Monogatari, The Meiji Years, and Japan's Oral Storytelling Tradition
By David McElhinney
One of Lafcadio Hearn’s greatest short stories is Mimi-nashi Hoichi, the tale of Hoichi the Earless. A blind bard in Shimonoseki, Hoichi was “famous for his skill in recitative and in playing upon the biwa,” and was said to sing of the battles between the Genji and Heike clans with such emotive power that even the goblins were stirred to tears. Late one evening, while living at Amidaji Temple, Hoichi is summoned by a nameless samurai to play for a great lord and his retinue. The history of the war would take several nights to recite, so Hoichi is asked to focus on the battle of Dan-no-ura:
“Then Hoichi lifted up his voice, and chanted the chant of the wild fight on the bitter sea, –wonderfully making his biwa to sound like the straining of oars and the rushing of ships, the whir and the hissing of arrows, the shouting and trampling of men, the crashing of steel upon helmets, the plunging of slain in the flood. And in the pauses of his playing he could hear, to left and right of him, voices of men and women murmuring wonder and praise : ‘How marvelous an artist!’ ‘Never was playing like this heard in our own province!’ ‘Not in all the empire is there another such singer as Hoichi.’”
That Hoichi turns out to be playing for a gathering of ghosts, one of whom lops off the bard’s ears, is unfortunate – but beside the point. Nor do I mean to draw attention to the vivid battle descriptions or Hearn’s eccentric punctuation. What’s interesting about this story from a historical perspective is that Hoichi, a blind bard of near-mythical repute, recounting the empire’s histories in temple courtyards and lordly halls, is typical of the oral storytelling tradition that thrived in Japan for centuries.
A History of Spoken Word
Because Japan adopted Chinese script around the 5th or 6th century, many of its ancient texts and literary compilations – the Man'yoshu (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves), the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters), the Nihon Shoki (Chronicles of Japan) – have existed in written form since their early iterations. It would, therefore, be logical to assume that oral storytelling declined as the written word boomed.
But Japan's best-known monogatari – a style of court literature meaning “telling of things,” sometimes translated to “narratives” or “epics” – were defined by their orality, with a communicative basis in speech rather than writing. Indicators of orality include repetition, formulaic expressions, rhythmic flow, and strong imagery. These helped with memorization (vital for a script-less storyteller) and are defining features of works like Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji, even in its English translation, which is at several removes from the 11th-century original.
Women at the time were discouraged from overt displays of intelligence and would have conducted much of their education in secret, so it’s doubtful there was a preliterate version of the story that Shikibu herself would have performed. But as the authors of The Tale of Genji - A Japanese Classic Illuminated noted, Shikibu’s diary indicates that she surpassed her brother in studies and was well-versed in the Chinese songs and poetry popular in Heian courts.
“No work of Chinese literature had more influence on The Tale of Genji than Bai Juyi’s ‘Song of Everlasting Sorrow,’” they wrote, “and his individual poems reproduced in Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing (Wakan roeishu) proved a lasting source of inspiration.”
Despite the growing number of canonized texts in Heian Japan, literature was the preserve of the upper classes, and huge swaths of the population still relied on verbal communication to enhance their understanding of the world. So itinerant storytellers and eyewitnesses to the great events of the age used their voices – and often instruments – to disseminate this information among the masses. Some scholars maintain that a vibrant oral tradition coexisted among all levels of society throughout the Heian (794-1185) and medieval (1185-1603) periods. This took many forms: campfire raconteuring, samurai attending events known as hyakumonogatari kaidankai (a “gathering of 100 supernatural tales”), proselytizing Buddhist preachers, masterless samurai exchanging stories for food or lodging, and musical bards in the employ of priests or lords.
As Japan entered a sustained era of peace in the 1600s, which would continue unabated for 260-some years, storytellers became professional entertainers in their own right. Some were categorized as hanashika, “raconteurs,” who performed without scripts and used light visual aids like fans and hand towels to engender their narratives with touches of theater. Others were known as kodanshi, “expositors,” whose performances had the air of a sermon. Standing upon a platform and gripping the lectern, they’d paraphrase passages from classic works or dense military histories and add snippets of commentary, treading the line, no doubt, between entertainment and propaganda.
Theaters, called yose, sprang up at the turn of the 19th century to accommodate the popularity of such storytellers, many of whom were diversifying to appeal to new audiences. Masters of the craft, known as shin’uchi, became the talk of the town, comedians performed rakugo (literally “fallen words”) while kneeling on cushions, magicians called kijutsushi stunned crowds with sleight-of-hand tricks and illusions, acting troupes specialized in skits and myths, and bards frightened with ghost stories and tales of strange things.
Then, in 1868, came the Meiji era, the promise of a global Japan, and a new dawn for storytelling.
