Afterword

The short stories presented in this collection are not those considered the original authors’ best works, nor are they my personal favourites. Their selection was much more arbitrary: I simply chose the stories that inspired me to write something.

In modernizing the stories, I tried to bring the central elements of the originals to the forefront. Without getting into excruciating detail, here are the elements which struck me deepest in each story.

The Moon Over the Mountain: the anguished isolation of the tiger-poet, Li Zheng. In a Grove: the powerlessness of the husband, bound to a tree and able only to look on impotently. Run, Melos!: the joy exuded by the author’s words as they bound one scene to the next. Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees: the woman standing beside the corpses of the slain wives. Ghost Stories: the man with the bloodshot eyes, sitting there alone amidst the revelry.

I don’t really know what literature is, but I do hold a vague admiration for literary history. While I realize that what I’ve done is a little impertinent, linking my name with the names of all of these literary giants does make me happy. I hope for only two things: that those who love the original works will be willing to overlook my transgression, and that this book will inspire people to go read the originals for themselves.

This collection was written at the suggestion of Watanabe Mamiko from Shōdensha. Deciding which work to tackle next and being pushed by such immortal stories was a lot of fun. Thanks to Ms. Watanabe for giving me the opportunity.

January 15, 2007

Afterword—Bunkoban Edition

These stories were written from 2005-2006.

The project was the brainchild of Ms. Watanabe from Shōdensha, who suggested in a basement cafe on Teramachi Street that I rewrite classic masterpieces and set them in modern times.

It was quite a reckless suggestion.

The mere suggestion that you are going to revise the classics is guaranteed to draw hordes of angry people demanding to know what gives you the right. They are called classics because they have been read by countless people over the course of many years. They carry with them the love of all those readers, and love is a heavy thing. Modernizing and rewriting them in my own style likely would please no one. Come to think of it, even I would probably feel indignant seeing an eccentric rewrite of a classic which I had read and loved for many years.

So why would I—a child of delicate modern sensibilities who would rather go without eating for a day than have someone get angry at me—tackle such a project? There are three reasons.

First, the idea of rewriting The Moon Over the Mountain with an aloof, ne’er-do-well college student at its center was too much for me to resist. Second, being a writer means that I have to come up with my own stories, and compared to that rewriting classics seemed like a cinch. And finally, even if I did receive a lot of flak, I wouldn’t really lose anything.

So it was that I began to re-read the classics and write these stories.

There’s a fine line between reading and writing. Sometimes you write as if you are reading, or read as if you are writing. I sometimes get the feeling that there’s a secret nestled somewhere within this muddled chicken-or-egg problem. Writing this book has only solidified that feeling.

Reading classics while thinking about how you would rewrite them is fun. Which parts would you have to keep? How would you change the characters? Which parts still ring true today? If a hundred people were to rewrite Osamu Dazai’s Run, Melos! a hundred different Meloses would be born, dashing down a hundred different street corners.

Put another way, only stories that can withstand such repeated readings time and time again can be called classics. And that is what makes them so terrifyingly formidable.

September 2009

Afterword—Kadokawa Bunkoban Edition

Through Kyoto Streets: Run, Melos! and Four Other Stories has become part of the Kadokawa lineup, joining other titles like The Night is Short, The Tatami Galaxy, and Penguin Highway. I feel like a doting father looking upon his children, and I pray that along with the Shōdensha version this edition will go out into the world to meet many wonderful readers.

When I re-read my own works I’m always surprised at the kinds of things I manage to put to paper, but I’m especially surprised with what I wrote in Through Kyoto Streets. It’s as if there’s an external power flowing through its pages. Obviously, that power comes from the original works, which I urge you to read if you haven’t already.

Chino Bōshi has graciously written a commentary for this edition. I’m always nervous when I ask people to write for my books, and that was doubly true for this book considering how I mangled the corpus of modern literature within its pages. Many thanks from the bottom of my heart to Mr. Chino.

