Texts in Context: Glynne Walley on Kyokutei Bakin

Hakkenden represents a whole other side of premodern Japan: big, messy, intellectually sophisticated, verbose, and populist.

Welcome to our new monthly column, in which Katarzyna Bartoszyńska seeks out academics who contribute to and elucidate the world of literary translation, revealing their deeper studies into texts both well-known and overlooked!

The following interview, conducted with Glynne Walley of the University of Oregon, spans Walley’s unprecedented efforts in bringing a titanic work of classical Japanese fiction to light. In his monograph Good Dogs: Edification, Entertainment, and Kyokutei Bakin’s “Natso Satomi hakkenden” (Cornell University Press, 2018), Walley explores the oft-ignored popular literature of nineteenth-century Japan, and how Bakin’s master epic foregrounds fundamental questions of morality, virtue, and the functions of fiction in society.

Katarzyna Bartoszyńska (KB): Tell me about your book, Good Dogs: Edification, Entertainment, and Kyokutei Bakin’s “Natso Satomi hakkenden.” Can you briefly describe the central idea or argument?

Glynne Walley (GW): Essentially, I’m looking at how a mid-nineteenth-century popular writer with aspirations toward capital-L Literature used a rhetoric of didacticism to satisfy both the demands of entertaining readers and his own desire to turn the novel into something Serious. The writer in question, Kyokutei Bakin (1767–1848) was one of Japan’s first professional authors of fiction, and he accomplished that by being acutely aware of what audiences wanted. At the same time, under the influence of masterworks in Chinese vernacular fiction, he had an idea that fiction, which his society considered beneath intellectual notice, could be a vehicle for serious ideas. It was a negotiation that other novelists in other places were also engaged in, but since Japan was operating largely outside their influence at that moment, Bakin makes an interesting case study of how the tensions between commerce and Art played out in a different and very specific context.

KB: What led you to this topic?

GW: The novel I focus on—Nansō Satomi hakkenden (Hakkenden for short, and Eight Dogs in English)—was hugely popular in its day, acutely influential on the next couple of generations, and remains crucially important to literary history, both for its intrinsic worth and for the role it played in debates over the modernization of fiction at the end of the nineteenth century. Despite this, it has been almost entirely neglected in Anglophone scholarship—mentioned, but seldom analyzed. It was time for a monograph on Hakkenden, I felt, and if nobody else was going to do it, I figured I might as well give it a shot.

KB: I’m burying the lede here a little bit because you are also, of course, the translator of Bakin’s Hakkenden! This is a monumental task—Hakkenden is massively long, immensely complex, and challenging to translate. What were the particular difficulties that this translation posed?

GW: Hakkenden is a massively long work! The modern edition I work from is nearly six thousand pages. The biggest challenges relate to that—and no doubt that length is one thing that kept the work largely untouched by Anglophone scholars and translators. Perhaps the smartest thing would have been to come up with a volume of highlights (a few short excerpts had already appeared in anthologies), but since the scale was part of the point of the work, I really wanted to see the whole thing in English.

The other big challenge is the language. It’s written in classical Japanese, which is grammatically and syntactically quite different from modern Japanese. The author writes in a wide array of styles within classical Japanese, drawing from literary masterpieces from Japan and China as well as the popular theater and fiction of his day, making for a really diverse stylistic palette. And he’s also incorporating a lot of elements of vernacular (as opposed to classical) Chinese writing, which adds a distinctive flavor, but which is, in a way, much harder for the modern reader than classical Chinese. Understanding all these registers, which are freely mixed in virtuoso ways, is hard enough, but the translator, of course, wants to try to capture them in English . . . 

KB: What led you to start translating it? Did you always plan to do the entire thing, or was there a moment where you sort of gave in and realized—I guess I might as well do the whole book?

GW: I’ve always been one of these translation-obsessed types who, when I’m reading a work in another language, always has one part of my brain thinking about how I might handle a particular phrase or tone. I can’t help it. So when I discovered Hakkenden, it was inevitable that I’d experiment with translating it. I told myself at first I’d do just a chapter or two to see how it worked out, and then I was having so much fun that I figured I’d keep going. I knew nobody else was going to do it!

