29 Chinese migrants in Rome have unsettled relations with the autochthonous population due to a diffuse structural nostalgia for the past beauty of the neighborhood supposedly ruined by Chinese stores. Selected memories of a betrayed past together with a general lack of official recognition of roles and social spaces occupied by ethnic Chinese in Rome negatively influence migrants' perception of their place and role on Italian soil and in the Italian society.

that in China they feel like guests. Mrs. Chang worked in the leather and textile business for nearly sixty years, and she managed to meet many Italians. She felt that when she was at work she was very integrated. Also, she felt integrated during the popular group dance she participated in at the Public Elderly Center in her neighborhood. Nevertheless, the Changs complained that Italy is a very narrow-minded country, unlike Great Britain, Germany, or France. They described the numerous acts of racism and intolerance they have been subjected to in their lives. The latest incident happened to Mrs. Chang, when she was at the market with one of her grandchildren. Somebody between the stalls started screaming: "Go away, Chinese! Go away!!" Almost in tears, Mrs. Chang reported that her grandchild, to protect her, told her: "Let's go grandma! Let's go." The child was used to only speaking Chinese with his grandparents, so Mrs. Chang believed the kid hoped that his grandma would not understand those rough words.

Nonetheless, they decided to remain in Italy. The resolution to overcome the inconsistency of quotidian struggle of "us" and "others" was to balance their existence between participation and voluntary exile. The length of their stay, almost sixty years in Italy, makes them different from many other Chinese migrants of more recent generations. Mr. Chang explained that their first two sons speak Chinese, while the third does not. After a while it became impossible for them to just live a separate and parallel life, detached from Italian society. In fact, Mr. Chang explained that while they participate in Chinese activities, they also watch Italian TV and follow the news, even though they still barely speak Italian.

#### *4b. Recent Comers*

In more recent years, Chinese migrants to Italy have had more mixed backgrounds and ambitions than early comers; they also followed different migratory routes. The story below explains how a constant tension between emplacement and mobility is a poignant feature of the lives of second-generation Chinese as well.

#### *Feifei*

Feifei was born in Finland and was moved to Rome after her parents divorced. At the time, she was just a teenager. Once in Italy, she was sent to live with an uncle and discovered she also had a brother. This brother had been "given" (basically sold) to an Italian family when her parents had to leave Rome, where they used to live before her father became wanted by the police and had to flee to Finland. Feifei stated she had no roots, but described Rome as her city of provenance.  She did not remember how to speak Finnish, but her knowledge of Italian was pretty good. She was enrolled in an American school in Rome, so she could state that her best language was English. She moved to America for college, but her father, now back in China, did not want her to stay in the U.S. forever. He was paying for her education and would have liked for her to get a degree in economics and move to China, even though her mom is still in Finland and her brother in Italy. Feifei had no intention of going to China and wanted to work in cinema. She did not have many strong opinions about herself except her love of Rome, and her only certainty was the annual Christmas reunion with the family in the Eternal City.    They know you do not belong."30 Feifei was aware of her in-between-ness and could only affirm to have learned to get the best out of each piece of her own self. Other second-generation Chinese I have observed have had different experiences and were learning to choose different survival strategies. The significance of the bottom-up *glocal* history is to be inclusive of many voices and the freedom the observer has from top-down categorizations.

#### *5. Toward Glocal Oral History*

To complete the picture, I travelled to the other end of the migratory chain and visited Qingtian in China. Qingtian is a small town in the southeastern province of Zhejiang. Qingtian has a population of roughly 40,000 inhabitants, while approximately 230,000 Qingtianese live in many countries all over the world.31 During the Qing Dynasty (between 1644 and 1911), around four thousand people left Qingtian and began the journey that brought them to many corners of the earth. Qingtian has been a town of emigration since the earliest time but still counts today as one of the most prolific sending communities among Chinese cities. I picked Qingtian as the primary town for this study because most of my interviewees came from Qingtian or surrounding areas.