The Meiji Era: A Golden Age
The Meiji era is seen as a golden age of oral storytelling in Japan: “By the nineteenth century storytelling occupied a cultural space in Japan's urban centers analogous to that of the cinema today, and professional storytellers became urban celebrities,” wrote the scholar J. Scott Miller.
Political reforms allowed for greater social mobility, meaning people began flooding into the cities for work and leisure, causing the demand for stories to grow in lockstep. There were hundreds of yose in Tokyo alone, at least one in every district, staging everything from pithy comedic monologues to episodic tales of love and war to dramatic recreations of Western classics. An Australian-born expat, Henry Black, who came of age in Meiji-era Tokyo, performed some of these “transmuted” works, including The Count of Monte Cristo and The Merchant of Venice, under the stage name Shodai Kairakutei Burakku. Black’s exotic theater proved a hit, inspiring Japanese performers to reimagine more stories from the Western canon for local audiences.
Educational reforms, including compulsory schooling, also fostered radical shifts in society. Japan was soon one of the world’s most literate countries. Newspapers, periodicals, novels, even works in translation, were becoming more accessible, yet the public still favored storytelling in the old way. There are numerous reasons for this – the social aspect of communal entertainment, attending the theater to show one’s cultural appreciation – but chief among them was the archaic nature of Japanese writing.
The genbun itchi movement, which unified writing and speech into a modern vernacular, didn’t get underway until the late 19th century. “The situation in Meiji Japan would be comparable to a modern England where everyone spoke contemporary English but for all written tasks would employ the language of Chaucer,” argues Miller. The upshot is that true written comprehension was still reserved for the elite until the fashionable new shorthand was popularized.
When this took off in the 1880’s and ‘90s, it allowed oral stories called sokkibon, or“shorthand books”, mined from yose performances, to be republished in the daily press in a style that mirrored modern speech. Storytellers’ reputations grew as their words were printed in a way that was digestible and familiar to the average reader, thereby bringing more crowds into the theater. That Japan’s national archives hold hundreds of sokkibon titles published around the turn of the 20th century evidences the richness of oral storytelling in the post-literate era.
Oral Storytelling in Japan Today
Of course, oral storytelling has its place in modern Japanese society. Taken broadly, it could encompass everything from theater and kabuki to stand-up comedy and poetry readings. But if we attach a bit more specificity to the meaning, it’s clear that traditional storytellers have watched their opportunities dwindle thanks to the proliferation of modern media: manga and light novels; video games, films, and TV shows; and internet-based entertainment like podcasts, influencers, and YouTube channels.
True, you can still find old-school hanashika performing to tourists in provincial towns. I was invited to one such event in Akita Prefecture, where a genial old lady with a stern face told us the tale of a pond-dwelling kappa creature from Japanese folklore. The local dialect and speed of speech made her narration near-impossible to follow, but I had to admire her commitment to keep the artform alive. Kamishibai, meaning “paper drama,” storytelling using picture cards and dramatic narration, is also battling for survival. Commonly performed on street corners when Japan was in the throes of economic depression in the early Showa Period (1926-1989), it became such a vital outlet for the nation’s youth that a 1933 op-ed in the Asahi Shimbun likened it to opium for children. As schools began to see analog equipment as outdated in postwar Japan, the government excised kamishibai from the national curriculum. But some kindergartens still use it as a pedagogic tool, while modern translations of kamishibai cards and guerilla artists delivering kamishibai performances on street corners across the world are opening the craft to new audiences.
Rakugo, also combining basic props and monologues, is perhaps the most common form of traditional oral storytelling today. Long considered an uncultured cousin to the more bourgeois theater styles in feudal Japan, it features a lone performer kneeling on a cushion and playing the various characters in the story. It’s thought of as purely comedic, but shows can straddle genres, from horror stories to narratives exploring the human condition. Rakugo retains a place on the live performance calendar in Tokyo and Osaka and shows are even staged in English by bilingual performers like the Canadian-born rakugoka Katsura Sunshine.
For centuries, an oral tradition was so much more than entertainment. It formed the collective memory of large portions of society; it was the basis of the stories they told themselves; it’s how they made sense of their history, their world, and their place within it. Modern storytellers may not have the mythical quality of Hoichi the Earless, they may not be the subject of folktales and legends, and they won’t attract the crowds of a hot new J-pop or idol band. But their work can still connect us to the past: to an ancient past that predates Japan’s oldest records and to a literary canon that includes some of the greatest stories ever told. Japan may see beauty in the impermanent, but its oral tradition is something worth protecting.
About the Author: David is a Northern Irish freelance journalist, writer and editor based in Tokyo and the UK. Fusing reporting and social commentary with extensive experience traveling throughout the country, he has published stories on travel, arts and culture, politics and current affairs, and sports in Japan. His work has appeared in a range of national and international publications online and in print. You can find links to his work at www.davidmcelhinney.com.
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