From Madness To Murder: Victorian Novel As Ninjôbanashi

Abstract

When General Grant was visiting Japan in 1879, Ichikawa Danjuro, one of the foremost kabuki actors of the day, portrayed the ex-president as a twelfth-century samurai hero. Six years later the legendary Danjuro performed a very different role, that of a contemporary ex-samurai forced, through social changes brought about by the Meiji Restoration, to eke out a meager living as an innkeeper. The play itself, Seiyobanashi Nihon utsushie (A Western Tale as Japanese Magic Lantern Show, 1885), was a dramatization of an oral epic tale narrated by one of the premier professional storytellers of the day, San’yutei Encho (1839–1900). Encho’s story was, in turn, an adaptation of a Victorian novel, Charles Reade’s Hard Cash. This chapter will focus on the vibrant Meiji world of professional storytelling, in particular the important role oral storytellers played as entertainers of the masses, and examine how oral adaptations of Western novels mirrored the contemporary world. In the process I will show how Encho’s hon’anmono of a propagandistic British novel was tailored to the concerns of his diverse and changing audience.