Pathway to Japanese Literature

In the spring of Bunka 3 (1806), Ueda Akinari—a seventy-three-year-old man now utterly alone—built a makeshift hut on the site of his former hermitage within Kyoto’s Nanzen-ji Temple and cast his aging, infirm body into it.

To call it loneliness—but never had it been so absolute.
Seven years prior, after being parted by death from his wife Koran-ni—with whom he had spent thirty-eight years—there remained not a single family member.
He did have some friends and disciples, but while maintaining proper appearances outwardly, he couldn’t open his heart.
Even they had stopped coming altogether of late.
Even those who came half in jest to sample this sarcastic, stubborn old man must have found it too taxing to torment a decrepit fool nearing blindness—and perhaps thought it rather cruel besides.
Akinari himself had resigned himself to outliving his allotted lifespan and had come to feel completely resigned.

In Records of Courage and Caution—written in Bunka 5 (1808), the year before his death—he wrote thus:

Since I can do nothing more, I have resolved myself to death by drinking sencha—

Even when building his small hermitage, there had existed humanity’s final ideal for dwellings.
That had been good enough—a mere eight-tatami house.
He made the four-tatami space within those eight tatami his living quarters and arranged daily necessities across two tatami each to the left and right.
He moved the desk beneath the eastern window, dug a hearth beside it, and arranged all provisions—rice, soy sauce, and other foodstuffs—on the surrounding shelves.
He hung a plum-blossom-patterned paper curtain over the westernmost tatami mat and tossed into it everything from the futon to discarded garments.
For the summer heat, reed screens beyond the veranda; to ward off winter’s harsh winds, firewood stacked outside the walls—the elderly Akinari had meticulously planned every detail of a convenient and practical comfortable life that could be sustained with minimal expense.
Yet even that modest expense proved beyond his means.
What he had no choice but to build was nothing more than a patched-together hut not even worth mentioning.
Even in his resigned state of mind, he could not help but feel anger.
Had seventy years of life led only to this?
But no sooner had he quelled this anger and transformed it within his palm than a reckless aestheticism reared its head from some corner of his heart.
He rummaged through his meager belongings and found the frayed hemp hanging screen.
The hanging screen bore the characters Quail Hut written in lushly brushed calligraphy.
He smoothed out the wrinkles in the hanging screen and hung it from the hut’s eaves.

He had lived with his family by the Nagare River seventeen or eighteen years prior, when he was fifty-five. The Nagare pines could be faintly seen, and being in the shade of the neighboring shrine’s forest, it had been a dwelling he favored. At that time, having moved over a dozen times between Kyoto and Settsu while supporting his family, he had lost all confidence in the stability of any dwelling. Having lost all confidence yet still desiring some semblance of stability in his heart, he had hung that screen from the eaves. The name "Quail Hut" had been conceived from the saying "quails have no permanent abode"—a hermitage title born of that familiar adage.

When he stepped outside and looked back at his small house with its hanging screen bearing those characters, he felt it was the only home he had ever secured in this world. At that moment—already on the threshold of old age—he became like a child and rejoiced.
Yet that joy proved fleeting; in the sixth year, when he took down that hanging screen and moved to Kyoto, his itinerant life of moving from place to place began once more.

The hanging screen was quite soiled.
Akinari stepped outside and looked back at it just as he had when first hanging it at his Nagare residence.
Because the hermitage was new, the screen’s stains stood out starkly.
He felt contempt rise within him—as if the ghost of his dwelling obsession still dared show its face.
“No matter how much fate forces me to move,” he thought, “my lifespan can’t possibly endure much longer like this.
This time, I’ll live out my days in one house.”
The thought brought a rush of exhilaration—“Serves you right!”
he spat at the screen.
Then came the urge to tell his wife Koran-ni—“Koran.
Just this once.
Won’t you crawl out of your grave for a little talk?”

He thought that if it were this hut, his wife would always be living out her days there, and spoke through the wall toward the next room—no larger than a small box. He buried the rest in laughter.

Shaking roasted rice from the paper bag into the bowl, Akinari poured hot water over it. He took the copy of Tales of Moonlight and Rain published in the fifth year of An’ei (1776) that lay nearby and used it as a lid for the bowl. This strangely elegant tale was one he had written in Meiwa 5 (1768), when he was thirty-five years old. Eight years had passed from its writing to publication. After endless revisions, the printing process itself had been fraught with hardship. Looking back on a life where his identity as a national scholar had ultimately prevailed, the storyteller’s craft—which one might have thought came to him with innate abundance—had manifested itself only sparingly. Among those scant works, precisely because this volume stood as his magnum opus—even as he let his other writings scatter—affection for it lingered, and he kept it close at hand more than ever in his later years. Yet he hadn’t gone so far as to store it carefully either.

In a life mocked and dragged about by fate, what had become of his tastes and talents? When I considered how those very gifts had subjected me to agony like fur being ripped against the grain, the petty literary contrivances I’d sacrificed to fleeting inspiration grew detestable even to myself—each time I saw this volume, it felt as if stamping my foolish self onto printing blocks, cheeks burning with shame, until I’d cast it down thinking Trample it if you will, kick it if you must, leaving it discarded upon the tatami mats. He felt an inexplicable antipathy even toward its worldly acclaim. In short, perhaps he kept it near precisely because this volume bound him through both love and hate. He often used it as a kettle stand. Stains from pots and kettles had soaked into the cover and back in overlapping crescent shapes.

