Book Review: 水木しげるの妖怪事典

As promised yesterday, I'm back with more info about the cool new book I got!

I know I've mentioned it before, but I study in waves. When I'm in the mood to study, I burn through Kanji like nobody's business. When I'm not in the mood to study though, I pretty much just lay on my tatami for a month and a half... like nobody's business.

So one of the biggest challenges for me is finding things to help me study that don't feel like studying.

From what I understand, the reading portions of the 2kyuu JLPT can get pretty brutal, so I've gotten in the habit of picking up books in Japanese that look like the kind of stuff I'd be interested in anyway. I know a lot of people who use manga to practice like this. I recommend doing that too, although I personally find myself more likely to skip words I don't know if I can tell what's going on because of the pictures.

This book, though, is perfect for me. Only one picture per page with a nice block of accompanying text explanation, it catalogs the demons and ghosts of Japan without coming off too encyclopedia-esque. The writer, Mizuki Shigeru, is known for being the creator of the popular manga and anime ゲゲゲの鬼太郎 (GeGeGe no Kitarou), but is also considered THE leading expert/master of the 妖怪 (youkai: spirits, ghosts, etc) world. Try buying a book about 妖怪 that's NOT written by him. Seriously, try it. Cause I did. It was hard.

Well-researched and incredibly detailed (down to the 川獺's likely responses to a variety of questions), the book is even more valuable for its application as a study tool. Instead of taking the form of a usual encyclopedia, with formulaic entries that would yield the same pattern of words and phrases ad infinitum, Mizuki writes most of the pages I've gotten to so far in a kind of autobiographical style, relating his earliest encounters with the stories of these creatures, how and where he came across them, and how and where he believed he was likely to actually encounter them. While I expected a kind of specialized encyclopedic jargon that would be good practice for reading... other encyclopedias, I got a book that creates a short, but interesting, narrative for each creature profile with broader vocabulary that I can actually use and apply.

I'll note some of the examples of sections that you can find in his book below:

• 猫の神通力：The magical powers of cats! Hear about how all kinds of nekos, believed to possess abilities and knowledge beyond humans, have used their powers in days past: causing a small-town shrine to hover above the ground to bring back it's parishioners and save it from bankruptcy. (起死回生?)


• かに坊主:The Buddhist monk crab: A traveling monk stays the night in the abandoned Crab Temple of Yamanashi-ken. He's bothered by a strange figure in a monk's visage during the night, but finding nothing suspicious about this, he tells the figure to leave him alone and resumes his sleep. In the morning, when he learns of the mysterious disappearance of the temple's former inhabitants all in one night, he suggests draining the pond behind the temple building. When they do so, they discover not only the skeletons of the missing monks, but a gigantic evil looking crab!

In addition to these anecdotes, there's tons about mermaids, giants, oni, mysterious apparitions, and more detail on the varieties and habits of かっぱ than you EVER thought possible.

This book is one in a series, so if you're interested in 妖怪 of China, or 妖怪 of the world, Mizuki's got your back.

Further recommendations for those of you who like 妖怪 too:

• About 水木しげる.
• ゲゲゲの鬼太郎.
• This movie: 妖怪大戦争by Miike Takashi, inspired by and featuring a cameo by 水木しげる.

諸行無常

しょぎょう　むじょう
shogyou mujyou

Oh MAN, do I have a long and intense post for you. And I just wanted to write about fireflies...

See, firefly season is just wrapping up in Saga, and there are some really nice places to go and watch them: long winding walks along the river in Ogi, or Tafusegawa in Saga City. I went last year and I loved it. This year, however, I've been busy, the weather's been bad, and I didn't have the time to make it out there, which makes me feel the poignancy of today's yoji all the more intensely.