I ran into a lonely Spanish kid of Chinese origins. I was coming out of the Museum of Overseas Chinese and chatting with the Museum's guard, who had

30 Tan 1989, 253.

31 Compiling Committee of the Zhejiang People's Publishing House 2011.

kindly opened the section of the Museum of Overseas Chinese just for me.32 In addition, since the guard had volunteered to accompany me through the sections of the Museum dedicated to Qingtian's *Shitou* (soapstone), I was expressing my gratitude to him for being patient and meticulously explaining all the natural combinations of colors, textures, and usages of the artifacts collected in the Museum. At that very moment, the boy passed by and stopped. He started staring and listening to the conversation. Since I had experienced people staring at me numerous times during my trip to Qingtian, at first I did not pay attention to him. When I finally waved good-bye to the nice guard and noticed that the boy was following me, I turned and made an interrogative expression. The boy looked back and was evidently looking for the right words, or better, the right language to use. After a few silent moments, he decided to use Mandarin, to ask me where I was from. His hesitant pronunciation revealed that Mandarin was not the language he spoke in his everyday life. Then I asked him where he was from. After he said he was from Spain, we exchanged a couple of sentences in a confused mix up of Romance languages, and after a funny "Vamonos! Andiamo!" we decided to take a walk. We had established a bond as Europeans in the far away land of China, but we kept speaking Mandarin.  He would have picked him up somewhere later that day, upon receiving a text message from him. The father had friends to go visit. The boy did not. Therefore, after a brief stroll outside the Museum, and after discovering the Museum was almost closing, the boy decided to hang out with me. We got a rickshaw pulled by a strong lady in her fifties, passed the bridge and went around the town.  The boy assured me that they were a delicacy of the place, and we bought some. We were conversing about what to do in Qingtian, making comparisons with Europe and talking about "*women nabian*"33 which literarily means "we down there," or better, "we Southern Europeans." The boy looked lost and lonely, and was visibly upset that he could not play with his phone, which had a Spanish Sim card. I was extremely worried about how he was going to talk to his father, and where he was going to go. We entered the lobby of the Hotel I was staying at to find relief from the suffocating Chinese July heat. We sat comfortably in the conditioned fresh air of the Lobby where I shared my password for the Lobby WiFi to make sure he could reach his father and also, in exchange for the fruits he had insisted on paying for, I shared

33 我们那边.

32 The Museum has an official function and it is open only for organized and specific events.

a bottle of truly Italian San Pellegrino sparkling water. Our bonding incorporated an exchange of some sort and became stronger at this point. He started telling me he was missing his friends, his skateboarding team, and Facebook, for which even the WiFi was useless since it is blocked in China.

My encounter ended there, in the Lobby of a four star hotel with Internet connectivity. Once the boy swore to me that he had spoken with his dad and that he was going to meet him in the plaza nearby, I felt reassured that I could let him go, and I continued with my plans for an evening at the library. The boy was almost forcefully experiencing a China that he said he liked mostly for the food. He told me he was in China once before this time when he was eight. He remembered his grandma and the food, but nothing else. This encounter raised many questions in my mind. What would he be taking home from the summer adventure in his father's hometown? What would he become later in life, an entrepreneur? A cosmopolitan entrepreneur? Would the journey to the hometown acquire different meanings once back in Spain? Would the suggestions of the trip come back in time and be evoked as essential and life-changing memories? Or would he forget all about the trip once back in Spain? Memories are certainly long lasting. Memories hide in dusty places of individuals' minds, and can always surprise us, resurface unexpectedly and contribute to defining moments of individuals and groups' history.

#### *6. Conclusion*

In this paper I proposed a *glocal* approach to discuss the history of Chinese migration to Rome. The temporal and spatial constraints linked to the evolution of Chinese migration to Rome required the analysis of oral sources. In fact, to the extent that was physically feasible I have tried to look at migrants' lives by tracing their journeys across the migratory chain. Therefore, the *glocal* approach allowed me to move back and forth from sending to receiving communities as migrants do.