Flicking aside the book whose back cover had swollen into a rounded lid from steam, portioning out the properly puffed roasted rice from the bowl into a small rice vessel, pouring hot water over it while using raw miso as his side dish, Akinari briskly finished his evening meal.
Though not large in stature, the old man with a sturdy build and a pockmarked face—jaw and cheekbones prominent—eating alone in the twilight of old age made for a lonely sight.
The dull-looking eyes spaced farther apart than most people’s gave him the appearance of a frog.

While putting away the chopsticks into their case, he realized he hadn't had enough and fetched from the room's corner a small pot that had been covered with a basket. Sticking his chopsticks into it, he began eating in that manner.
In the pot loach had been boiled to a whitish hue.
When he ate this, he glared nervously at windows and back door.
At fifty-seven he lost his left eye; just when he thought that left eye had somewhat recovered at sixty-five, this time his right eye went blind.
From then until this day of awaiting death, his eye troubles never ceased.

There were people who recommended loach as being good for him, so he kept eating it until one day a stubborn monk discovered this and declared that humans were created with flat teeth to eat vegetables and grains.
He was admonished that eating loach was not only killing life but went against natural principles. Though he argued on the spot that it was health-preserving eating, afterward, each time he ate it, he felt unsettled.
Even as he thought that eyesight hardly mattered when one was going to die, he could not bring himself to abandon his health regimen.

In his childhood, though frequently afflicted by convulsive seizures, he with his resilient constitution would periodically succumb to delusional episodes. He had maintained an unshakable belief that foxes and raccoon dogs invariably orchestrated such phenomena. Gnawing at the loach bones now—his conscience uneasy—he became convinced the admonishing monk had actually coveted the forbidden dish himself; should this hypocrite detect him defiantly eating it, envy would surely transform him into some shape-shifted apparition. Indeed, he perceived that figure warping into an unnaturally flat shadow-puppet slipping through shoji paper's membrane. Emboldened, he ostentatiously devoured the loach in full view. When the spectral silhouette dissolved entirely, he savored victory's tang before storing his chopsticks.

At Nanzen-ji's main hall, the sound of shutters being lowered thundered.
Amidst this, winter wind that resembled broom sweeps could be heard from north and west.
He lit the andon lamp before taking out his sencha tea utensils.

He maintained an unwavering dedication to this practice even at this advanced age—as one who would later be revered as a foundational figure in the revival of sencha tea ceremony. Rather, having pared down his other pastimes one by one, precisely because this sole remaining preference was what he could not bring himself to discard, it possessed an all-consuming quality. "Tea should be received as one would a noble guest; should one be careless in either brewing or serving, there will be no escaping regret." This was his approach to tea. Thus, he reduced the number of tea utensils from the prescribed twenty to sixteen, then to twelve—ultimately retrieving from a torn Miyako basket only the barely sufficient essentials: a tea jar, tea bowl, and tea caddy. However, the manner of preparing sencha remained proper. Though he let his life be eroded by the crumbling forces of old age and poverty, within that dissolution lay the old man's final pride—the desire to preserve one single thing that would not compromise its dignity.

He filled the kettle with fresh water and brought it back, then added charcoal to the brazier and set it alight.
He was fastidious about water.
He refused to use nearby wells, claiming their water carried a fishy stench or briny tang.
He went out of his way to hire someone for drawing water into jars from the distant well above Ichijo.

Between Kyoto and Osaka, the river water from Uji's Hashimoto was considered peerless; when his body still permitted, he would often shoulder a water jug and make the day-long journey to fetch it.
The jars storing this water were brought out to the garden each evening—lids removed, mouths veiled with gauze—and left exposed to the night sky.
Through this practice, he believed the water absorbed starlight and dew's essence, keeping intact the liquid's noble spirits.
In savoring the marrow of all things, he harbored an insatiable appetite.

He sat leisurely and ritualistically wiped the tea bowl with a soiled cloth, opened the lid of the tea jar to examine its contents, then drew the tea caddy and tea container close to his knees.
Then he waited for the water to boil.
In his childhood, he had contracted smallpox so severe it threatened his life, leaving the middle finger of his right hand as short as his little finger.
The index finger of his left hand too had shriveled short.
Accustomed to handling utensils with such deformed hands, they might appear casual at first glance, but upon closer inspection revealed wrists clamped onto the vessels like a lion's jaws.
It was the obsession of a hungry ghost.
When that perverse habit of confronting himself with unpleasant truths surfaced here, he twisted his wrist before his eyes and chuckled darkly alone.
With hands like these gripping the brush, he would denigrate himself completely—convinced he could never write decent characters—and no matter how others praised his accomplishments, he absolutely refused acceptance.

The water in the kettle placed on the brazier had finally warmed enough to begin emitting a faint sound.
Akinari placed his hands on his knees and did not so much as twitch.
He surrendered himself to this solemn yet relaxed time where his sole desire was to wait for the water to boil.
The winter wind grazed the hut sideways, and he felt its oppressive weight bearing down from directly above on his dry, mottled skin.

The mental state that had required years of careful cultivation to attain such a realm had naturally shed itself, and now without effort had taken form within him.
That was the principle of "stillness without loneliness."

The water boiled and reached a state "like springs bubbling up on all sides" and "like pearls strung together."
In a little while, it would "enter the stage of waves surging and drums rolling," and "there, with water’s nature extinguished, one must brew tea."
The water reached its perfect stage.
Akinari felt a surge of anticipation as something hot coursed through his body and welled up in his chest.
Just when he thought this was solely an elegant passion for tea, it proved otherwise—various worldly emotions that had sprouted within now reared their heads.

