Kate: You have translated two collections of short stories connected to Twelve Kingdoms: Dreaming of Paradise and Hisho's Birds. Some of the short stories seem complete stories in their own right. Others read like filler—extra bits that got edited out but hey, here they are! Rather like Tolkien’s endless tales of Middle Earth. Is that a suitable comparison? Any other thoughts about the short stories? A favorite perhaps?
Eugene: "Jougetsu" is a nice coda to A Thousand Leagues of Wind and pays off the major plot points. I get a kick out of "Blue Orchid" because it's obvious the author did a ton of research about beech trees and was determined to share that research with the reader. Hills of Silver Ruins similarly follows the Moby Dick model, which integrates all of the background material into the narrative.
To give Fuyumi Ono credit, we're not just chasing red herrings. All those bits and pieces so exhaustively explicated and explored are beginning to fall into place.
Kate: In “Jougetsu”, Gekki makes the rather extraordinary—and insightful point—that although his assassination of the previous emperor helped the people, he personally didn’t act out of objective compassion but rather, disillusionment. He consequently refuses to take the throne.
Is Gekki’s struggle between the superego and id find its roots in Freud? Or in other philosophies?
Eugene: I ascribe Gekkei's reluctance more to the notion of the "worthy vessel," arising out of the Mandate of Heaven and the Confucian concept of righteous rule. There are Old Testament parallels here, especially in the case of Saul and David. But the Chinese implementation is more deeply embedded in the culture, with higher stakes and responsibilities than the "Divine right of kings."
In medieval China, it was (hypothetically) possible for anyone to become emperor. The problem, especially in Confucian terms, becomes one of ends and means.
Granted, the bestowal and withdrawal of the Mandate tended to be an ex post facto kind of thing, The Twelve Kingdoms solves this problem by manifesting it physically. When the emperor does bad things, youma show up, the kirin dies, and then so does the emperor.
In Hills of Silver Ruins, it's observed Asen could never become emperor based on his own bad behavior (the surname problem aside). Gekkei placed himself in a similar boat, though in his case, the kirin was already dying of the shitsudou, so he was hurrying the process along. Were this China, he wouldn't have a problem.
The question is whether measures taken to overthrow an unrighteous emperor disqualify the regicide. Both Shoukei and Shushou tell him to man up because he's the best man for the job. In any case, we're back in Saul and David territory because the choice of the next emperor is up to the future kirin and nobody else.
Kate: You commented once that political states
inherently retreat to feudalism. Is legalism part of the equation? It certainly
comes up in the United States with the self-righteous religious right as it
does with the self-righteous progressive left. Is legalism always tied to group
identity? Gekkei appears to fear that possibility—that regicide could push the
kingdom too far in the other direction.
Eugene: When political systems regress to the mean, they inevitably veer into feudalism. I would argue that all democracies have been slowly creeping in that direction over the past century. The more idealistic the society, the faster it creates an aristocracy of mandarins convinced it is up to them to preserve that idealism, and that without them in charge, everything would go to the dogs.
It's not long before they see themselves as the Edo period samurai. The samurai constituted a hereditary civil service and were actually forbidden by sumptuary laws from doing anything else. Overall, they did a pretty good job and might have lasted longer had the shogunate not pursued isolationism so fanatically and traded a bit more openly with Europe in goods and ideas.
Legalism was never part of the core philosophy of Tokugawa rule. It waxed and waned according to the shogun. Utopianism never took root. They were a pragmatic bunch. In the aftermath of WWII, it took about twenty-four hours after the broadcast of Hirohito's Surrender Rescript for practically the entire population to slough off the previous two decades of ideological sloganeering.
Unfortunately, even skin-deep ideological sloganeering can cause a whole lot of damage in the short run. But as long as it is not coupled with the perpetual motion machine of utopianism, it burns out eventually.
Western culture has Plato and other attempts at creating, on paper, the perfect utopia. Does Japan have the same? Have attempts to move the utopia off paper resulted in equally problematic outcomes?
Eugene: Since 1945, groups on both the far right and left in Japanese politics have failed to gain a foothold among the general populace. The far right did find a home among the yakuza, but even the yakuza failed to thrive in the long run (especially after law enforcement in Japan got tired of them).
Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong were both brutal dictators. The difference was the former was interested primarily in power in opposition to communism, not in pursuit of a utopian world. Mao coupled power (which "grows out of the barrel of a gun") with the utopianism of communism enforced via legalistic means. The result was devastation on a far more massive scale.
Today, Taiwan (like Spain after Franco) is a thriving democracy while China is slipping backwards into an Orwellian system ruled by the tools of high-tech legalism. Speaking of which, Chris Chappell's little essay on the subject at the end of this video provides a nice summary of the subject.
Kate: I’m currently reading Heaven Official’s Blessing by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, the same author as the delightfully titled The Scum Villain’s Self-Serving System. The dialog is modern-sounding with informal references and slang despite the heavy material (gods, etc.). Is this a trend in Asian novels? Do any writers go in for “forsoothly” language?
Eugene: Japanese historical dramas have long used the equivalent of Hollywood Shakespearean dialogue. The more recognizable rhetorical flourishes (like honorifics) are preserved, while updating enough of the grammar and vocabulary to make it comprehensible to modern audiences without becoming anachronistic.
Like Shakespeare and especially Chaucer and earlier, hardly anybody today could understand the material if it actually remained faithful to the period. Nevertheless, the people back then sounded to each other more or less like what we sound to each other today.
The same way Anglo-Saxon verbs and Latin verbs can mean the same thing while still not being the same, a Chinese cognate has a different "flavor" than a native Japanese word or a loan word from a European language. Kanji orthography has also evolved over time, resulting in multiple "spellings" for the same kanji.
Sort of like aluminium and aluminum or theatre and theater or spanner and wrench. How a kanji is written can also tie the text to a particular time or place. In the Twelve Kingdoms, Fuyumi Ono prefers more "classical" kanji, and often uses Chinese words, rather like dropping a French, German, or Latin word into an English text.
For example, Ono uses a kanji in a passing reference to a kind of youma that wasn't in any online Japanese dictionaries, so I thought she made it up (which she also does, this being a fantasy world), until I found the reference (originally in Chinese). Google Translate is very useful when translating the Twelve Kingdoms!
Kate: Speaking of Shakespeare, you often throw in allusions—“parting is such sweet sorrow,” for instance. Shakespeare crops up in manga: I own a
manga series in which an art gallery is titled “The Nutshell” as a deliberate reference to “through I
am bound in a nutshell” from Hamlet. And when I was a
teenager, I saw a fantastic version of Shogun MacBeth live.
Is Shakespeare a big deal in Japan? Are the references as common—and often unacknowledged—as in the West?
Eugene: Akira Kurosawa adapted MacBeth in Throne of Blood and King Lear in Ran. Especially in Showa period dramas, it can seem that every girl's school in Japan has to put on a performance of Romeo and Juliet. In Hanako and Anne, an entire story arc is devoted to Hanako translating Romeo and Juliet for her BFF Renko to star in.
Kate: Youka complains that names “really are confusing.” I can relate! There’s Keikei and Keiki. There’s an Emperor Kyou but that Emperor is in En. And a Kei Province but that province is also in En. And then there’s the Russian multi-name thing, so the author refers to Enki by Enki and by Rokuta. And don't get me started on the number of bureaucrats!
Does the kanji make a difference? That is, are the names less confusing in Japanese?
Eugene: Yes, kanji make a big difference when it
comes to proper nouns in Japanese. Not only do kanji allow the reader to
differentiate between homophones, but they add semantic information that makes
them each unique and memorable. A kanji has its own built-in set of mnemonics, which
are often referred to when making introductions. Click on the link for more about names.
Kate: A few times I have run into double negatives as a kind of emphasis. Are double negatives common in Japanese texts? ("I can't get no satisfaction" sort of thing.)
Eugene: Double negatives are ubiquitous in Japanese, especially tag questions. The difference in Japanese is that "Yes, we have no bananas" is acceptable grammar. So you end up with a translation that is "Yes" in Japanese and "No" in English. Very much the bane of the Japanese language student.
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| Birds don't necessarily fly (through the sky). |
| Not all birds fly. |
