Ugetsu Monogatari
Largely adapted from traditional Japanese and Chinese ghost stories, the collection is among the most important works of Edo period (1603–1867) and kaidan literature, and is considered a predecessor of the yomihon genre.
Kenji Mizoguchi's award-winning film Ugetsu (1953), credited with helping popularize Japanese cinema in the West, was adapted from two of the collection's stories.
[11] It was part of a new genre of books that had become popular in the 18th century: translations of Chinese stories adapted to fit into Japanese culture and historical settings.
[9][5] This was not viewed as plagiarism, as "the notion of the artist prevalent in [his] time defined [literary] practice as one involving an adaptation of the tradition.
[5][11][9] Notably, Ueda, a devoted kokugaku scholar, went farther than his contemporaries in changing the source material to remove evidence of its Chinese origins.
[9] Like other members of the kokugaku movement, he utilized fiction as a tool to reinvigorate Japan's past, by bringing to life the aesthetics of antiquity in the present.
[11][5] Ugetsu Monogatari is one of the best-known and most highly regarded kaidan-shu, collections of supernatural or ghost stories that became popular in Japan during the Edo period.
[5][9] Ueda continued this trend of secularization in Ugetsu Monogatari, removing certain religious elements from stories such as Asaji ga Yado and Kibitsu no Kama.
[11] He references his non-didactic approach to fiction writing in the preface of the book, joking that, unlike other well-known authors such as Lo Kuan-chung and Murasaki Shikibu, whom some Confucian and Buddhist scholars of the time believed had received divine punishment for leading readers astray, he was safe from divine punishment because no one was expected to believe his writing to be truthful.
[11] The secularization of kaidan was amplified by an interest among intellectuals of the time, especially among Neo-Confucianists, in using logic grounded in Confucian yin-yang theory to find mundane explanations for supernatural phenomena.
[9][5] Ueda, however, rejected mundane explanations for supernatural phenomena, believing that only Japanese folk belief could explain such events.
[9] Prominent Japanese literary scholar Donald Keene argued that the value of Shiramine lies in its "overpowering beauty of style", which may be difficult to parse when read in translation or without the necessary historical context.
In Kikka no Chigiri, a warrior falls ill while trying to return from a mission on behalf of his lord and becomes dear friends with the man who nurses him back to health.
[4] Asagi ga Yado, set in the year 1452, tells the tale of an irresponsible man who leaves his devoted wife behind to try to rebuild his fortune selling silk in the capital.
When the man awakes the next morning, he discovers that the house is in ruins and all that is left of their marital bedroom is the grave of his long-dead wife, whose ghost he had seen the night before.
He finds an old man, the sole resident who had been there since before the war, who tells him the story of his wife's death and compares it to the legend of Mama no Tekona.
The man is delighted to find that the ghosts share his love of poetry and antiquity studies; they spend the night discussing these things.
[11] Ueda added the love triangle element and, as with Asaji ga Yado, gave his version of the protagonist more distinct personality traits and made him directly responsible for the story's tragedy.
[11] Jasei no In is a bildungsroman in which a dissolute second son, impoverished due to primogeniture, falls in love with a white snake disguised as a beautiful woman.
[11][4] Hinpuku-ron is set around the year 1595 and was inspired by a real samurai from that era, who was known for being obsessed with money despite the anti-wealth ideals of bushido.
[11][4] The latter point directly contradicted the Buddhist and Confucian teaching common in Ueda's time that wealth is a reward for good behavior in a past life.
[4] Economist and literature researcher Waldemiro Francisco Sorte Junior argued that Hinpuku-ron is one of the many Edo period stories that used a historical setting to veil criticisms of contemporary society and government that could not be said directly because of the censorship laws of the time.
[4] The first English translation was published by Wilfred Whitehouse in Monumenta Nipponica in 1938[21] and 1941[22] under the title Ugetsu Monogatari: Tales of a Clouded Moon.
[7][8] Subsequent English translations have been published by Dale Saunders (1966),[23] Kenji Hamada (1972),[24] Leon Zolbrod (1974) and Anthony H. Chambers (2006).