Had I continued my youthful immersion in haikai poetry until this age, I would never have let someone like today's Tan-Tan carry on so arrogantly.
That Tan-Tan fellow—true to his lumber merchant lineage—applied his business acumen to amass disciples and now boasts three thousand followers.
This above all was infuriating.
Even the National Studies I began at forty—though I'll admit my scholarly disposition was apt—getting entangled in disputes and failing to systematize my research became my next regret.
Murata Harumi of Edo who accused me of privatizing scholarship, Motoori Norinaga of Ise who flaunted his antiquarian learning—neither proved worthy as adversaries.
When engaged in written debate, he'd turn away whenever nearing defeat—a repulsive, slippery opponent.
Confronting him inevitably brought mockery and sarcasm to the fore, making the world suspect me of ulterior motives.
From humanity's natural state, from originality, from pure intuition—I had come to fully realize how my method of seeking logical coherence became trapped by old conventions, rejected by a world bedazzled with pedantry.

When it came to waka poetry, Ozawa Roan surfaced in his thoughts.
On one hand, court-style ornate poems flourished with their affected elegance; on the other, amidst ancient-school scholars teeming with pretentious imitations of Manyō-style verse, he envied that senior colleague who had resolutely stood his ground—advocating plain expressionism and raising high the banner of "tada-uta."
Had I possessed slightly greater dedication to waka poetry and a more obstinate disposition, that very style might have been one I myself would have pursued.
As the essential core of that "plain speech poetry," Roan composed:

For words are the voice of the human heart,

there remains no choice but to give voice to one's thoughts.

Verses like this—akin to saying "It's raining, take an umbrella"—couldn't be called poetry by any measure, yet whenever Akinari attempted to compose verse, these very phrases would inexplicably surface first in his mind, suppressing the emergence of more refined words and thoroughly exasperating him.

Roan’s obstinate arrogance—clinging rigidly to boorish, conventional things and remaining immovable—dispelled his creative fervor.
And no matter how many poems he composed, he keenly felt that Roan had already churned them up beforehand.
The man called Roan had initially aspired to become the greatest swordsman under heaven, but when that path proved unattainable, he switched to poetry with such single-mindedness that he settled in Okayazaki like a ground-dwelling insect for nearly forty years, pondering nothing but verse alongside two pine trees in his garden.
When I first visited him, he claimed it was hospitality and played the koto for me with his clumsy arms.
He found those overly earnest poems so absurd he could hardly bear it, yet forced himself to endure and exchange verses with his fellow poets as etiquette demanded.
But he was a kind-hearted old man, and unable to bear watching me idle about, he advised me to at least take on some disciples.
I said whatever came to mind and dismissed it, making that scrupulous old man heave a sigh.

The sudden rise to prominence of painters like Taiga, Okyo, and Gekkei also grated on his nerves.
In their impoverished days, they had desperately earned through odd jobs like making tea house lanterns—their state hardly enviable—but now carried themselves with lofty airs, greedily demanding exorbitant painting fees.
In particular, with Gekkei—when living before Chion-in Temple, they had been immediate neighbors; at Higashinotoin, sharing the same tenement where they borrowed and lent miso and soy sauce, and with his wife Koran-ni being a capable drinker—he had often held boisterous drinking gatherings centered around tofu hot pots, making Gekkei an excellent drinking companion.
From those days onward, this painter had been a gourmand, a drinker, and yet another indulgence besides—and having achieved success made it all the more unbearable.
He had completely worn out his body, and when visited after a long absence recently, was emaciated like some unlawfully displayed criminal crammed into a barrel.
And yet, even in that state, he still went on about matters of appetite—limiting his drinking snacks to tofu or horsetail shoots or the like.
Kishikoma’s excessive indulgence in worldly desires—building a lavish residence and giving it the pretentious name Dōkōkan—also grated on his nerves.
Painting shares equal merit with classical texts—hence the painter’s studio was apparently named Dōkōkan, “Hall of Shared Merit,” or so the reasoning went.
The more grandiose the names they devised, the more absurd they became.

When he let such grievances accumulate and surge within him, Akinari would find the blood—scant yet sufficient for his robust frame—circulating smoothly through his body, awakening a faint vernal warmth in his heart.
The spasmodic twitching of his eyelids had become its own vital stimulus.
The water in the kettle had boiled over entirely, churning violently, yet he paid it no mind.
More than that—in this moment of having been roused by some acute physical stimulus—he wanted to attune his present state of mind.
Thereupon he thrust his fingertips against the kettle's searing surface.
A scorching sensation bit into the slightly numb fingertips of his left hand, and an indescribable pleasure fused instantly with his excited nerves, making his entire body seem to brighten with invigoration.
He inwardly declared that at this rate, he could endure living another five or six years.
Seeking to subject equally his smallpox-shortened index finger—the one in his left hand left untouched by the kettle's body, lingering with numb sensation—to this same pleasure, he peeled away his other four fingers and pressed only this deformed digit firmly against the kettle's rounded surface.
Sweet pain coursed through this finger too.
Were I to hold this finger to flame and breathe in the scent of my own life burning away—how utterly satisfying that would be.