In 1863 Baudelaire wrote: "To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes." While examining the world, the historian, like the observer in Baudelaire's poem, possesses regal privileges. Yet, even the unidentified prince is subject to social and spatial constraints. Nobody can be completely free from the environment he lives in or moves through; however, one can adapt and change as needed and wanted. Migrants construct their lives abroad, sometimes they chose what to like, and sometimes they make do with what they have. In the same way, ethnic identities and memories are shaped within constraints; as a result, they are not permanent and static as I tried to demonstrate in this essay.

I have analyzed the lives of Chinese migrants in Rome as a function of the formation of *ethnicity* (*ethnicization*) and development of *memories* (both localized and global). *Ethnicization* is a process that migrants in Italy experience as a persistent dialogue between "us" and "them." Such dialogue can be voluntary or involuntary, circumstantial and incidental as well as essential or essentialized.

In conclusion, *ethnicity*, *memories* and, consequently, identities are moving targets and multilayered concepts. They become molded and shaped according to the needs and desires of each migrant. With the analysis of migrants' oral stories, I wish to contribute to a comprehensive description of a process that is simultaneously global and local; that goes beyond national borders and can, at the same time, be equally restrained or freed by transnational environments as well as by local frames.

#### *Bibliography*

# CHINESE MIGRANTS AND THE "CHINESE MAFIA" IN CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN CULTURE

# *Zhang Gaoheng* University of British Columbia

#### *Abstract*

In this essay, I suggest that the association of Chinese migrants in Italy with the "Chinese mafia" in Italian cultural texts is indicative of, and perpetuates, the tendency—which is characteristic of Italian media accounts of the country's initial contacts with mass immigration in the early 1990s—to relate an ethnic group to a specific set of bounded traits. How did contemporary Italian cultural practitioners make use of the association of Chinese migrants in Italy with the presumed "Chinese mafia" in their works? And to what specific rhetorical use is this association deployed in these texts? How did Chinese migrants respond to these depictions, and what in turn were the Italian creators' justifications? In order to answer these questions, I analyze two broad categories of cultural texts in which, since the 2000s, the aforementioned association has become meaningful for cultural practitioners in Italy—namely, the realist and postmodern varieties. Both approaches draw on, or ultimately manifest, an Orientalist discourse that uses the depiction of Chinese migrants living in Italy as a foil against which to investigate issues relating to Italy and Italians.

#### *Keywords*

Chinese immigration, the Chinese mafia, Orientalism, mass media, Saviano, Manetti Bros.

摘要

本文阐述在意大利文本中把中国移民与"中国黑手党"联系起来的现象。 本文作者论述了这种现象的存在显示并延续了将一个民族群体特征进行圈 定的趋势。在90年代初,随着外国移民大规模迁移至意大利,当地关于移 民群体的媒体报告也相应诞生。上述的趋势便是其文本之一大特色。当代 意大利文人在他们的著作中是如何将旅意华人与所谓的"中国黑手党"之 间建立起联系的?两者之间的这种关联有什么样具体的修辞作用呢?面对 这样的涂黑描述,中国移民有何反应?意大利文化工作者对于华人的反应 又有何评论?在回答这些问题时,本文作者将分析两部2000年后意大利 文人对上述联系有深入考量的作品,并把它们归为两大文派,即为现实 派与后现代派。此两种派别或是建立在,或是显现了"东方主义"。在 这其中,关于旅意华人的描述成为了探讨意大利及其民众的间接途径。

#### 关键词

华人移民,中国黑手党,东方主义,大众媒体,Saviano, Manetti Bros。

*Transcending Borders. Selected papers in East Asian studies*, edited by Valentina Pedone, Ikuko Sagiyama, ISBN 978-88-6453-403-9 (online), ISBN 978-88-6453-402-2 (print), CC BY 4.0, 2016 Firenze University Press