June 2015

Commentary—Ten Nights of Dreams

Chino Bōshi

I had this dream.

I was sitting with my arms folded at Mr. Tomihiko’s bedside. He murmured that Through Kyoto Streets: Run, Melos! and Four Other Stories was going to be published by Kadokawa. _Will it, then? _I asked, looking down at him. Indeed it will, said Mr. Tomihiko, opening his eyes wide. I could see my reflection vividly suspended in the depths of his jet-black pupils.

I very much enjoyed Through Kyoto Streets. Its short stories represent Japanese literature from a number of eras—Meiji (Mori Ōgai), Taishō (Akutagawa Ryunosuke), and Shōwa (Nakajima Atsushi, Osamu Dazai, Sakaguchi Angō)—with a cast of college ne’er-do-wells standing in for the original protagonists.

The “Four Other Stories” mentioned in the title are of course The Moon Over the Mountain, In a Grove, Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees, and Ghost Stories.

After a moment, Mr. Tomihiko spoke again.

“If you want to write the commentary, please be sure to make the deadline.”

When is the deadline? I asked.

“The sun will rise, and then it will set. Again it will rise, and again it will set. Can you finish writing it as the red sun makes its way from east to west, east to west?”

I mutely nodded. Eventually, just as Mr. Tomihiko had said, the sun came up in the east and slowly sank into the west. One, I counted.

After a while, the pale red orb arose sluggishly into the heavens once more, then sank silently beneath the horizon. I counted again: two.

The sun rose and set, rose and set, until at last I lost count. Then, a green stem sprouted from underneath a stone, growing diagonally up towards me. The pure white lily that grew at its tip gave off a scent that moved me deeply. A single star twinkled in the dawn sky.

It was then that I realized that the deadline had already arrived.

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I found myself on a maroon train. It raised a tremendous racket as it careened along the Hankyu Kyoto railway after the setting sun, though its pursuit was in vain.

I caught a conductor and asked, “Is this train going west?”

The conductor scrutinized me for a moment, finally replying, “Why do you ask?”

“Because we seem to be chasing after the setting sun.”

The conductor laughed drily, then walked off towards the women-only car.

I was filled with great unease. Before I knew it we had arrived at Jūsō Station in Osaka.

The train car was quite full. Most of the passengers seemed to be tourists on their way to see the autumn leaves. One approached me and asked if I knew literature. I was silent.

Peering into my face, the tourist told me that each of the original works which inspired this book are delightful to read. Many are surreal. Some of them are like fairy tales. Taken together they are a primer to Japanese literature for young people.

But many of those originals are reworks themselves: The Moon Over the Mountain was adapted by Nakajima Atsushi from a Chinese Tang Dynasty fable; In a Grove is Akutagawa’s reboot of a tale from the Konjaku Monogatari in the style of Ambrose Bierce’s The Moonlit Road; and Dazai Osamu used a poem by Friedrich Schiller (itself inspired by Greek mythology) as the basis for Run, Melos!

In this volume Mr. Tomihiko reworks these tales yet again. Perhaps he took inspiration from another collection of reworked tales, Dazai’s Shinshaku Shokokubanashi. The tourist returned his gaze to me, and seeing that I remained silent began to relate Dazai’s Run, Melos! to me, telling me that this story helped inspire Mr. Tomihiko’s spirit of service.

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I left the monks’ quarters and returned to my room along the corridor where the paper lamp was glowing dimly. I knelt with one knee on a floor cushion and stirred the wick. The charred, flower-like wick tip clattered onto the crimson-lacquered table, and at that same instant the room was flushed with light.

An important theme in Mr. Tomihiko’s writing emerges in the first two stories in this collection, The Moon Over the Mountain and In a Grove. That theme is the futility of that self-consciousness that is so common peculiar to youth, or in other words the cruel gulf between how you perceive yourself and how the world perceives you.

