Tales of Ise by Unknown

First published:Ise monogatari, tenth century (English translation, 1968)

Type of work: Short fiction

Type of plot: Love

Time of plot: Ninth century

Locale: Japan

Principal characters

• The Narrator, a man who loves love
• His Wife, the daughter of Aritsune
• Various Women,

The Story:

Not too many years after the capital is moved from Nara to Kyoto, in 794, there lives a man who loves love. Shortly after his maturity rite (which at that time was usually at the age of eleven) and when the boy grows four and a half feet tall, the youth goes falcon hunting at Kasuga in the former capital. There he happens to see two beautiful sisters and sends them a poem. The poem begins the description of the love life of this man. Later, he meets and begins to visit a performer in the imperial court. When their love affair is exposed, the woman is made unavailable by the simple expediency of placing her in service at court where, in 866, she becomes the consort of the Emperor Seiwa.

Tiring of life in the capital, the man goes on a trip to eastern Japan, but he goes no farther than the border of Ise and Owari Provinces when he becomes homesick and composes poems to express his nostalgia. He meets an itinerant priest, sees Mount Fuji for the first time, and composes a poem. Entering the province of Musashi, at the Sumida River that runs through present-day Tokyo, he composes a celebrated poem of nostalgia concerning the oystercatcher birds. In Musashi he also meets and is attracted to various women. Later he wanders through the region to the northeast, where he makes love to the local country women.

Friends since early childhood, the man and the daughter of Aritsune eventually marry, but Narihira does not long remain faithful to her. Scattered through the episodes, however, are hints that cause the reader to believe that she manages to draw him back to her after each infidelity.

In another story, there is the eternal triangle involving two men and one woman, with the usual tragic results. The woman in this case waits three years for the return of a man who leaves to make his fortune in the capital. Meanwhile, she is courted by a second man, who finally wins her promise of marriage. The first man, returning on the wedding night, learns what happened during his absence and leaves the woman with his blessing. Following him, she loses her life.

There is, in another story, a weakling son of good family and a household maid. In another, a young woman is in love but too shy to make her feelings known. She dies with her love unrequited as a result. Two faithless people have an affair, each sends the other poems charging the other with faithlessness. A beloved wife has a husband who is so busy with his duties at court that she feels neglected and goes with another man to the country. Eventually the husband is appointed an imperial emissary to an important shrine and there meets the woman, who is by then the wife of a country official. She realizes her mistake and becomes a nun. There is the story of an elderly woman, the mother of three sons, who is amorously starved but too diffident to say so openly, so she tells her sons of her craving as something she dreamed. The third son alone is sympathetic to his mother’s plight, and he arranges for her to meet the handsome narrator.

From the earliest times it was the custom for the emperor to appoint through divination an unmarried imperial princess to serve as the head priest at important shrines. In the narrator’s time the head priest of the great shrine of Ise is Princess Yasuko, second daughter of Emperor Montoku. Her appointment, made in 859, lasts until 876. Sometime after her appointment, there appears in Ise a handsome inspector in the guise of a falcon hunter. The priest, having received word of his arrival on official matters, greets him with special kindness; the meeting leads to their falling in love with each other. For the sake of discretion she waits until nighttime before paying him a visit, and she leaves long before dawn. That same morning a messenger arrives from her with a poem, the gist of which is “Did you come to see me last night, or was it I who went to see you? I do not remember. Nor do I know whether it was all a dream, or was real.”

The narrator replies with another poem setting a tryst for that evening, but the governor of the province gives an all-night banquet; thus the narrator’s plans are thwarted. On the following day it is necessary for him to continue his tour of inspection. The lovers part, promising each other in poems to meet again, somewhere, sometime.

So the stories of love go, ending with the poem that might be roughly translated “Long have I known/ That this last journey must be made,/ But little did I know/ That it might be so soon.”

Bibliography

Carter, Steven. D. “Claiming the Past for the Present: Ichijo-Kaneyoshi and Tales of Ise.” In Rhetoric and the Discourses of Power in Court Culture: China, Europe, and Japan, edited by David R. Knechtges and Eugene Vance. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. Carter describes how Ichijo-Kaneyoshi, a fifteenth century Japanese court regent and patron of the arts, influenced the reception of the work.

Harris, H. Jay, trans. Introduction to The Tales of Ise. Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1972. This translation also has a running commentary on each episode. The introduction gives background information and summarizes the speculations about the origins and authorship of the text.

Keene, Donald. Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century. New York: Henry Holt, 1993. Gives a picture of the probable circumstance of the composition of the Tales of Ise, the text as it is now, and other poem tales of the period.

McCullough, Helen Craig. Tales of Ise: Lyrical Episodes from Tenth-Century Japan. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1968. This complete translation of the work is scholarly and readable. There is a lengthy introduction to the Tales of Ise and to the poetry and poets of the early Heian period.

Mostow, Joshua S. “Modern Constructions of Tales of Ise: Gender and Courtliness.” In Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature, edited by Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. Mostow examines how interpretations of Tales of Ise have responded to Japan’s changing fortunes since the nineteenth century, demonstrating that gender played a central role in the poem’s reception.

Okada, H. Richard. Figures of Resistance: Language, Poetry, and Narrating in “The Tale of Genji” and Other Mid-Heian Texts. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991. Has a chapter devoted to the Tales of Ise that deals with the political and social background of the work.

Tahara, Mildred M., trans. Introduction to Tales of Yamato: A Tenth Century Poem-Tale. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1980. This translation of another major tenth century poem tale has a short introduction and a succinct history of Japanese literature in an appendix.