Hizakurige

My son and I went for a bike ride today, and I took the opportunity to dash into the local second-hand book store. I purchased several books, pleased with my finds, but I glimpsed something special on the way out: a Tuttle first edition of Hizakurige (膝 栗毛), Ikku Jippensha's (十返舎一九, 1765-1831) classic comedy. It is, ostensibly, a novel about the adventures of two misfits, Yajirobei (彌次郎兵衛) and Kitahachi (喜多八), as they travel on the road from Edo to Kyoto. But it is really a travelogue, composed by Jippensha between 1802 and 1809 as a serial. Thomas Satchell first translated Hizakurige in 1929 as Shank's Mare, and that genuine first edition is apparently quite valuable. As far as I can tell, the 1960 Tuttle edition I now hold, essentially a reprint of Satchell's original translation, is itself quite a find; Amazon reports only three used copies for sale.

I was initially drawn to the book purely by its cover: a wood block print by one M. Kuwata (a Japanese woodblock artist from the 1950s). I was already tempted by the promise of something simultaneously new and antiquarian, but I was sold (or, rather, the book was) when I flipped open the cover to find that this edition was accompanied by the little-known fifth version of Hiroshige's The Fifty-three Stages of the Tokaido. The fifty-five full-colour prints (fifty-three stages plus the prologue and epilogue prints) are sprinkled throughout the book. I stood in the bookshop momentarily stunned. In my hand I held two wonders in one volume: a tale of old Japan I'd not read, and a set of nostalgic woodblock prints, admittedly small, by Hiroshige.

As to Jippensha, he was the son of a minor official and worked in administrative posts himself, at least until he turned to literature to earn his livelihood. Apparently, he had little patience for hypocrisy or pomposity, hating priests and contemptuous of swaggering samurai. One wonders how much of the humour in Hizakurige disguises a more sober social commentary. Perhaps ironically, he is buried in the grounds of the Zenryuji, at Asakusa, Tokyo; how it must grate on his spirit. Three years after his death relatives and friends raised a monument to him, with an inscription and a poem. The poem reads:

My allotted span of life has passed;
Oh, give me peace and rest at last!

The companion inscription is particularly apt, and I quote one part:

[T]hings of which people never tire are a bright moonlight night and dinner, to which may be added a book and sake.

Well, Mr Jippensha, I don't have any sake, but I have your book, and methinks it will suffice. Kampai!