As his mood grew more exhilarated, he began feeling he might yet live a long time. Rather, he even started sensing this was only the beginning.
"Humans retain their seventeen- or eighteen-year-old spirit no matter how aged they become," Soryo—that young drum-bearing tea practitioner—had once declared. Though lacking any personal experience of such longevity himself, Akinari remembered wondering where the man had picked up such notions.
There had been that time when Soryo performed a tea farce, taking the role of Chidori at a drinking gathering. His handsome features enhanced by meticulous makeup had even left the geisha and their attendants spellbound. Yet upon reaching his forehead during the performance, he boldly inscribed "Chidori" in thick characters. Then on his right cheekbone, he vermilion-stamped his master Sōsa's name in imitation of an appraisal seal.
This conceit proved so extraordinarily novel it instantly became the talk of pleasure-seekers throughout Kyoto and Osaka. Having attended that banquet himself, Ueda Akinari witnessed Soryo's performance firsthand and perceived it as true improvisation springing from youth itself—an artistry he knew himself incapable of replicating no matter how he steeled his resolve. What he envied most were Soryo's comely looks and sheer youthfulness.

Now, as Akinari himself looked back, he saw that his own body had been eroded by age since youth, and even his most resolute youthfulness had failed to ignite.
But perhaps this old age that had gnawed within him since youth had instead sheltered and preserved the mysterious sensibilities within him through seventy years.
In the transient world's fleeting affairs he could find no satisfaction, yet beyond death lay desires ever more unreachable—barely capturing them through brush and paper, through dreams alone, he had preserved their traces in form.
In his actual being, when he tried to apprehend it through his body, it fled to his heart; when he sought to suppress it through his heart, it became trapped within his body.
On nights when rain cleared and the moon hung hazy, only by guiding his worn brush could he fix that seeping desire's trickle upon the page.
The two booklets—*Tales of Moonlight and Rain* and *Spring Rain*—were in truth the soiled paper left after wiping away that desire's bloody pus.
Yet though fleshly fluids and pus might be wiped away, desire's obstinate core remained.
Even in old age, when stirred, his covetous heart would suddenly raise its viperous head—he startled at this.
And he marveled at how the object of this craving remained so ethereal and elusive.

It had no true form, resembling a specter that performed only mysterious deeds. It was glimpsed as a colorless rainbow that showed only clarity within the morning mist that was beginning to clear.

As a cowardly act of indulging in memories to forget old age, Akinari had long cautioned himself against it. He neither looked back on the past nor concerned himself with the future. He had focused solely on fitting himself into whatever world happened to be at hand, considering how to live through each transient moment—in truth, there was no past worth yearning for, nor any future he could believe in. Yet tonight, for some reason, this life he thought he had spent scattering himself through play, through writing, through existence itself—blown about by karmic winds—lay open to reflection without self-reproach. And now, he began to notice something like a single thread running through what he had considered his thoroughly unremarkable life. Even were he to pursue and examine this thread more meticulously now, it would hardly amount to cowardly regret or self-loathing—no, rather, he even began to feel something akin to the noble sentiment of investigating the singular path granted to him.

Akinari lifted the kettle lid and peered inside.
He furrowed his brows at the water boiled to exhaustion, its liquid center heaving like a spine as it groaned.
While lost in thought, he had let the tea water boil over.
Rising with dim eyes, Akinari diagonally gauged his footing while moving to replace the kettle’s water beneath the eaves.
The hernia-swollen weight of his hips forced him into a limp.

Leaving the lingering embers untouched, he placed the kettle back atop them.
Though he’d lost all interest in brewing or drinking tea now, he wanted to preserve the subtle resonances of water transforming into boiling water.
It seemed an accompaniment that gently restrained his probing mind while letting it flow unimpeded.
He listened intently, but the wind had died—outside, a biting cold numbed everything from temple hall to mountain gate to woods from the waist down. Kyoto’s cold showed no mercy.
Here, he uttered a single word to himself.
Resuming his proper seated posture, he tied the frayed end of his previous thought to the threshold of a new one—neither through love nor hate could it be grasped, nor through contest; only through obsession’s tenacious grip driving ever deeper into matters was that desire fulfilled.
But in this world—did anything exist worth such total devotion?
However much he longed to love obsession’s persistence, he couldn’t indiscriminately pursue things and sink his teeth into them like a lion.
Charm proved necessary.
Yet the stronger the charm, the swifter boredom arrived.
If boredom failed to come, the other side shifted instead.

He was separated from his biological mother by death at four years old.
She had been a teahouse daughter in Sonezaki.
Given her circumstances she likely wasn't unattractive, but since no one ever revealed his father's name, he must have been born from a relationship too illicit for public acknowledgment.
By the time he became aware there were people he called father and mother, he had already been taken into the Ueda household in Dōjima.
He never intended to ask what relation Mr. Ueda bore to him.
He understood they would tell lies if he asked.
If lies were inevitable, he found it more tolerable to call this Ueda couple—who now doted on him so indiscriminately—father and mother.
His checkered fate had planted such precocious thoughts in his childhood self.

His second mother—Ueda’s wife—had loved him but died after only two or three years.
He decided in his childish heart that mothers generally die young and felt nothing about it.
However, Mr. Ueda’s subsequent wife—the woman who became his third mother—lived a long life.
She was the woman who lived until Akinari was nearly sixty and whom he supported alongside his wife throughout their lives.
That woman too loved him as a mother.
So in Akinari’s youth, people would say: “You may seem unfortunate yet blessed—having gone through two mothers where none were truly stepmothers.”
But now upon reflection, that too had its merits and flaws.
Had his foster mothers behaved with stepmotherly cruelty, his yearning for his birth mother might have remained undiluted—a single thread of devotion that could have taken clear form throughout his life.
But by ill-advisedly allowing two women’s love to intrude like water poured sideways, he had ultimately rendered his birth mother longing tepid.
The curious thing was that whenever he missed his mother, three women’s visages would rise in his heart—from his young birth mother’s imagined likeness to his final foster mother’s aged face—all lining up to vie for dominance over his memories.
He restrained himself from devoting his heart entirely to longing for any one of them.

