New Chronicles of Yanagibashi and Diary of a Journey to the West: Narushima Ryūhoku Reports from Home and Abroad

460 Pages·2010·15.618 MB·English

by  Matthew Fraleigh, Ryuhoku Narushima

NEW CHRONICLES OF YANAGIBASHI
AND
DIARY OF A JOURNEY TO THE WEST

N C
EW HRONICLES OF
Y
ANAGIBASHI
AND
D J
IARY OF A OURNEY
TO THE WEST

NARUSHIMA RYŪHOKU
REPORTS FROM HOME
AND ABROAD

Translated with a
Critical Introduction and Afterword
by

MATTHEW FRALEIGH

East Asia Program
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
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Number 151 in the Cornell East Asia Series
Copyright © 2010 by Matthew Fraleigh. All rights reserved
ISSN 1050-2955
ISBN: 978-1-933947-21-1 hc
ISBN: 978-1-933947-51-8 pb
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010931918
Printed in the United States of America.
○∞The paper in this book meets the requirements for permanence of IS0
9706:1994

Calligraphy on title page and section divisions by Yanagimoto Katsumi

CAUTION: Except for brief quotations in a review, no part of this book may
be reproduced or utilized in any form without permission in writing from the
author. Please address inquiries to Matthew Fraleigh in care of the East Asia
Program, Cornell University, 140 Uris Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-7601.
Contents

List of Figures ................................................................................................. vi
Acknowledgments .......................................................................................... vii
Introduction ..................................................................................................... ix
A note on the translations ..........................................................................l viii
New Chronicles of Yanagibashi (Volume I) ......................................................... 1
New Chronicles of Yanagibashi Volume II ........................................................ 73
New Chronicles of Yanagibashi Volume III Preface and Foreword .................. 137
Diary of a Journey to the West ........................................................................ 145
Afterword ..................................................................................................... 311
Glossary ........................................................................................................ 337
Works Cited .................................................................................................. 346
Index ............................................................................................................. 375
v
List of Figures
1. Woodcut from the second volume of New Chronicles of
Yanagibashi.
2. Map of Sumida River and environs.
3. Photograph of a yanebune roofed pleasure-boat, circa 1871.
4. Narushima Ryūhoku’s diary entry for the twenty-first day of the
fifth month of Ansei 4 [June 12, 1857].
5. Title page from the first volume of New Chronicles of Yanagibashi.
6. Textual excerpt from the first volume of New Chronicles of
Yanagibashi.
7. Handwritten copy of Matsumoto Hakuka’s partial transcription
of Narushima Ryūhoku’s original overseas travel diary.
8. Photograph of Okiku, proprietress of the Yūmeirō Teahouse,
circa 1872.
9. Photograph of the Yūmeirō Teahouse, circa 1872.
10. Calligraphic inscription of prefatory poems from the second
volume of New Chronicles of Yanagibashi.
11. Photograph of Narushima Ryūhoku taken in Japan, circa 1867.
12. Photograph of Narushima Ryūhoku taken at Langerock of Paris,
circa 1873.
13. Photograph of Narushima Ryūhoku and David Carr Binnie
taken by Shimooka Renjō, Yokohama, July 1873.
14. Excerpt from David Carr Binnie’s travel diary for 1873.
vi
Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the many scholars who have helped in
various ways with the realization of this manuscript. Jay Rubin, Edwin
Cranston, and Harold Bolitho fostered my earliest interest in kanshibun
and encouraged my work on Narushima Ryūhoku in particular. In
Kyoto I was fortunate to work with Hino Tatsuo during his final years
at Kyoto University, and was equally lucky to have the chance to read a
great many kanshi with Fukui Tatsuhiko. I have also benefited from
conversations on my work with Kawai Kōzō, Ōtani Masao, Niina
Noriko, Nakajima Takana, Ju Chiou-er, and Chia-ning Chang. I have
learned a great deal from several scholars of Chinese, including Paul
Rouzer, Yu Feng, and Chen Yizhen.
Sumie Jones and University of Hawai‘i Press kindly allowed
me to pursue the publication of my full translation of New Chronicles of
Yanagibashi even though a short selection from it appears in a different
format in the forthcoming An Anthology of Meiji Literature. Her
co-editors Robert Campbell and Charles Inouye were also extremely
generous in offering advice in various ways.
Robin Feuer-Miller, Steve Dowden, David Powelstock,
Harleen Singh, Hiroko Sekino, and all of my other colleagues in the
German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literature Department
have made Brandeis a wonderful place to work and I am grateful for
their advice and encouragement. Aida Wong, the chair of the East
Asian Studies Program, shares my intellectual interests in Sino-Japanese
cultural exchange and has been very supportive.
Along the way, my research has been assisted by grants from
the Fulbright Association, the Blakemore Foundation, the U.S.
Department of Education, Harvard University, the Reischauer Institute
vii
for Japanese Studies, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science,
and Brandeis University. I am thankful for the support of these
institutions and am pleased to acknowledge a publishing subvention
from the Theodore and Jane Norman Fund.
Mai Shaikhanuar-Cota at Cornell has been an enthusiastic
proponent of the project and I appreciate her help in guiding the
manuscript toward publication. Micah Auerback, Banno Kayoko, Linda
Cheung, Vernica Downey, Barry Hinman, Anita Israel, Dzintra Lacis,
Matsumoto Kajimaru, Lauren Malcolm, Eric McGhee, Kuniko McVey,
and Emi Shimokawa facilitated my access to various rare library or
archive materials. Jonathan Abel, Haengja Chung, Jim Mandrell, Kazuya
Ōya, Rebecca Suter, and Larry Schehr gave their expertise and
assistance in various domains. I am especially indebted to Paul Warham
and Glynne Walley for their generous advice and commentary. Anne
Allison, Ishiguro Keishō, Noboru Koyama, Kokumai Shigeyuki,
Kuniyoshi Sakae, Nagai Kikue, Christian Polak, Timon Screech, and
Tsuruta Tōru kindly shared their own work. Alexander Akin, Steve
Hanna, Mark Quigley, and Jason Webb have all provided illuminating
suggestions and welcome diversions while I put together this
manuscript. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their
encouragement, as well as Yanagimoto Katsumi, who has been a
wonderful companion over the years that I have been working on this
project.