Last year, when we were watching the fireflies, I heard about today's

BONUS WORD: 物の哀れ (mono no aware)

for the first time. 物の哀れ is famous for being the aesthetic heart of the Japanese literary classic The Tale of Genji*. Nirav, who was kind enough to educate me, since I've never formally studied Japanese literature, said that it was like the beauty of a sunset that reminds you that another day is ending, or the beauty of the fireflies who will light up the night for a few brief weeks and then pass away into the Grave of the Fireflies. Rikai-chan, who is smarter than me, translates 物の哀れ as an "appreciation of the fleeting nature of beauty," but I like to think of it as a little bit deeper than that. I define it as having to do with the existential sadness of being, with kind of a melancholy appreciation of the value of life due to an understanding of its transitory nature. Can you see how this concept might be deeply, deeply rooted in the Japanese psyche even to this day? No? Click here, and then read on to see why we're talking about this in relation to today's yoji: 諸行無常

Definition:
生きていることは、儚いこと。この世のいっさいの現象は常に変化・消滅して絶えない形容。
Translations:
1. The impermanence of worldly things
2. The transitory nature of life

Much as the concept of 物の哀れ was given a voice in The Tale of Genji, 諸行無常 has it's place in the opening lines of the Tale of the Heike, which tells the story of the Genpei war.

The Genpei war was fought at the end of the 12th century, between the Taira and Minamoto clans, which are also referred to as the Heike and Genji clans, respectively. Does this sound familiar to any one yet? The Original Tale of the Heike, collected in the late 1300s, has been retold and re-imagined many times, providing inspiration for manga, woodblock art, and most recently, the Miike Takashi film, Sukiyaki Western Django, which I watched last week. It features an all Japanese cast who recite their lines in English, to a very interesting effect, and it transports the feud between the clans to a place claims to be Nevada, but is clearly not. In it, Quentin Tarantino actually recites, in a bizarre narrative voice, the first lines of the book, which go something like this:

祗園精舎の鐘の声、諸行無常の響きあり。娑羅双樹の花の色、盛者必衰の理をあらわす。
おごれる人も久しからず、唯春の夜の夢のごとし。たけき者も遂にはほろびぬ、偏に風の前の塵に同じ。

The sound of the Gion Shōja bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the color of the sala flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must decline. The proud do not endure, they are like a dream on a spring night; the mighty fall at last, they are as dust before the wind.
-trans. Helen Craig McCullough

Those lines alone are enough to make me want to read the whole thing. There's another yoji buried in there, for those of you who noticed, but I'll leave it alone today because this post is dense enough.

For those of you who made it this far, know that any of this knowledge and vocab will earn you MAJOR えらい points, but if that's not enough of a reward for putting up with my ramblings, I'll also give you this small piece of advice.:

This is 紅音ほたる. She's an actress of sorts. She's also the reason that you don't EVER, EVER want to do an unfiltered Google Image search for ほたる (firefly) from your computer at work, unless you want to be reminded of the transitory and impermanent nature of having a job as a school teacher, and the fleeting beauty of receiving a paycheck. Yikes.

Notes:

• Articles on the Genpei war, the Taira and Minamoto Clans (and alternate readings of their names) all come from Wikipedia, where you too can read about them.
• Sukiyaki Western Django hasn't yet been released in the US yet, but you can probably find a DVD rip from the Japanese copy, as it's already out here. It's filmed in English, but when we watched it, we had to rely on the Japanese subtitles to understand what they were saying sometimes, so try to get those too.
• If you're going to immediately search for that girl in Google images, as I assume all of our male readers will, search in hiragana. Both ホタル and 蛍 searches will get you... pictures of fireflies.
  

例文:　Fireflyの短い寿命は諸行無常を感じさせる。Joss Whedonはまだ生きていてよかった。
The short lifespan of Firefly really makes you reflect on the impermanence of things. I'm just glad that Joss Whedon is still alive.

*Though The Tale of Genji was written in the Heian Period, the idea of 物の哀れ didn't find itself popularized until Motoori Norinaga articulated it in his definitive criticism of Genji during the Edo period.