Even to his foster mothers—who had nothing particularly outstanding—he had bowed his head sincerely on two occasions.
Once, during his fifty-fifth year while his later foster mother still lived—
It was the year when the medical practice he had taken up in middle age and painstakingly built became unsustainable from overwork, forcing him to relinquish the rather splendid house he had earned through it into others' hands and withdraw to the countryside.
At that time, having had to take in his wife's mother as well, two old women were compelled to live in squalid disarray within the cramped rural dwelling.
The household had originally been a prosperous merchant family in Osaka's Dōjima district, but after Akinari took over the shop, they directly endured this sudden reversal of fortune—persevering through meager circumstances until some success finally came to the medical practice he had managed to establish. Just when they had been granted a comfortable retirement, they plummeted back into impoverished lodgings once more.
Thus from Akinari's perspective, there was no avoiding profound remorse toward his foster mother.
And so the fifty-five-year-old man pressed his forehead to the floor before his mother and apologized for his peerless unfilialness.
To this his foster mother replied: “What a hopeless thing.”
She was not one to actively resign herself to circumstances, but rather a woman who simply lived her life by fitting herself into whatever situation presented itself, always on her own terms.
Yet this mother's response had done considerably to make the world feel more livable for Akinari.
This foster mother, his wife's mother, and his wife—now nearing fifty—the three old women would go out together like aged hens, unconsciously keeping each other company as they picked shepherd's purse along Nagara River's banks.

Seeing such ease, I who had found reassurance in their way of living now devoted my ever-pursuing mind wholly to the mysteries of history and the allure of ancient words.

Taking advantage of his foster parents' leniency, Akinari spent his youth in dissipation.
In this regard, he differed little from the typical playboys of moderately affluent Osaka households.
He read popular books on character types of the time, wandered the pleasure quarters, frequented teahouses, and immersed himself in theater-going—all as a matter of course.
Though he dabbled in haikai as a sideline and wrote two character studies, these remained mere relics of that common literary proclivity found among many libertines throughout history.

However, at thirty-five—as his dissolute life was drawing to a close—he abruptly wrote Tales of Moonlight and Rain.
Through this tale, the extent of his mastery of Japanese and Chinese literature proved no ordinary attainment of some literary youth.
There stood the unmistakable vestige of a literary master.
That a dissolute youth could immediately produce a work bearing such gravitas—other scholars of National Studies unanimously marveled at this transition's lack of clear lineage.
Particularly since he himself had told people—in self-deprecating fashion—that until past twenty he hadn't known the national language and had been mocked by townsfolk, this being recorded in others' diaries, all the more did this period of his literary existence intensify others' bewilderment.
By this time, he had received some instruction from scholars and storybook authors—Takai Hankei in haikai, Goi Ranshu in Confucianism, along with Tsuga Teishō and Takebe Ayatari—but for the most part, he cultivated his expertise through self-direction.
Nor had he strained through diligent effort.
From childhood, his checkered fate had warped his innate nature's heart that sought sincere emotion, driving his formidable mental strength toward pursuits like mystical desires for beauty, love, and knowledge—through that propulsion, without his awareness, his erudition in Japanese and Chinese studies had deepened.
What attests to this erudition's depth is that shortly before completing Tales of Moonlight and Rain at thirty-five, he presented offerings to Kato Umaki—a direct disciple of Kamo no Mabuchi in National Studies and shogunate retainer—yet this teacher commanded the deepest reverence in his entire life, so much so that for eleven years until the teacher's death, he maintained closeness with him.
This Umaki, when Akinari entered his tutelage, immediately treated him not as pupil but rather as friend—or with the courtesy due a guest scholar—and upon dying, even entrusted academic affairs to him, deeming him no ordinary scholar of National Studies.
And during this time, his name too had gradually begun circulating in society.
Yet even toward such a teacher, Akinari maintained a habit of never permitting absolute emotional expression when confronting reality—a chill suspicion lingering that unknowable depths existed even in the teacher's words—until ultimately he returned to self-reliance, extolling how true scholarly rigor could only be achieved beneath a solitary window through solitary and insular study's virtue.

Though he bowed to no one and trusted none, Ueda Akinari had once expressed heartfelt gratitude to his former foster mother. This occurred in Kyōwa 1 (1801), when he turned sixty-eight—the very age at which the deity of Osaka’s Kashima Inari Shrine had decreed his granted lifespan would end. When Akinari contracted smallpox at four years old—an age when he should have died—his foster mother prayed to Kashima Inari: rather than taking his young life, let her own be claimed when he reached sixty-eight years of age, so that he might survive until then. Even when he reached sixty-eight, he did not die. When the foster mother who had prayed died two years later instead—her death seeming a precious substitution for his own—he bowed deeply to her corpse. Even so, he had survived far too long from then until today. Was it indeed the obsession entrenched deep within him—this relentless pursuit of something—that refused to let his life end? As long as this obsession does not leave me, might I not be kept alive in this world even against my will? That thought seems bitter and terrifying. And yet, I also feel a cheerful sense of fortitude. The delusions inherent in humanity can be thought to perform quite a flavorful function in relation to lifespan.

