From Madness To Murder: Victorian Novel As Ninjôbanashi

Abstract

When General Grant was visiting Japan in 1879, Ichikawa Danjûrô, one of the foremost kabuki actors of the day, portrayed the ex-president as a twelfth-century samurai hero. Six years later the legendary Danjûrô performed a very different role, that of a contemporary ex-samurai forced, through social changes brought about by the Meiji Restoration, to eke out a meager living as an innkeeper. The play itself, Seiyôbanashi Nihon utsushie (A Western Tale as Japanese Magic Lantern Show, 1885), was a dramatization of an oral epic tale narrated by one of the premier professional storytellers of the day, San’yûtei Enchô (1839–1900). Enchô’s story was, in turn, an adaptation of a Victorian novel, Charles Reade’s Hard Cash. This chapter will focus on the vibrant Meiji world of professional storytelling, in particular the important role oral storytellers played as entertainers of the masses, and examine how oral adaptations of Western novels mirrored the contemporary world. In the process I will show how Enchô’s hon’anmono of a propagandistic British novel was tailored to the concerns of his diverse and changing audience.

The [storyteller] is one of the institutions of Japan. Sometimes by reading a low native novel, or by extemporising some story of vulgar fun, he gathers a little audience around him in the public street, or exhibits for a pecuniary reward his mimic powers among the inmates of a private dwelling.

—George Smith, Bishop of Hong Kong 1861¹

[Enchô], a. . . story-teller of Tokio, also composes in the colloquial style. Indeed his novels are first delivered in a spoken form, and are taken down in writing.. . . Some of his plots are said to be taken from the French.

—W. G. Aston, 1899²

The ordinary novel, which deals. . . with shadows only, is one kind of property, a story that cuts deep into realities. . . and has already set hundreds discussing it as history and law, is a different thing; it finds buyers as well as readers, and that amongst a class that does not buy novels as a rule.

—Charles Reade³