#### *Introduction*

In the early 1990s, as the number of Chinese migrants living in Italy increased dramatically, media accounts of them were in full force. A distinguishing characteristic of the initial chronicles of this migratory phenomenon in Italian mass media is an excessive emphasis on the presumed "Chinese mafia" operating in Italy. The so-called "Chinese mafia" is a term used by Italian journalists during the 1980s and 1990s to mean three distinctive things which, however, more often than not, coalesced to refer to the same phenomenon in their texts (e.g., *Spazio 5*). Some journalists used the term to indicate individual Chinese migrant criminals who may or may not work for larger criminal groups. Others intended the term to mean the network of various criminal groups composed of Chinese migrants which may or may not operate in agreement, most of which managed human smuggling from China to Italy and other European countries. Yet others applied the term to refer to large-scale criminal organizations of Chinese nationals, such as the Triad, the very influential Chinese transnational organized crime.

The year 1992 saw the news reporting of the first major police investigations into the Chinese migrant community in Italy that put criminals to court trials and sparked further media interest in this topic. By 1993, the leading Italian news daily *Il Corriere della Sera* had featured the presumed Chinese mafia in Italy numerous times, often showing a hodgepodge of socio-criminological facts and fantasies based on previous popular cultural archetypes of Chinese. Milan, Rome, Florence-Prato-San Donnino, and Naples are the most highlighted areas of concern in these accounts of Chinese criminality in Italy (Breveglieri and Farina 1997, 96–101; Galli 1997, 102–103). In the age of global migration at the beginning of the 1990s, the Italian public understood Chinese migration to Italy first and foremost through a peculiar socio-criminological lens as adopted by the country's mass media. This lens has proved to be enduring, and survived well into the 2000s in Italian media and other cultural domains.

In this essay, I suggest that the association of Chinese migrants in Italy with the Chinese mafia is indicative of, and perpetuates, the tendency characteristic of Italy's initial contacts with mass immigration in the early 1990s to relate an ethnic group to a specific set of bounded traits, the "metonymic freezing" of which Arjun Appadurai speaks (1988, 36). Throughout the 1990s and the 2000s, Italian readers and journalists regarded (and some still do to this day) the "Chinese mafia" as an attribute of the Chinese migrant community. The Chinese mafia served, and by and large still serves, both as a "shorthand" in interpreting existing activities of migrants and as a "guide" with which to navigate incoming information related to this migration. Such a use of the Chinese mafia in Italian journalism drew vocal criticism from Chinese migrants especially during the 2000s. Such criticism came in a variety of modes, most notably through the writings of elite Chinese migrants who controlled the ideologies and technologies of Chinese migrant media outlets. Given the scope of this essay, I will examine mostly the Italian side of this story of media debates. But even so, I hope to clarify as much as possible that the Chinese mafia has become a compelling *idea* "around which to organize *debate*, whether such debate is about method, about fact, about assumptions, or about empirical variations" (Appadurai 1988, 45–46, the italics are Appadurai's).

How did contemporary Italian cultural practitioners make use of the association of Chinese migrants in Italy with the Chinese mafia in their works? And to what specific rhetorical use is this association deployed in these texts? How did Chinese migrants respond to these depictions and what in turn were the Italian creators' justifications? I will analyze two broad categories in which the association of Chinese migrants with the Chinese mafia has become meaningful for cultural practitioners in Italy since the 2000s—namely, the realist and postmodern varieties. Both approaches draw on, or ultimately manifest, an Orientalist discourse that uses the depiction of Chinese migrants living in Italy as a foil against which to investigate issues relating to Italy and Italians. In Italian mainstream journalism during the 2000s, the Chinese mafia was likened to the *Camorra*, a native Italian organized crime familiar to the Italian readership, a parallel sharpened and then popularized by Roberto Saviano's nonfiction *Gomorra/Gomorrah* (2006), to which I dedicate the first section of the current essay. In my account, Saviano's realist rhetoric to approach Chinese migration to Italy and the Chinese mafia is ultimately only concerned with such Italy-centered social issues as the *Camorra* and globalization. A brief analysis of Matteo Garrone's 2008 filmic adaptation of Saviano's book, also titled *Gomorra*, will throw Saviano's Orientalist vision of the Chinese migrant community into sharper relief.