Deeply suspicious, he had also found that since his youth, every woman he saw harbored an ugly seed hidden deep within the flesh, dampening his interest.
They would tempt men into fathering children with them.
They would use their born child as a hostage to keep men perpetually at their beck and call, then arrogantly demand support from that very child they bore—not a single woman could exist without harboring such seeds of pretext. Though of course, the women themselves did not necessarily all consciously know these schemes when approaching men.
Most women behaved unknowingly and innocently without any awareness.
But within that unconscious behavior, seeds of this very sort were already planted.
It was said by the Buddha that women bear deep sins—but surely he had been pointing to matters such as this.
Every woman I encountered had this trap, making it impossible to feel at ease or be captivated.
Moreover, women of the night and such carried an entirely different seed—yet they too invariably possessed one.
There was not a single woman who could make a man fall in love without leading him astray or captivating his soul.
When they fell in love, they would surely extract the man's spirit, render him gutless, and try to treat him like a wooden puppet.
Not a single woman existed who could make a man firmly hold onto his spirit while granting him blissful feelings.
All such women, while a man still had his spirit, set about picking at it as if it were a fish with bones—meticulously concerned with every fragment.
Once the bones were picked clean, they set about eating with relief.

There were many women who intoxicated like sake.
There was not a single woman who intoxicated like tea.
He recalled a passage from Eisai Zenji’s *Kissa Yōjōki*.
“Even if one drinks tea and stays awake all night, tomorrow the body will not suffer.”
Could there be a love that kept one awake all night yet left the body unburdened come morning?… For that very reason, I had held no expectations whatsoever for the wife I took at twenty-nine.
It was simply that, having reached a certain age, I had followed societal norms by settling down like everyone else.
Her name was O-Tama, and she was eight years my junior.
She was a woman raised in Osaka, but having been born a peasant’s daughter from Kyoto, her endurance ran deep.
She was the sort who would keep growing even as she was trampled underfoot.
Taking advantage of this disposition—and being still in his prime of revelry—he neglected his home to indulge with haikai poets and gesakusha companions.
When he occasionally returned home, O-Tama’s boorishness grated on him.
That she shared his own affliction only compounded his irritation.
Even after passing thirty, his dissipation became chronic and persisted until, at thirty-seven years old, his foster father died.
He inherited the paper shop and tried his hand at business for the first time.
Being unaccustomed to such work, it naturally fared poorly.
At this vulnerable juncture came a shop fire the following year; through twelve months of desperate efforts to rebuild the business, all proved futile.
Thus he realized that among those raised in merchant families, none could match his innate unsuitability for commerce.
The reason lay in his inability to brazenly add profit margins above cost—to sell goods while feigning ignorance felt shameful.
Though applying commission-based profits was standard practice, by nature he recoiled at forcing such gains upon others; when customers questioned the value, he could scarcely muster a confident reply.
With matters thus deteriorating, by the third year he had bankrupted his household and retreated to the countryside.

And since nearly all his resources had been exhausted, he had no choice but to select some occupation for his livelihood.
Having reached forty years of age, he could no longer afford to linger; thus he resolved to establish himself through medicine—a path he deemed accessible for someone entering the intellectual class.

At that time in Japan’s medical world, renowned physicians such as Mochizuki San’ei in the Kanto region and Yoshimasu Tōdō in Kansai had emerged, both advocating for the revival of ancient methods and revolutionizing practical techniques. Though their talented disciples were positioned at key locations overseeing medical practice, their influence had yet to permeate widely.
The town and village doctors around Osaka prattled about Tōdō’s motto of "All Illnesses Stem from a Single Poison"—a phrase they had merely picked up by hearsay—while their actual practice remained that of conventional physicians.
After three years of devoted study, Akinari returned to Osaka in the fourth year of An’ei and finally opened his medical practice.
At that time, he resolved thus:
“Doctors are all middle-aged amateurs anyway—clumsy hands that people won’t employ.
Therefore, I’ll sell myself through diligence and kindness.
However, even were I to stoop to vulgarity, I resolved never to engage in the party entertaining, antique brokering, or matchmaking for money and brides that conventional doctors practice.”

The policy of being diligent in making house calls made Dr. Issōi Akinari popular, and his livelihood became prosperous.
In the fourth year of practicing medicine, he bought a house, renovated it, and moved in.
The expense of twelve kanme at that time was managed without much difficulty.
At first, with prospects seeming secure in this manner, he worked diligently, but due to his inherently weak constitution, he ultimately could not endure and regrettably had to abandon his medical practice, returning once more to his rural dwelling.
That place was none other than his secluded dwelling by the Nagaegawa River.

Even his wife O-Tama—where could there have been joys proper to a wife? When I was young and reveling through my prime years, she kept watch over our home during my absences; when I became a doctor and grew busy, she received guests and mixed medicines; then when I finally stayed home, she nursed her sick husband. On top of that, she took on caring for my foster mother who had lived until seventy-six. O-Tama might as well have come to my house as a maid rather than a wife.

As I myself neared sixty, whiling away time in rural seclusion out of boredom, it was after nearly thirty years of cohabitation that I first truly looked anew at this woman called my wife—and this too through only my right eye, since my left had deteriorated beyond use. At this time O-Tama was already fifty-one years old. She had never possessed features striking enough to remark upon from the start, but once whitened entirely by age, she became merely an ordinary old woman.

In essence—given her nature as a Kyoto-born peasant's daughter whose endurance I considered innate—it was precisely because she had been shaped for hardship that even as an old woman, she continued working diligently like household furniture, which struck me as remarkable indeed. I never believed this woman possessed any femininity worth noting, and the very notion of seeking it out repelled me—yet paradoxically, I came to cherish watching my wife transform into an old crone resembling gnarled timber.