“Having so much fun,” I wrote, and I mean it. All those difficulties of style I mentioned above are the kind of thing that gives translators headaches, but of course they’re also the kind of thing that translators love. I, at least, translate because I’m fascinated (in both the modern sense and the older, magical sense) by the process of wrestling with a text until I feel I understand what it’s doing, and then wrestling with English until I feel I’ve found a way to make it do something similar, or at least something suggestive of similarity.

KB: Let’s imagine that fifty years from now, Hakkenden has become massively popular in the Anglophone world, such that several other people couldn’t resist the urge to do their own translation. When future people are comparing those various translations, how do you think/hope yours would be characterized?

GW: If Hakkenden ever gets retranslated, that will mean this translation spurred enough interest to make space for a second one. I’d be thrilled by that, even if the next translation supersedes mine in every way—accuracy, scholarly depth, beauty.

Even if that happens, I hope and suspect mine will be remembered as the most complete, and not just because I doubt anybody in the future would attempt more than highlights. I’ve also been making a point of translating all the paratexts, including things like title pages, patent-medicine ads, and lists of errata, that I’ve never seen translated in any premodern Japanese text. One of my aims is to make the “bookness” of Hakkenden apparent in English, and I hope that effort will be valued by future readers and scholars.

KB: Were you working on the translation and the monograph at the same time? How did translating the book inform the academic project, and vice versa?

GW: I love this question, because it speaks to the value of translation as a scholarly activity! I was working on the translation all through my work on the dissertation, and then on the monograph that grew out of the dissertation. The translation took a back seat to the monograph, but I was always working on it, which informed the monograph research immensely; it kept the text always fresh in my mind, kept me rediscovering aspects of the text, and ensured that I understood the text on a deep enough level to write about it. Translation is a continuous process of problem-solving, and I found that many of the problems I had to solve in the translation ended up being things I needed or wanted to analyze in the monograph.

And of course the reverse is true as well. My translation choices were (and are) informed by the research that went into the monograph. Translation is always an interpretation, and my interpretation was formed through constructing and supporting the argument in the monograph. I hope the translation also opens up the text to other interpretations, but I know it can’t help but be informed by the way I interpret the text’s meaning.

KB: Let’s say someone wanted to be an autodidact and create a syllabus for themselves centered around Good Dogs—what works of fiction would they need/want to read along with it? Hakkenden, obviously, but are there others?

GW: The big one would be a work of Chinese vernacular fiction called Shuihu zhuan, a title variously translated as Outlaws of the Marsh, The Water Margin, All Men Are Brothers, etc. Hakkenden is an adaptation of Shuihu zhuan—a very playful, distant adaptation. I write about how Hakkenden responds to Shuihu zhuan both on a plot level, playing games with reader expectations, and on a thematic level, positioning itself as a critique of the original’s moral underpinnings (or lack thereof).

I’d also recommend the translations of works by Santō Kyōden found in Adam Kern’s monograph Manga From the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and the Kibyōshi of Edo Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2006). Kyōden was Bakin’s mentor (and disclosure: Kern was mine!), and the comic fiction he specialized in was something Bakin also wrote, but later moved away from. Bakin wanted to redefine popular fiction; Kyōden epitomized the definition of popular fiction that Bakin wanted to revise.

One other work I’d recommend for thinking about Hakkenden, although I don’t discuss it in Good Dogs, is The Tale of the Heike (Heike monogatari). This is a classic medieval war tale based on events of the late twelfth century, and exemplifies the kind of Buddhism-heavy samurai story that Bakin was looking back to in Hakkenden. A lot of his battle scenes and thinking about medieval warriors’ morality comes from texts like Heike.

KB: How does understanding your argument in Good Dogs provide a new perspective on contemporary world literature? How does this change the landscape or reveal new aspects?

GW: Something I’ve thought about a lot since starting this whole project is how a sense of didacticism in literature or culture is still with us, even though we don’t think of it that way. Hakkenden was openly didactic, and that was part of what bothered literary modernizers about it. I spend much of my monograph engaging with the specific rhetoric of didacticism that Bakin used,  and what that taught me was that we can also think of didacticism in a much broader sense—that when we do, we can see it at work in a lot of contemporary culture.