In the second section of this article, I examine the film made for television titled *Vendetta cinese/Chinese Vendetta* by Manetti Bros. (2006) and the short story by Carlo Lucarelli, titled *Febbre gialla/Yellow Fever* (1997, 2012), on which the film is based, from the postmodern perspective as declared by the authors. While Saviano places the Chinese mafia at the center of a reality-based nonfiction—or so he claims—, Lucarelli and Manetti Bros. justify their manifestly offensive treatment of the same topic as the necessary evil when creating an engaging narrative. Thus the writer and the filmmakers poke fun at several things at once: at Italian media depictions of the so-called Chinese mafia, at certain behaviors of Chinese migrants that make the association between them and the organized crime seem plausible, and at how Italian audiences react to the media construction of the *idea* of Chinese migrants as members of the Chinese mafia. Ultimately, the textual practices in *Vendetta cinese* and *Febbre gialla* as well as the comments offered by Lucarelli when confronted with a protest from Chinese migrants strongly suggest the presence of the Orientalist discourse, for which the Chinese mafia is a floating metaphor for Chinese migrants living in Italy and depictions of these migrants are meant to reveal some more nuanced aspects of Italians themselves.

Although the evidence from Chinese migrants on these texts as examined here is slim, one can nonetheless venture to postulate a power relation as manifest in the two texts under discussion, in which the Italian interpretation of the Chinese migrant community in Italy through the Chinese mafia had the upper hand over the counterarguments of Chinese migrants and others. In this light, what follows in this essay reveals much about Italians' views and methods of approaching Chinese migrants, and not much about Chinese migrants' interventions in the debates. This is a method validated by the tradition of the textual and discursive analysis advanced in Edward Said's *Orientalism.* Said analyzes the production and mobilization of knowledge of Islam or of the Orient in the West through studying textual representations of the Orient (Said 1978, 20–23).

However, I aim to examine the Italian authors' works by placing them in the contact zones to which both relevant texts of Chinese migrants in Italy and my knowledge as a scholar can contribute. I am of the opinion that without telling readers of this article what is sociologically accurate and proved, or what is obvious to Chinese migrant readers but not to Italian readers, my article would risk not contributing much to expanding the readers' knowledge of Chinese migrants in Italy, except for referring back to the Italians' knowledge organization of this migratory phenomenon. This would be a particularly problematic approach considering that there exists a vast sociological and anthropological literature in Italian on Chinese migrants in Italy. Therefore, both the accuracy of information, or the lack thereof, and the social imaginary of Chinese immigration to Italy being circulated in these two works are important to my inquiry in this article.

#### *1. Orientalizing Chinese Migrants Through the "Chinese Mafia"*

The most well-known journalistic depiction of the Chinese mafia in Italy appears in the first two chapters of Saviano's *Gomorra.* News commentators and critics have come to regard Saviano's book as the key narrative that brought the economic and criminal activities of the *Camorra* in Italy and worldwide to the attention of an international readership. Saviano denounced the *Camorra* so effectively in his writings that he had to be put under protection because of several death threats made by the *Camorristi*. What has not often been scrutinized in news analyses and critical literature is Saviano's use of Chinese migrants in the opening two chapters as a ploy to set the stage for his condemnation of the *Camorra* in the rest of his book.

Nevertheless, news magazines and websites by Chinese migrants in Italy were quick to react to Saviano's depictions. In an editorial published in the bilingual Italian-Chinese magazine *Cina in Italia/China in Italy*, the editor-inchief, Hu Lanbo, takes issue with the expression used in the book's opening paragraph—"The Chinese never die"—, and goes on to explain specific Chinese cultural practices and migratory patterns that contribute to keeping funerals of Chinese migrants out of the public's sight in Italy (2007, 52–54). Hu is mainly worried about the possibility that Saviano's view of the Chinese migrants in Naples would seem convincing to the average native Italian reader thanks to the book's realist rhetoric. An article published on the website of Associna, the important association for second-generation Chinese migrants in Italy, asks why Saviano elects to use unsubstantiated information about Chinese migrants in the book, including the striking image that opens the book, as frozen bodies of Chinese migrants fall from a container at Naples's port. Like Hu's article, Associna's statement accuses Saviano of knowing little about the Chinese migrant community in Naples while showing no hesitation in turning the community into a vehicle for journalistic sensationalism, a view endorsed also by China experts in Italy (associna.com 2006; Ceccagno and Rastrelli 2008, 132).

