The late Fumiko Enchi was, besides being a well-known novelist, a major scholar of Japanese literature. Like her father, Kazutoshi Ueda, she was a classicist. Her 1972-3 translation of "The Tale of Genji" into modern Japanese is popular, and her glossings of other classics are widely read.
The 1965 "Namamiko Monogatari" won Enchi several major local prizes and remains the best-known of her reinterpretations of classical texts. It is this work, ably translated by Roger Thomas, that is now given us by the always active and discerning University of Hawai'i Press.
The English title "A Tale of False Fortunes" is consonant with "A Tale of Flowering Fortunes," the title William and Helen Craig McCullough gave their translation of the "Eiga Monogatari." It was was purposely chosen to echo the earlier work because the "Namamiko Monogatari" is a reinterpretation of the "Eiga Monogatari" itself.
That earlier work, an 11th-century historical tale, was presumably written -- at least the first part -- by Akazone Emaki, a lady-in-waiting at the Heian Imperial court. It is the first historical work written in the "kana" syllabary and is given over to the glorification of Fujiwara no Michinaga, whose principal wife was the lady whom Emaki was waiting on. It is a political panegyric to a godlike Michinaga.
This means it is also very pro-Fujiwara, championing the family that proved so adroit at handling reigning emperors and keeping power in its own hands. There are, however, other takes on history, and Enchi's is one of them.
She once said that she found all the Heian ladies, each one writing away, all rather alike, adding that she was, however, rather fond of Fujiwara Teishi, the consort of the Emperor Ichijo and found her appearance in the "Eiga Monogatari" both vivid and fresh.
So she set about making her even more so and wrote the "Namamiko Monogatari," a most innovative form of historical fiction and a textual foil to the original -- one where we may again view Michinaga, but now find all of his godlike feats to be really political machinations.
Supporting Enchi's claim is "A Tale of False Fortunes," a manuscript given her father by Basil Hall Chamberlain, now unaccountably missing. Nonetheless she read it so thoroughly that she remembers whole sections word for word, and it is these which are given us, along with commentaries on alternate readings, on probable motivations and on her own suppositions.
So convincing and natural is the manner, so right-on is her pastiche of Heian Japanese, that some scholars are said to have searched for the missing document. This the author encourages, often commenting upon the difficulties of its use. "This kind of writing amounts to a sort of cut-and-paste work, rather irritating, but there is no other way to reconstruct."
The missing document, of course, never existed. The "source" is as fictive as the result. Nonetheless, Enchi quotes from contemporary sources (Sei Shonagon is often there) and if she leaves out Murasaki Shikibu it is perhaps because the original "Eiga Monogatari" quotes her. And at the end she covers any error by asserting that her original tale "is a work of fiction and perhaps the order of historical events was inverted as a means for its author to suggest something."
Suggesting something is just what Enchi herself is doing in this spirited fake. In fact, faking in this manner is a known way of suggesting something. It is fascinating, effective and -- right now -- rather prevalent.
Yosano Akiko refurbished the "Genji" into a modern novel, and a new publication by G.G. Rowley from the University of Michigan Press indicates how she did it. Liza Dalby has Murasaki writing her memories in her new "Tale of Murasaki" (London: Chatto & Windus) and dedicating this work to her daughter, who in turn gives it to her own child, Murasaki's granddaughter. Thus excusing any chronological error, the author (Dalby) is able to piece together fragments from the real Murasaki diary using the glue of her own lively imagination.
Or, continuing the listing of contemporary attempts to fake history for a good purpose, I might modestly mention my own "Kumagai" (Tuttle, 1999) which purports to be the memoirs of the 12th-century warrior who famously took the head of the young and beautiful Atsuimori. All of these books, including my own, are fakes, and all have ambitions to present something more than chronology.
Their common aim is to confirm the relevance of history by reinterpreting motives and to validate the event by the interpretation. Being able to see further than did the various originals, these works attempt a contemporary interpretation that far from distancing the subject, brings it closer to us.
Thus Enchi's Teishi, while never anachronistic, is our contemporary to the extent that the reader is able to look deeper into her motivation. At the same time, the conventional (classical) is revealed as naively partial or even (as in my "Kumagai") as an error. The reader is thereby encouraged to revalue and (perhaps for the first time) take these characters seriously.
Enchi's book must have been a nightmare to translate. There are a number of levels of discourse, including Heian Japanese, all of them to be kept stylistically separate. Thomas, who likes long, difficult, important books (he devoted years of his life to translating Yasushi Inoue's "Confucius") does so here with skill and confidence -- if they are still giving out prizes for translation, this effort certainly deserves one.
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