In Akutagawa’s In a Grove, the story of a robbery and murder unfolds through the testimony of multiple narrators. Mr. Tomihiko uses that technique to tell the story of an unhappy love triangle that takes place within a student film club.

Nakajima Atsushi’s The Moon Over the Mountain relates the tale of an arrogant aspiring poet. Mr. Tomihiko uses this framework to tell the story of a proud literary young man whose views are hopelessly outdated.

In the original, Yuan Can (Constable Natsume) listens to Li Zheng’s (Saitō Shūtarō’s) poem and thinks to himself, The poet himself is certainly first-rate. However, there is an element missing from his poems which prevents them from being truly great.

It is an unsentimental tale, something which Mr. Tomihiko does not miss in his reworking. Yet neither does he forget to treat the proud protagonist with a sense of compassion. It is splendidly done.

If you are familiar with the source material you will appreciate the way he changes the elements, and even if you are not you will find it fascinating nonetheless.

This book is meant simply to be enjoyed. There is little for me to dissect. And yet—

Aren’t you a samurai? How can a samurai possibly fail to write a commentary? said the monk. Seeing how you continue to flail about with your words I can only conclude that you are not a samurai. You are common riffraff, nothing more. _Ha ha, do my words anger you? _continued the monk. If you feel my words to be unjust, bring me a draft, he said, before abruptly turning away as if I was not worthy of further attention.

I shall certainly write a commentary before the table clock placed in the alcove of the adjoining room strikes the next hour. And tonight I shall enter the monk’s room again. I shall exchange the commentary for his head. That is why I must complete it. For I am a samurai.

If I cannot complete it, I must turn my blade upon myself. A samurai cannot live in shame.

As I was thinking of how beautiful my death must be, I heard the clock in the next room begin to chime.

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I am carrying a woman on my back. I believe she is an old acquaintance of mine.

To my left and right the cherry trees are blossoming. The Philosopher’s Walk is narrow. I think back to Mr. Tomihiko’s Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees, which also depicts a man carrying a woman on his back along the Philosopher’s Walk with the cherry trees in full bloom. In that work Mr. Tomihiko plucks out the theme of youthful malaise from Sakaguchi Ango’s body of work and recreates it in modern-day Japan.

“Mr. Tomihiko is quite good at portraying youthful malaise,” says the woman on my back.

“Are you reading my mind?” I ask, turning my head.

“Can’t you see the flowers dancing through the air?” comes her reply.

Two cherry blossom petals come fluttering down.

I become slightly unnerved. Carrying such a burden on my back makes me fear for my future. I look around for someplace to set her down.

“Am I heavy for you, Mr. Chino?” she asks.

“Not at all.”

“Soon I will be,” she says. “It was under that cedar, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was,” I replied.

“It was in 1988, the year of the dragon.”

Yes, I’d had a feeling it was sometime around then.

“It’s been 27 years since you lifted me onto your back and started walking.”

The moment I hear those words, the memory rushes back to me. I’d carried her on my back, walking through the darkness beneath the cherry blossoms and reading Sakaguchi Ango’s Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees. And as I realize that I am just like the mountain bandit shouldering that youthful malaise, the woman on my back becomes as heavy as Sakaguchi himself.

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Hearing that Mr. Tomihiko was revising Ōgai’s Ghost Stories before the gate of Shinnyo-dō, I walked there to take a look only to find that a great crowd had already gathered, voicing opinions on the work.

“Incredible,” some were saying. “It must be much more difficult than writing a novel of your own.”

“Ōgai, huh?” wondered another man. “In this day and age? I’d thought he was played out at this point.”

“It’s just remarkable. No other word for it. You look at the literary giants of the old days, none of ‘em holds a candle to Ōgai. I’d put him over Natsume Sōseki, even,” said another.

Mr. Tomihiko sat on his chair typing away, paying no attention whatsoever to all the hubbub as he sketched through his words the student theater troupe putting on the hyakumonogatari.

