interest was for the Romanian author's motivation for his choice of a subject, for the first time in Romanian, of the Japanese legend (chūshingura) of the 47 ronin (wandering samurai with no lord or master) who end their lives after they had avenged their master who had been condemned to death through cunning schemes, a theme that has bestirred great interest in Japan and worldwide. The present analysis tries to explore the means through which Gheorghe Băgulescu approached this subject, by questioning whether this historical novel (published before James Cavell's Shogun in 1975) managed to surpass the pattern-situations, in order to create an original literary space.
Journal Article
T.C. Boyle's \East Is East\: A Samurai in Georgia, or the Failure of Intercultural Understanding
The article shows that T.C. Boyle's novel East Is East (1990) is based on a 'real' incident and mixes fact and fiction in Boyle's idiosyncratic manner. It then demonstrates how artfully the many-faceted story combines the traditional plotlines of the innocent youth on a search for a better world and the lonely son on a quest for his lost father with the satiric thrust of a Künstlerroman and how it connects these narrative strands by means of a tightly woven net of both direct and implied allusions to many facets of American culture on the one hand and major aspects of the Japanese samurai tradition on the other, thus allowing for diverse variations of the chances and pitfalls of intercultural negotiation. The unusual combination of these narrative strands and the constantly alternating points of view enable the reader to see the events from contrasted perspectives. And Boyle's linguistic mastery or what he once called \"the mad, language-obsessed part of me\" allows him to accomplish the seemingly impossible task of conveying a depressing truth in a hilarious way and to embed his harsh critique of American parochialism and racism and his plea for an unprejudiced attitude towards 'Others' in a fast-paced, entertaining and captivating tale.
Journal Article
The samurai of Seville : a novel
In 1614, twenty-two Samurai warriors and a group of tradesmen from Japan sailed to Spain, where they initiated one of the most intriguing cultural exchanges in history. They were received with pomp and circumstance, first by King Philip III and later by Pope Paul V. They were the first Japanese to visit Europe and they caused a sensation. They remained for two years and then most of the party returned to Japan; however, six of the Samurai stayed behind, settling in a small fishing village close to Sanlâucar de Barrameda, where their descendants live to this day.Healey imbues this tale of the meeting of East and West with uncommon emotional and intellectual intensity and a rich sense of place. He explores the dueling mentalities of two cultures through a singular romance; the sophisticated, restrained warrior culture of Japan and the baroque sensibilities of Renaissance Spain, dark and obsessed with ethnic cleansing. What one culture lives with absolute normality is experienced as exotic from the outsiders eye. Everyone is seen as strange at first and thenwith growing familiarityis revealed as being more similar than originally perceived, but with the added value of enduring idiosyncrasies.
Book
From Cultural Alterity to the Habitations of Grace: The Evolving Moral Topography of Endo's Mudswamp Trope
Endo often used the \"swamp\" or \"mudswamp\" to signify metaphorically either his own personal identity or else a collective Japanese identity. In an oft-cited interview, Endo conceded that his Catholicism often felt \"borrowed\" and distinct from his \"real self' This feeling, he suggested, \"is the 'mudswamp' Japanese in me\" (Mathy, \"Shusaku Endo: Japanese Catholic Novelist\" 592). The fact that he modified this swamp with \"Japanese\" suggests that this swamp identity represented not merely an individual identity but a shared, culturally-particular identity. In another interview, he characterized \"Japan as a sort of 'marsh;\" explaining the trope by noting \"that Japan is a country which transforms the religions that it accepts ...\" (Yamagata 497).
Journal Article