Pretty baubles, but not much else

 As a lifetime member of the Clean Plate Club, it bothers me to leave a book unfinished but I'm afraid that despite John Gardner's interesting introduction I am abandoning Kikuo Itaya's Tengu Child.

Kikuo Itaya (1898-1978) was the son of a nationally famous Japanese ceramicist, and although was expected to follow in his father's footsteps, he entered Waseda University to study Japanese literature. On graduation in 1923 he was hired to teach at Kaisei Gakuen, one of Tokyo's most prestigious private schools for boys. He taught there until he retired in 1977. The story collection Tangu Child is his only book.

John Gardner (1933-1982) was an American novelist, essayist, literary critic, and university professor. He's best know for his 1971 novel Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf myth from the monster's point of view. Gardner and Nokuko Tsukui are credited with translating the stories in Tengu Child.

Gardner's introduction argues that much fiction, Western and Japanese, "claims to show us, more clearly than life ordinarily does, how and why things happen: shows us how a chain of events takes shape, the motives and values of the characters involved, the effects of physical inertia when characters seek to impose their will on the world—in short, it helps us to understand reality-as-process."

In contrast, "a Buddhist writer like Kikuo Itaya . . . tends to use storytelling as a facade: the deeper impulse of the fiction is what I shall called meditational . . . .  As we muse on the stories of Kikuo Itaya, lured in by the graceful surface—the apparently coherent but sometimes puzzling line of action—we gradually realized that here . . . nearly everything is symbolic."

And that, I think, is my problem with the stories. While I believe a fictional character may be both convincingly realistic and symbolic (think Leopold Bloom in Ulysses), Itaya's characters feel entirely symbolic. In the stories I read, the action takes place pre-1600, i.e. before the shogunate. Setting the action in the remote past does not for me make it more persuasive or engaging. 

Prince Genji and the other characters in The Tale of Genji are very different in their lives, goals, and motivations from anyone I've ever met. Nonetheless, I'm willing to believe that Murasaki was trying to evoke plausible characters. Exceptional perhaps, but plausible. She was not trying to create symbols on which the reader is to meditate.

If I cannot enjoy or understand a character's thoughts and actions as at least remotely credible, it's unlikely I will make the effort to probe for a, or the, the deeper meaning. I found the handful of stories I read in Tengu Child to be lovely objects, but they told me nothing about life, reality, or Japanese culture.