As pungent as these comments are, they manifest what Said aptly calls the positional superiority of Orientalism, which, to borrow the words of Daniel F. Vukovich, refers to "that tactic or de facto strategy by which the object of study is kept in place, never allowed to challenge let alone displace the effectively a priori assumptions, conclusions, and discourse" (3). Indeed, Chinese migrants were quick to identity the problematic deployment of stereotypes of Chinese and a simplistic dichotomy between Italians and Chinese migrants as represented in *Gomorra*. However, by unduly focusing on the sociological and anthropological accuracy of how Chinese migrants lived in Naples, Hu and the author at Associna seemed to be unwilling to acknowledge the fact that Saviano's narrative project in *Gomorra* is never to examine the Chinese migrant community in Naples on its own terms in the first place.

My entry into this discussion concerns how Saviano massages an Orientalizing discourse into his descriptions of Chinese migrants which are anchored to the Chinese mafia. Saviano's depiction of Chinese migrants in *Gomorra* manifests Orientalism not only in the format of "ideological suppositions, images and fantasies" of China, but also, perhaps more importantly, by reconsidering "the changing historical and cultural relationship between Europe and Asia" (Said 1986, 211; see also Said 1978, 2–3) during the 2000s when, if we were to follow Saviano's visceral and mostly fact-based arguments, Chinese global economy was expanding to the detriment of Italian economy. Saviano's use of China in *Gomorra* is similar in rhetoric to the intellectual project revealed in references to China in the works of such contemporary critical theorists as Giorgio Agamben and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in which, as Vukovich rightly notes, mentions of China are self-referential in that they "betray no serious engagement with the question of China through intellectual rigor" (128–135). If this is indeed the case, then what rhetorical purposes do the depictions of Chinese migrants focused on their criminal activities serve within *Gomorra*'s narrative project? I maintain that Saviano's Orientalizing discourse causes Chinese migration to Italy to function as the first and most effective case study in *Gomorra* to lead to the subjects that will concern Saviano in the rest of the book—i.e., the *Camorra* and globalization, both Italy-centered social issues. Saviano is not manifestly interested in contributing to the knowledge production of Chinese migrants living in Italy. Instead, the author's objective is to stimulate the readers' associative capabilities with which to make approximate, but emotionally powerful, evaluations of the similarities between the two transnational organized crimes, i.e., the *Camorra* and the Chinese mafia.

Saviano's Orientalization of Chinese migrants as members of the Chinese mafia is manifest when, despite the profuse use of statistics and on-site investigations that form the core of his book, his realist narrative devices do not tangibly increase the readers' knowledge of the migratory phenomenon. Ultimately Saviano is not so concerned with an accurate account of the Chinese mafia as seems to be the case at first glance. Saviano's account is accurate with regard to the Chinese migrant community in Naples insofar as it was intelligible to the general Italian readership. This point explains the sudden flight of the Chinese mafia from the second chapter, not to reemerge again in the book. Following the image of frozen bodies that opens the book, Saviano informs us that this firstperson, eye-witness account is a transcription of what a crane operator told him. Subsequently, in the overview of the transactions at the port of Naples, Saviano makes a promotional use of statistics ("the largest cargo terminal" and "almost all the traffic," 5), the sources of which are omitted (elsewhere Saviano sometimes mentions his sources), leaving the reader with no clues about the exact criteria that are being used to substantiate such superlative claims.1 Later in the chapter, Saviano uses the second-person imperative to invite the readers to call on their somatic experiences in daily life as well as on their familiarity with the genre of crime reporting in comprehending Chinese migration to Naples and the Chinese mafia. In the rest of the first chapter, Saviano gives a first-person eyewitness narration of his work in a Chinese migrant warehouse, underscoring the authenticity and value of his own observations. Through these narrative

1 All quotes of this book are taken from Saviano 2007.

details, Saviano finally arrives at the conclusion in the first chapter of *Gomorra* that the Chinese mafia operates in Naples and collaborates with the *Camorra*.

