Edward Seidensticker, the most eminent translator from Japanese to English, is a man of many parts. Not only has he given us "The Tale of Genji," "The Makioka Sisters," and much else, he is also the author of the finest history of Tokyo and has written that wonderful account of Tokyo's own Nagai Kafu. Now, all of these various abilities come gloriously together in his new book, a conflation of translation, adaptation, comment, knowledge about and affection for Tokyo.
The bottom layer of this delicious mille-feuille of a confection is the popular series of detective stories known as the "Hanshichi Torimonocho" (1917-36) written by Kido Okamoto, a writer best remembered for such "new Kabuki" as "A Tale of Shuzenji."
Okamoto (1872-1939), like Seidensticker, was an aficionado of Tokyo. He invented the Tokugawa police officer, Hanshichi (a personage born, he says, in 1823 in Nihonbashi) so that following his investigator around as he solved his cases, Okamoto could explore Edo (the city later named Tokyo).
Indeed this exploration was more important to Okamoto than the various plots involved. As he later wrote: "If there is any distinguishing feature of these stories, it has to be that glimpses of Edo are caught behind the detective work."
Thus inspired, Seidensticker selected three of the 68 stories in the Okamoto collection, and set out not only to translate them but to comment upon them; and through them remark on Edo/Tokyo itself. In his preface the translator-author has said that he chose these stories because "I think them interesting and because they are set in very different parts of the Edo complex and therefore provide a sort of guide to the city."
The three stories involve a severed "alien" head, the strange "morning-glory" case, and the mysterious bowing snake. All (unlike in the Okamoto original) occur at the same time (1861 or thereabouts) and bump into one another. Like most detective stories they are rudimentary and depend upon the often tiresome prowess of a detective. Hanshichi is not as insufferable as Sherlock Holmes, however, because he knows that "snooping was in the air of Edo."
But does he know this? There are three narrators in this book: Okamoto, Hanshichi and Seidensticker. Whose voice is this? Sometimes the Seidensticker tone is plain: "Dinner was good but not excessively so. It would be hard for a meal to be excessively delicious, but a Japanese meal could be excessively pretty."
Sometimes it is there, disguised, as when Hanshichi, says that if one is tired of the red-light districts one is tired of Japan, quoting Dr. Johnson's famous dictum that a man tired of London is tired of life -- a judgment Hanshichi could not have known.
At other times Okamoto himself seems to come forward: "Hanshichi was only forty, but a man was held in those days to have nothing to complain about if he died at fifty." At other times the opinionated Hanshichi takes over: "The English were dour and haughty, the Dutch were fat and jolly, the Americans were dirty."
In this book Seidensticker has created a new genre -- a translation that incorporates its notes into its text, which explains as it goes, which renders an older language (late Tokugawa kabuki talk) into the modern colloquial, and does it in a manner that is light, amusing and the opposite of pedantic.
Attached to this layered narrative are sweeping views of Yokohama after the barbarians had landed, of Edo's low city -- a whole wonderful and vanished world. Translator, scholar, historian, Seidensticker here in one slim volume offers an affectionate tribute to Tokyo and its past.
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