Seeing how stoically he worked, a young man turned to me and gushed, “That’s Mr. Tomihiko for you. He’s so focused it’s like we don’t even exist. Like there’s nobody else but him and Ōgai. It’s incredible!”

I glanced back at him, thinking what he’d said was interesting. Without skipping a beat, the young man continued, “Look at how he brings his characters to life. He’s completely one with his work.”

Mr. Tomihiko began to write about the scene at Shinnyo-dō. I could practically feel the late July heat shimmering in the air at Hōnen’in-cho. The way he selected his words was so natural. It was as if there were no doubts in his mind at all.

“He uses his words with such ease, the sentences and scenes just flow onto the page,” I muttered to myself in awe.

“But he isn’t using words to create sentences and scenes,” the young man said to me. “He’s just using his fingertips to unearth the sentences and scenes which are buried in his head. It’s like digging up stones from the earth; that’s why there’s no way he could make a mistake.”

This was the first time I had ever considered literature in such a light. And if that were all there was to it, anybody could do it. I suddenly was overcome with a desire to write Sōseki’s Ten Nights of Dreams, and leaving the scene returned directly home.

I started up the text editor on my MacBook Air and began to frantically type, but to my disappointment, Sōseki was nowhere to be found. I tried booting up my old Sony laptop running Windows XP, but the words were just as barren. Neither was Sōseki on my iPhone.

I tried with every writing implement I could find, but none of them was hiding Sōseki within. After the sixth dream, the words at last dried up. It was only then that I realized that the literature of Sōseki’s time is not buried within my mind. I believe now I understand why Mr. Tomihiko has remained such a popular author.

Commentary—Treading on the Tiger's Tail: Just Plain Funteresting

Kamiyama Kenji

“Is this kind of thing allowed in literature…?”

That was what popped into my mind the first time I read this book. Though it was a gripping read, I couldn’t help but feel a little worried. It certainly is possible to do things like this in anime and film, but there’s something more taboo about written literature, and I wondered whether this book might not anger fans of the original works.

I first read Through Kyoto Streets: Run, Melos! and Four Other Stories in the fall of 2007. I’m an anime director, and at the time I was in the midst of planning for an original show called Eden of the East. The characters in the show were college students worrying about their impending graduation and having to step out into the world. All of them much younger than I was, and since I didn’t go to college, I had to run around asking the younger staff what college was like these days.

One of them told me about an up-and-coming author who wrote incisive portrayals of somersaulting youths with trouble fitting into society, and suggested that I check out one of his books. This bizarre pitch was my introduction to Morimi Tomihiko, and how I ended up reading this very book. Thinking back on it, the young man who made the suggestion was quite influenced by Morimi’s works.

At first I considered reading Morimi’s debut novel Tower of the Sun, or The Night is Short which at the time was already making waves, but as I perused Morimi’s works at the bookstore the title of this book jumped out at me from the shelves. The audacity of the concept—particularly the reworking of the famous story Run, Melos!—grabbed my attention and refused to let go, so I plucked it from the bookshelf. I’d heard that this Morimi Tomihiko was around 30 years old. Yet the stories in this collection—The Moon over the Mountain, In a Grove, Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees, Ghost Stories—were all landmarks of the literary landscape. People gripe about the younger generations for their supposed lack of literacy, yet here I had stumbled upon a bold young writer who challenged that stereotype. This wasn’t just a book about degenerate college students, I soon realized, flipping through the pages and forgetting why I had come here in the first place.

I soon came across the following phrase: There once was a haughty student who possessed great renown among a select few in the Yoshida neighbourhood of Kyoto. What a wonderfully ambivalent expression.

Though I didn’t know then that these oxymorons are a Morimi special, I was hooked by the quirky, clever writing, and as the book really was about college students I soon headed for the register.