viii
Introduction

Narushima Ryūhoku (1837–1884) was an important literary
figure whose career straddled the Meiji Restoration. Born into a family
of Confucian scholars who had served the Tokugawa shogunate for
two centuries, Ryūhoku held the prestigious post of okujusha, which
included such academic and intellectual responsibilities as tutoring the
shoguns in the Chinese classics and overseeing the editing of official
histories. In the tumultuous mid-1860s, he served in even more central
military and administrative positions within the Tokugawa government,
first as an officer in its new Western-style cavalry unit, and then briefly
as second-in-command of the treasury and foreign ministries. After the
collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate and the founding of a new
government in 1868, Ryūhoku elected not to serve the fledgling Meiji
regime in spite of invitations from several of its key officials. Yet far
from retreating into obscurity, Ryūhoku built upon his past experiences
and endeavors as a poet and writer to carve out a new position for
himself as a pioneering journalist, editing the Chōya shinbun newspaper,
founding one of Japan’s first literary magazines, Kagetsu shinshi, and
continuing to take an active role in Meiji society as a widely read critic,
satirist, and commentator.
ix
The continuity of Ryūhoku’s literary activities on either side
of the Meiji Restoration means that he frustrates the neat categories of
Japanese literary history that conventionally take the year 1868 as a
decisive pivot. Perhaps the best index of this dual status is the way in
which the works of his translated here have been incorporated into the
schemas of postwar literary anthologies. His Ryūkyō shinshi (New
Chronicles of Yanagibashi), for example, is the final selection in
Iwanami Shoten’s Shin Nihon koten bungaku taikei (New compendium of
classical Japanese literature), a definitive edition of annotated primary
texts from the classical canon that was published in one hundred
volumes between 1989 and 2005. Likewise, a generous sampling of
Ryūhoku’s kanshi (poems in literary Chinese) is included in the tenth
and final volume of the Edo shijin senshū (Selection of Edo-period
kanshi poets), also published by Iwanami between 1990 and 1993.
Despite such classical categorization, however, Ryūhoku’s works have
also been among the first to be included in multi-volume sets of the
modern literary canon. For example, both Nihon gendai bungaku zenshū
(Complete works of Japanese contemporary literature), a massive
collection of 108 volumes that Kōdansha published in the 1960s, as
well as the sixty-volume Nihon kindai bungaku taikei (Compendium of
modern Japanese literature) published by Kadokawa Shoten beginning
later that decade, place New Chronicles of Yanagibashi in their first
volumes. Similarly, Chikuma Shobō’s more narrowly circumscribed Meiji
bungaku zenshū (Complete works of Meiji literature), which was
launched in 1965, includes both New Chronicles of Yanagibashi and
Ryūhoku’s overseas travelogue Diary of a Journey to the West in its fourth
volume, and its volume on Meiji Chinese poetry, edited by Kanda
Kiichirō, includes several selections from Ryūhoku’s kanshi.
Most recently, in what can be read as a recognition of the
limitations of the 1868 divide, an affirmation of the interpenetration of
x