Koda Rohan - ghosts and samurai

I found Koda Rohan's short novel The Five-Storied Pagoda accessible* because I was able to slide it into a genre, stories-about-artists, that I understood. The Pagoda, Skull & Samurai collection includes two other stories where my luck was not so good. They are even easier to fit into genres, but ones about which I know nothing.

Encounter with a Skull (1890) is a Japanese ghost story, with a strong religious theme. The renunciation of the flesh literalized, maybe. There also seems to be some relation to idealized travel narratives like Basho's Narrow Road to the Interior. Parody? Homage? No relation at all?

The Bearded Samurai (1896, I think) is even trickier. The novella covers events before and after the 16th century battle of Nagashino, an important episode in the establishment of the shogunate. Fictional and historic characters are mixed together. Long scenes involve characters debating the value of life, or the importance of duty. It's sometimes a bit like the Bhagavad-Gita, actually, and also has some resemblance to Icelandic sagas, and to European medieval chronicles, like Froissart. It's true sources, the Japanese chronicles, the Tales of Heike, and 17th century stories of Ihara Saikaku, are completely unfamiliar to me.

In other words, I'm flailing. The Five-Storied Pagoda had something of the taste of a new discovery. The Bearded Samurai, on the other hand, is a Project for Future Research. Read one book, read another, read another. At some point, some light begins to shine through. There are no secret ways to learn new things - just try and try again. I'm ignorant, but curious.

* Also, pretty great.

Koda Rohan - 19th century Japanese novelist

Not many 19th century Japanese writers have made their way into English. It takes Donald Keene 300 pages of Dawn to the West, his history of modern Japanese literature, to get to Soseki, the first writer with an international reputation. So, merits aside, there's plenty of writing in the 19th century. What are the merits?

Pagoda, Skull & Samurai is a collection of two novellas and a ghost story, all from the early 1890s, by Koda Rohan. All three stories are interesting in their way, but the novella The Five-Storied Pagoda (1891-2) is especially accessible. That does not sound like such high praise, I know. It's an acknowledgment of my limitations.

A Buddhist temple is going to build a five-storied pagoda, presumably much like the one to the left that I saw at the Senso-ji temple in Tokyo. Two master carpenters (and architects, really), the successful Genta and the pathetic Jubei, both apply to build the pagoda. The saintly abbot makes the two men figure out the problem for themselves.

Rohan was known, and apparently criticized, for stories like these, with real ethical dilemmas and no villains. I find - I think most modern readers will find - the story to be pleasingly complicated. What do we want with a villain?

Jubei the carpenter may be a fool but he is also, we discover, a real artist, creative and individualistic. It's this strain of the story that makes The Five-Storied Pagoda accessible. I'm used to reading stories about artists' problems - their role in the world, the sacrifices they make, or don't, for their creativity. The Five-Storied Pagoda puts these familiar themes in a new context. New to me, anyway.