Thus when I was fifty-nine and she fifty-one in Kansei's fourth year—after first her mother died, then immediately my foster mother passed—and when O-Tama, now hollowed by these losses, requested permission to shave her head and take nun's vows, I granted it without hesitation. For I found it refreshing that this woman by my side—who disdained all feminine affectations—should grow ever more like withered wood.

At that time my wife asked me to bestow a nun's name upon her. After brief consideration, I gave her "Koran." When she inquired my reasoning, I half-joked that it was simply convenient for addressing her—to which she seemed dissatisfied by its excessive plainness, yet offered no real protest and soon grew accustomed to bearing it.

What surprised people about O-Tama after she took the form of a nun was how her temperament had completely changed. She spoke briskly. She worked when the mood struck her, but when it didn’t, she was endlessly indolent. She stopped caring about societal appearances altogether and would go out without hesitation even in a kimono with frayed hems dangling. And she began laughing without restraint. Though often bedridden due to her many illnesses, whenever someone visited her, she would let out a raucous laugh. When she became like this, he found himself developing an unexpected tenderness toward her. The considerate attentions of his youthful wife, who had diligently tended to him with such earnest care, left no impression in his memory; yet when he saw those eyes of hers—now worn and frayed—gazing into his own without reason, he felt for the first time since their marriage that they had come to understand each other. Moreover, she observed him in an unconscious state where she no longer found any pleasure in such things.

From the start, she had been something of a drinker, but now she cast off all restraint—whenever there was money to spare, she drank freely. After moving to Kyoto, she formed alliances with male drinking companions like the painter Gekkei, often holding modest gatherings where tofu sufficed as their sole dish.

In the seventh year after this woman became a nun—when he was sixty-six and she fifty-eight—she died.

Even after her death, she managed to startle him one final time.

She had emulated his hobbies, dabbling in poetic compositions and occasionally writing short pieces, but he dismissed these as mere imitations by a woman fundamentally suited to housework—hardly worth serious consideration—and never engaged with them.
She too had been too timid to show them to him.
Yet after her death, while sorting through her meager belongings—a tattered haori, a chrysanthemum-patterned underrobe—he suddenly discovered a bundle of discarded writings bound with thread.
Reading them revealed meticulous accounts of her anxieties as a young wife left to guard their home during his dissolute wanderings, along with pitiful descriptions of his childless self during their Nagaegawa seclusion mourning an unexpectedly beloved neighborhood child’s death.
Not only did her writing style mirror his own—the sentiments themselves were all directed toward him.
Had such lingering emotions festered within that insect-like woman?
Had she still sought to bestow affection upon a man like me—neither withered wood nor fresh sapling?
This thought vexed him until unwitting tears fell upon those discarded pages.
Yet upon repeated rereading, her elder-sisterly tone toward him—her refusal to resent him while cloaking everything in worldly impermanence to feign enlightenment—these displays of model widowhood and false wisdom grew conspicuous. Though he told himself his fascination had waned (*So she too was ordinary after all*), this very realization deepened his pity until he appended her writings to *Fujizusa Notebooks*, that collection of his works someone had compiled.

Akinari devoted himself to study and writing amidst such a wandering, itinerant life, and his works were said to reach a height equal to his stature.
His lifetime writings spanned an extraordinary range: studies related to national literature, national history, short stories drawing material from Chinese anecdotal histories, textual critiques, polemical essays, gesaku playwriting, waka poetry, travelogues, essays, and more.
His works extended even to expositions on sencha tea ceremony and studies of Chinese seals.
However, these works—whimsical and fragmented—could not sustain his material life, and while his scholarly talents instilled awe in others, his existence gradually descended into solitary poverty.

In the fifth year of Kansei—the year following the deaths of his foster mother and mother-in-law—when he moved to Kyoto with his shaven-headed wife Koran, they had sold his foster mother’s remaining possessions and carried 107 ryō of gold, but this too vanished in an instant. Thereafter, he eked out a living by producing meager annotations of old books commissioned by bookstores for payments of ten or fifteen ryō. Yet in his far later years, he subsisted poorly on rewards from copying famous works among his own writings—including Tales of Moonlight and Rain—as requested by aesthetes.
However, this too became impossible as his eyesight gradually worsened, and he himself reached the state he frankly describes in *Records of Courage and Caution*: "living an unremarkable life—eating barley and drinking burnt-rice water—"

After the death of his wife Koran-ni, Ueda Akinari—now a wholly lonely widower—temporarily lodged at his disciple Hagura Nobuyoshi's house but found the constraints unbearable; once more he staggered out to return to his inconvenient solitary existence.

He wandered nostalgically through his hometown of Osaka and secluded himself at the tranquil Shōhōji Temple in Kusaka to rest his eyes; yet he found no means to solace his old age.

Having reached exactly seventy years of age, he requested a living burial ceremony from the priest of Saifukuji Temple—whom he had acquainted himself with while lodging there the previous year—and even prepared his tomb.

Ueda Akinari gave a wry smile as he recalled that time.
To everyone’s surprise, people began gathering—had even the notoriously crotchety old man finally compromised?
Having made him suffer humiliation, even the young Confucian scholar who was rumored to be furious came to offer cheerful greetings.
People gave him many seemingly useless things.
Those people expressed words of caring for him and offering encouragement.
And they expected him to put on a gracious show of accepting their kindness with pleasure.
I thought I had messed up.

