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.

Stories set in pre-Tokugawa Japan

I picked up this 1983 collection of Japanese short stories because Charles Johnson recommended it in his book The Way of the Writer, making a special point of discussing John Gardner’s introduction, “Meditational Fiction.”

Gardner points out that most Western fiction offers a causally related series of events with a beginning, middle, and end. Or it did until recently as more books are being published as “fiction” are more like life with coincidences, accidents, and the inexplicable.

What makes Kikuo Itaya interesting, Gardner wrote, is his use of “storytelling as a façade: the deeper impulse of the fiction is what I shall call meditational.” As readers are lured into Itaya’s stories by the graceful surface—"the apparently coherent but sometimes puzzling line of action”—we gradually realize that nearly everything is symbolic.

The symbolism, however, is not Western symbolism where a rabbit in a medieval painting symbolizes fecundity and a book symbolized learning. “In Eastern symbolism the distinction between vehicle and tenor—the thing said and the thing meant, or the temporal instance and the eternal principle—is illusory. To see only the temporal instance (this character in this story or life-situation) is to be unenlightened.”

The symbolism in a Itaya story may look like traditional Western symbolism, Gardner wrote, “but it is no more the same thing than wings are to, respectively, a butterfly and a bird. The two are products of distinct evolutionary lines.”

Kikuo Itaya was born in November 1898. His father became a nationally famous ceramist and Kikuo began following his father’s craft. In his early twenties he decided to enter Waseda University to study Japanese literature and gave up ceramics. When he graduated from Waseda after almost dying of pulmonary tuberculosis he began teaching at a prestigious Tokyo boys school. He published only one story, “Tengu Child,” during his fifty-four years of teaching. He did however continue to write and polish the stories that make up the book, however.

The tengu images I’ve seen have red faces and giant noses. In Japanese folklore, they are supernatural creatures that inhabit mountains and forests and are found in both Buddhist and Shinto traditions. They are goblins with a human body and wings, carry a feather fan, and able to fly and perform miracles. 

In the title story, boy named Tengu Doji—"Bird-creature child”—lives in a village with his carpenter father who maintains a small shop that sold canes and straw sandals to the travelers who passed through the village on the way to Kyoto. One day, the child’s father finds an unusual stone beside the house. It has fine shape, a beautiful crack, and beautiful blue moss. When an itinerant monk passes through, the villagers ask him about the stone. 

It is no ordinary stone, he announces. “This is a sacred treasure called a Tengu stone, which the great noble Tengu living high up in Mt. Kurayama lets fall occasionally.” The monk uses the magical powers of the stone to cure a woman’s headaches and a man’s aching hip. He tells villagers to build a shrine as a sanctuary for the stone and he will perform further religious rites on his return trip.

The carpenter builds the shrine beside his house having risen to the rank of a priest at one bound. His son however grows more and despondent and finally admits that one day while he was in the great persimmon tree beside the house he saw passing armed monks pass. The halberd of one “struck the eves of our house with great force, and one of the stones on the roof fell off to the ground”—the Tengu stone.

Everything turns out well. The boy is forgiven, the carpenter is reconciled to being a carpenter, and the villagers laugh at the monk on his return. “The incident of the Tengu stone shook the lives of the commoners’ district for only a short time and then was gone. Nothing in particular was gained, though perhaps it could be said that after this incident the hears of the people seemed more united, somewhat warmer. The child’s mind, however, was swinging and swaying in a complex thought. The grown-up world seemed to him empty, ridiculous, and shameful. He was weary of having to live in such a twisted world.” The story concludes with the Tengu child at the top of the persimmon tree.

The fifteen stories in Tengu Child all take place in the Heian era (794 to 1185) or during the Warring States period (1467 to 1615). Many read like folktales and have elements of the supernatural. For example, a fox becomes a human woman to become the wife of “a soldier in the Right Division of the Imperial Guards,” the men responsible for protecting the Emperor and his family in Kyoto. It does not end well.

Although I did not enjoy all the stories equally—a few seemed hardly more than anecdotes or shaggy-dog stories—the Gardner introduction and several of the stories are both fascinating and informative.