One thing Bakin saw in didacticism was a way to construct stories that readers would find satisfying.  We like to see good guys win and bad guys lose, and that’s a kind of didacticism. We construct plots that pander to the audience’s sense of right and wrong, or challenge it, or even subvert it in ways that are either tragic (good guy loses and we feel the moral pain of it) or ironic (good guy loses and we reflect that life ain’t fair). That’s still the logic of most of our storytelling.

But we also, like Bakin, still use storytelling to advance certain arguments about right and wrong, or to think through moral issues. And this has both its adherents and its detractors, just as Bakin’s didacticism did. When someone complains about a Netflix series being too “woke” these days, aren’t they really complaining about being confronted—in what they consider a heavy-handed way—with a moral message, probably one they disagree with? And don’t most of those same series appeal (or hope to appeal) to viewers who are receptive to that same message (we might call it a vision of society), who see themselves represented in it?

So I guess I hope that I’m contributing—in a highly context-specific way—to a broader recognition that storytelling, and the worldbuilding it entails, always involves reifying a certain conception of right and wrong, locating characters within that conception, and maybe showing them moving toward one or the other. Whether it’s doing that simply to entertain, or because it has something to say about these conceptions of right and wrong, is the big question.

A completely different answer to this question would have to do with the way Japanese fiction and culture are perceived in the world. When I was first becoming aware of Japan back in the 1980s, the West still had the old cherry-blossoms-and-geishas image of it. That is, it imagined Japanese culture as being all about delicate, fleeting beauty, usually captured in suggestive miniatures—the haiku, in other words. Several decades of Murakami Haruki and Neon Genesis Evangelion have pretty much exploded that notion, in terms of modern and contemporary Japan. But I suspect that most people’s image of premodern, so-called “traditional,” Japanese literature is still tied to the gentle pathos and eros of the Tale of Genji, as well as the lapidary insights of Bashō and other poets. Hakkenden represents a whole other side of premodern Japan: big, messy, intellectually sophisticated, verbose, and populist. Japanese literature contains multitudes, and I hope an awareness of Hakkenden in English helps make that clear.

KB: More broadly: why should people read Hakkenden, or other Edo-period Japanese fiction? Do you think they should, or do you see this as more of an obscure thing that maybe only specialists/academics are into?

GW: I hope it’s not just an obscure thing that only specialists/academics are into! But reaching beyond that audience is definitely a challenge. I see Hakkenden as one of the most entertaining (and thought-provoking) adventure novels I’ve ever encountered, and I think people who enjoy things like The Three Musketeers or Lord of the Rings would find a lot to love in it. I hope it finds an audience among such readers. I also see a lot of echoes of Hakkenden in contemporary Japanese popular culture; not only are there explicit adaptations of Hakkenden into anime and manga, I recognize bits of its story in things like InuYasha and Dragonball. Anyone interested in some of the deeper roots of things like that should find Hakkenden illuminating.

KB: Do you have any favorite translators?

GW: Royall Tyler is kind of my idol. His translations of noh plays attempt poetry where most translators would settle for prose, and create some exquisite effects. And his Tale of Genji manages the miracle of making you appreciate the indirection and artful vagueness of the textual world. And now that he’s retired, he’s been self-publishing translations of things that need to be done but that, perhaps, no press would be interested in. Speaking of that, there’s an independent scholar named robin gill (lowercase) who self-publishes these wild-eyed, overstuffed translations of haiku and other early modern Japanese poetic forms, which get at the meanings and music in ways more conventional approaches often can’t. He renders each verse multiple times, adds exhaustive annotations, and asks you to triangulate on the original that way.

Glynne Walley is an Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Good Dogs: Edification, Entertainment, and Kyokutei Bakin’s Nansō Satomi hakkenden (Cornell East Asia Series, 2017) and the translator of Kyokutei Bakin’s Eight Dogs, or Hakkenden: Part One: an Ill-Considered Jest (Cornell University Press: 2022).

Katarzyna Bartoszyńska is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literatures in English and the Program of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Ithaca College. She is the author of Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press: 2021). She is also a translator, most recently, of Zygmunt Bauman’s Culture and Art, and Sketches in the Theory of Culture (Polity, 2021: 2018). 

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