The act of burying himself was nothing unusual, having repeated it countless times throughout his life. This time, he had intended to renew his resolve by giving it grander formality, but now it seemed nothing more than an irreparable mistake—as if he had created an opportunity for others to bury him. "Well... thank you. I suppose from now on I'll feel like returning to being a child—" As soon as he said this, someone pounced on his words: "Excellent! Indeed, from this moment forth you must forget everything and be reborn as a child!" declared an old man who, though the same age as himself, had black hair, retained all his teeth, needed no cane, and took pride in his eyesight—an elder who secretly resented Akinari for living as long as he despite daily infirmities. He had been seeking an opportunity to strike at Akinari—who constantly berated his idle health—whenever possible. His words continued: "If you intend to live even longer, then behave yourself properly." This too carried the same edge. The surrounding listeners clapped their hands and chorused: "Yes! That very thing!"

After that, his acquaintances colluded as if by prior arrangement, treating him like a child and refusing to engage with him seriously.
He found this arrangement more convenient.
Under the pretense of dealing with an old man who had regressed to childhood, they could listen amusedly to his invectives and affect magnanimity toward Akinari.
No longer did anyone show him pained expressions of being skewered by truth or furious attitudes of resistance.
Only smirking laughter—like a theater curtain—draped itself around him.
Ueda Akinari could no longer bear his exhaustion from loosing arrows at vanished targets.

On top of that, they even showed him kindness by compiling his collected works.
They rifled through the wisteria basket beside the desk where he kept manuscripts he had allowed no one to touch, arbitrarily procured poetic drafts from others' possession, and engraved them for printing.
Perhaps they thought that even if ducks were ugly, their eggs could still be eaten.
When I tried to make any requests—they would chide me for forgetting I'd reverted to being a child.
"Go play, go play!"
They brushed him off with an elbow.
These manuscripts—shouldn't they have been entombed with my coffin at the temple as I'd resolved long ago, to await posterity?
Even a booklet that had been torn away and nurtured by others—once completed, there was no denying its endearing quality.
Precisely because of that, the vexation of having others act so presumptuously also lingered.

The night had grown late and still.
The gravelly bell of Nanzen-ji hammered at the base of one’s ears; Chion-in’s bell pursued close behind from a slight distance; Kiyomizu’s bell aligned far off rang clear and pure; Chōraku-ji’s bell.
The cold had eased imperceptibly, and sluggish drips from eaves tapped against trailing owl hoots that had begun crying out here and there.
It was not rain.
It was mist.
It seeped unseen through door gaps dampening lamp paper.
The kettle’s water had completely vanished, and with that the brazier’s fire had grown faint.

Ueda Akinari clicked his tongue at the tranquil darkness enveloping midnight’s stagnant calm—agitated by endless memories yet restrained by irrepressible emotions.
"What nonsense! That I’ve reverted to some childlike dotard?"
"My yearning heart persists! My loves and hates! This competitive spirit refusing defeat! All left half-dead yet undeparted!"
"It’s only this rotting carcass—these decaying surroundings—that shackle them now."
"Were they mine to command again—stubby brushes clutched in both fists—I’d pour out every last drop of this longing heart! Persuade till my throat bled! Survive forevermore as humanity’s unhealed wound!"
"You hear me?!" He hurled his graveled voice at his own hands and shadowed walls.
"You murderous flesh! You tomb-like hovel!"
"Murderers!"
"Murderers!"
Only then did he finally loathe his own senescence.

If that's how it is, let it tear apart, let it fester—I'll live as long as I damn well can.
Even if my body dies from the feet upward and perishes from the hands outward, I'll show them—I'll leave a breath of life clinging to the last remaining rib——.
When his thoughts reached this point, an uncanny calm arose within him.

A rooster's crow, as if announcing a lukewarm dawn approaching daybreak, came from some indeterminate distance.
He began to feel a feigned interest in drinking tea on this murky morning.
He fetched new water to refill the kettle and stoked the brazier's flames vigorously.
While waiting for the water to boil, he lifted his sole cherished possession—a Nanban-made teapot—onto his lap and caressed it with his malformed hands as if touching a flower.
Amidst the decay of his five senses, tactile sensation remained sharpest.

At Nanzen-ji's main temple, the walking meditation began.
While listening to that sound, he lined up the names of the dead in his head.
Chronologically working backward five years to Kyōwa 1 (1801), when his friend Ozawa Roan had died at seventy-nine and his scholarly rival Motoori Norinaga had passed at seventy-three, he smiled and muttered: "Spineless fools."

Twelve years his junior, the sixty-year-old Ota Nampo was still vigorous—this nagged at him.
He could not even imagine himself outliving this man.
This shrewd minor shogunate official, who hid behind kyōka and indulged himself, would occasionally look upon Akinari with earnest, thoughtful eyes.
And so, even if he were to be outlived, he did not feel such bitter resentment.

Water was poured into the teapot, and from the premium 'Ichinomori' tea arose a faintly tinted fragrance reminiscent of a high-ranking courtesan's flattery. He gripped the teapot fiercely. He thrust his pointed, hooked nose into the vessel's spout. The spring dawn scenery of Shigaraki Village—a tea-growing region—rose before his mind's eye.

The following year, in Bunka 4 at age seventy-four, Akinari discarded five bundles of manuscripts into an old well.

Yet the very next year, in Bunka 5, he permitted people to compile and publish his correspondence collection *Bunhogu*. And he himself completed *Records of Courage and Caution*, an essay collection constituting his most unflinching confessional text.

The following year, in June of Bunka 6, he died at the home of his disciple Hagura Nobuyoshi.
He could not even persist in residing at Nanzen-ji’s small hermitage “Quail Hut,” where he had resolved to live out his days.
Before being taken into Hagura Nobuyoshi’s home, he had temporarily stayed at Saifuku-ji Temple—where he had prepared his grave—among other places.