Hankai. A Translation from Harusame Monogatari

Abstract

Ur n EDA Akinaril was born in I734, precisely in the middle of the Tokugawa period. The period began with the unification of Japan by Tokugawa Ieyasu (I542i6i6), who established the pattern of strong, centralized rule that was to give Japan more than two hundred years of peace and stability. It was a period of isolation as well; Ieyasu's successors banned all foreign contacts, with the exception of closely regulated trade with the Dutch and with China. The contact with China was of great importance. The Tokugawa period saw a flourishing of Chinese, particularly Confucian, scholarship: Confucianism was the official doctrine of the government, and 'the ethics of the Chinese sages, systematized and modified by the Japanese to suit their own peculiar society, had by the opening of the eighteenth century begun to permeate all classes in Japan.'2 A reaction to this emphatic acceptance of Confucianism began in the middle of the eighteenth century with, among others, the great scholar Kamo no Mabuchi (I697-I769), and was carried on by a group known as the 'National Scholars' who emphasized the philological study of earlyJapanese classics in an attempt to discover the pure Japanese spirit as it existed before falling under Buddhist and Confucian influence. The circumstances of Akinari's birth are unknown. His mother seems to have been an Osaka prostitute, and Akinari himself did not know the identity of his father. Fortunately, he was adopted at three by a wealthy dealer in oil and paper named Ueda, and was given the name Ueda Senjiro.3 (It was many years later that he adopted the name Akinari.) The following year he had a severe case of smallpox, which weakened him