Eight Dogs, or "Hakkenden": Part One—An Ill-Considered Jest by Kyokutei Bakin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Eight Dogs, or "Hakkenden": Part One—An Ill-Considered Jest by Kyokutei Bakin William C. Hedberg Eight Dogs, or "Hakkenden": Part One—An Ill-Considered Jest. By Kyokutei Bakin. Translated by Glynne Walley. Cornell University Press, 2021. 348 pages. ISBN: 9781501755170 (hardcover; also available as softcover and e-book). Pity the scholar of early modern Japanese narrative with proselytizing ambitions. While our colleagues researching Renaissance England or Golden Age Spain can be reasonably confident that a mixed audience at a Modern Language Association convention is at least passingly familiar with the historical context and plotline of, say, Macbeth or Don Quixote, those in our field are afforded no such luxury. When presenting our research to nonspecialists at conferences, we reluctantly become participants in Monty Python's All-England Summarize Proust Competition, racing our way through tedious but necessary summary in the hope of securing a few short minutes for explication and analysis before we end. Even among peers, the twists and turns, concealed identities, and multigenerational vendettas central to genres such as yomihon, jōruri, and kabuki defy easy summary and require valuable space in our conference talks and publications to adequately contextualize. Confronted with the relentless avalanche of names, titles, battles, and historical allusions found in a baggy monster like Kyokutei Bakin's Nansō Satomi hakkenden, one is initially [End Page 344] tempted to sympathize with the novelist Martin Amis, who in describing Quixote wrote, "The question 'What happens next?' has no meaning, because there is no next … there is only more."1 Or is there? Among scholars of Edo-period literature, one of the most welcome critical interventions of the past thirty years has been the insistent and long-overdue argument that the texts we study are undergirded by a rigorous system of narrative logic that is readily discernible to any reader willing to pay attention to the author's (often heavy-handed) hints about how to read the work. Seminal scholarship by, most recently, Peter Kornicki, Jonathan Zwicker, Satoko Shimazaki, Patrick Caddeau, and Rebekah Clements has directed our attention away from the narrative proper and toward the prefaces, interlineal commentary, illustrations, maps, charts, lists of characters, commemorative poems, postfaces, and advertisements that explained how texts like Hakkenden were meant to be interpreted and that were, for early modern readers, inseparable from the narrative itself. Most of these paratextual features were excised in modern typeset editions of the works, and despite our frequent reliance upon these modern editions, it is a useful exercise to think of them as butterfly specimens that have been pithed and mounted in a display case: readily visible and easily legible, but wholly shorn of the life, movement, and context that gave them meaning as social beings. It is to Glynne Walley's immense credit that he brings the materiality of early modern Japanese fiction to the forefront of his translation of Nansō Satomi hakkenden (The Lives of the Eight Dogs of the Satomi of Southern Fusa; 1814–1842) and, in so doing, gives us a keen sense of the paratextual density and cosmopolitan dimensions of this text. Eight Dogs, or "Hakkenden": Part One—An Ill-Considered Jest contains the inaugural volume (shū) of Hakkenden and four chapters of the second volume, sensibly concluding at a natural break in the narrative with the canine Yatsufusa's immaculate impregnation of Satomi Yoshizane's daughter, Fusehime; the release of the embryonic spirits of the eponymous dog-knights; and the beginning of the warrior-monk Chudai's quest to locate and gather the warriors. As Bakin himself reminds the reader in a postface to the final chapter included in the translation, "everything from the 1st Book of the Inaugural Volume through to the end of the present Book constitutes but the opening stage of the whole" (p. 292), and as Walley notes in the translator's introduction, An Ill-Considered Jest comprises less than one-tenth of the complete Hakkenden. Before discussing the translation itself, I must give due praise to its translator for his Yoshizane-esque ambitions in embarking on such a venture, and to Cornell University Press for supporting an epic project and ensuring that the job is done well. An Ill-Considered...