Reading "The Tale of the Utsuho" in the Original: Reading Essays by Koji Sasaki

"The Tale of the Utsuho"

I cannot say I have finished reading it, but I have at least looked through it. How should I put it? It is difficult to summarize my impressions in a single word, and perhaps that in itself reflects the character of the work, but if I were to force myself to choose one, I would call it "unconventional."
I get the feeling that it is a collection of separate stories that have been forcibly skewered together. A man heads out as an envoy to Tang China, is washed ashore in Persia, receives a special koto from an Asura, learns a marvelous technique, meets seven immortals, returns home to entrust the koto to his daughter, and the daughter is protected by a monkey while raising her child—just tracing the plot makes me smile. Then it turns into a tale of courtship. Since the child of the daughter protected by the monkey appears there, it is not as if there is no connection at all. And then, it suddenly shifts to political intrigue and power struggles. The skewer that holds it all together is the koto. In "The Silk Road of the Heian Aristocracy," Professor Hiroshi Yamaguchi speculates that "The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter" and "The Tale of the Utsuho" might have been written by the same author, and I find myself nodding along to that idea. "The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter" also has a considerable degree of what you might call unconventionality, and the way its ideas leap is fascinating. It makes me realize that this kind of eccentricity might be latent in Japanese literature, or perhaps in the Japanese psyche itself.
What I associate with Utsuho is Miguel de Cervantes' "Don Quixote de la Mancha" and Kaizan Nakazato's "The Great Bodhisattva Pass." Of course, it was written before Cervantes' work, and it is more unrestrained and, frankly, more interesting. Unexpectedly, the bizarre, almost incoherent, and vast mountain range of Kaizan Nakazato's work, while appearing to be a mere anomaly of Japanese literature, might actually be the legitimate successor to Utsuho.
When people speak of Japanese literature, there is an image that it is fundamentally rooted in damp, narrow, personal novels (in fact, one aspect of modern Japanese literature is the struggle of how to break away from the personal novel), but perhaps it is acceptable to say that the deep layer, or the essence, lies in Utsuho and The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. And as Saiichi Maruya argued in "A Quick Guide to the History of Japanese Literature," that anthologies were the foundation, perhaps Japanese literature was formed by being woven together with these anthologies. If you look at it from a different perspective, it is also possible to see it as the formation of a mentality. Is it not important to know one's roots? That would also mean knowing one's possibilities. These are the kinds of things I have been thinking about idly these days.