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The more I read, the more I was enthralled by the ingenuity with which Morimi recast these classics. The storylines remain unchanged, the setting is brought to modern-day Kyoto, and the characters are transmuted into slightly (very) eccentric college students. The author’s feigned pretension and his command of language unusual for one his age all inject a wonderful sense of humour into the pages.

When I work on a TV anime adaptation, I always add things which are not in the source text. These are a way to expand on the original and create something new, as well as a rare chance for me to realize the stories in my head. In that sense I’ve quietly done similar experiments as what is done in this book. I’ve transformed classic movies that I admired into animation, retaining the structure but building them anew with original characters and settings. But this must be carried out carefully to keep people from realizing what you have done, because people get angry when they think you’ve ripped something off. On the off chance that you are found out, you can still get away by using only the structure and plot devices and passing it off as a homage. But recreating an entire movie in the same format down to the title is a fairly daring venture. Not to mention, when you base your work on classics (which don’t exist in the same way in anime) you draw comparisons to the original, which almost guarantees that your project will crash and burn.

Despite my initial misgivings, when I finished reading the book I found that those concerns were unfounded after all. Though there are elements of parody it is not a parody. Neither is it an imitation or a remake. Though it borrows the bones (structure) and wears the skin (title) of the original works, it is a splendid, original tale of youth that stands on its own, perhaps even as a full novel. And most of all, it is funteresting. On that point alone I don’t think you could call it a ripoff no matter what it is titled. I once tried to base one of my works on The Moon Over the Mountain and found it terribly difficult, and because of that experience I am all the more impressed by what Morimi has done here.

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Admitting that doesn’t bother me. However, film (to say nothing of anime) already often takes a back seat to literature. If I ever ran into Morimi, as much as it galled me to do so I would probably shower praise on him, a man more than a decade my junior. But Japan boasts the masterful Kurosawa Akira and the master of animation Miyazaki Hayao, both of whom have achieved greatness doing similar things to this book. Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood is a transposition of Shakespeare’s Macbeth to Sengoku-period Japan, while Miyazaki’s Nausicaa was inspired by the Heian-period tale Mushi-mezuru himegimi as well as Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea cycle. And if you claim that those are merely film adaptations, consider the playwright-cum-director Mitani Kōki’s play Twelve Gentle Japanese (though Mitani didn’t direct the film version), which brilliantly reimagines Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men as a comedy in a Japan where trial by jury exists. Hurrah for a true trailblazer. Now I can face Morimi as a filmmaker with my head held high—or so I sputter to myself, but in the end I must admit that there is really no point to pretending I don’t feel a vague sense of defeat and envy. Not only can this book stand side by side with the classics I have just mentioned, it is a masterclass in scriptwriting and direction, and furthermore it is an invaluable field manual for those seeking to learn more about the slacker college student in his natural habitat. When I first read this book I was tempted to bring this book up at the next planning meeting, or even better yet, go directly to Morimi and urge him to write a script. My mind was bursting with possibilities, and so using my industry connections (apologies to all the Morimi fans who don’t have that luxury) I went to Kyoto in February of 2008 to visit him.

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To make a long story short, I never got to meet him. The ever shy, retiring, and (according to Honjō Manami) self-effacing Morimi did apparently consider taking precious time out of his crushing writing schedule to meet with me; however, he was bedridden with a cold owing to the uncommon flurry of snow that suddenly descended on Kyoto that day.

On the bullet train back to Tokyo, I felt strangely relieved as I looked out the window at the light snow that fell outside. Maybe it was better I didn’t meet him just yet. I still carried that jealousy in my heart; better that I try my hand one more time at reworking a classic, so that I would have something in hand when I finally did come face to face with him.

So how was Morimi able to rework the classics so fearlessly? Perhaps the answer lies in the admiration and respect he holds for them, just as Kurosawa and Miyazaki respected that which came before them.

I don’t know if I will ever reach those heights. But without this book I never even would have considered that question, and for that I am delighted and grateful.