What Saviano's first-person accounts, use of statistics, address to Italian readers, and assertive conclusions based on inconclusive evidence share in common is an Italian media milieu, in which these techniques were widely practiced throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Several of Saviano's points in the first chapter of his book had precedents in mainstream Italian media, which had already formed a cognitive map of this migratory flow for most of his readers. An article in the influential Italian news weekly magazine *Panorama* dated 2003 makes references to the recycling of passports possessed by deceased Chinese migrants, to the low number of Chinese funerals in Italy, and to the Chinese-Italian competition in the garment sector in San Giuseppe Vesuviano near Naples. As the garment industry in Naples has a tradition of hiring black-market native workers, and as the industry is "a business traditionally controlled by the *Camorra*, who had nothing to say on this. Strange, no? This is how the anti-Mafia investigators reason. They fear for an agreement between Chinese organized crime and the *Camorra*" (Pergolini 2003, 147). The basic logic for this media interpretation, to borrow an observation made by critic Massimo Introvigne, is not to run the risk of countering negative stereotypes about Chinese migrants in Italy by preempting a consideration of the presence of Chinese organized crime in the country (2010, 290). Speculations of a potential Chinese collaboration with the *Camorra* were also prevalent in mainstream Italian media outlets other than *Panorama* in the years 2000 and 2003 (Calabrò 2000; Marino 2003). Ultimately, Saviano asks his readers to recall this media knowledge about the Chinese mafia and Chinese migration to Italy in order to embrace his analysis. Saviano's rhetoric is tautological in its recycling of media content and methods from previous years. As such, *Gomorra* adds no particular insight into Chinese migration to Italy in the 2000s.

Saviano's realist strategy works in tandem with his affective strategy, with the latter contributing even less factual information to the public understanding of Chinese migration to Italy. A prominent example is Saviano's use of a sexually charged metaphor—Naples's port is like an anus—to accentuate the negative economic impact made by Chinese migrants on Italy. The port at Naples is compared to an "open wound" and to "the hole in the earth out of which what's made in China comes" (4).  Figuratively speaking, the act of Chinese bodily fluids (i.e., the flow of fleets carrying "Made in China" merchandise for Chinese migrants' import-export business in Italy) being injected into the Italian body (i.e., Naples's port) is metaphorical of the current Chinese invasion in Europe. For critic Alessandro Dal Lago, Saviano uses a "gastroenteric vocabulary" to denigrate Chinese by associating them with abjection (2010, 48–49). This is part of a larger project undertaken by Saviano in this book and elsewhere that draw on cultural populism, dilettantism, and stereotypes to uphold a heroic image of the writer and journalist as the public denouncer on morally controversial social issues (Dal Lago 2010, 123–125). The anus metaphor undoubtedly provides Italian readers with an outlet for ventilation at the cost of the reputation of Chinese migrants—e.g., the menacing army of Chinese commercial fleets is only equipped with cheaply made merchandise. By condemning a complex social phenomenon through metaphors that evoke disgust and abjection, Saviano's book provides a potent form of psychological compensation for readers who may well face real-life problems resulting from globalization in Italy, of which Chinese immigration is an organic component.

While Saviano's realist and affective strategies do not contribute to enlarging his readers' knowledge of the presumed Chinese mafia and of Chinese migration to Italy, in the narrative economy of *Gomorra*, I contend, these strategies help to reflect on Italy's perilous positions in globalization and in migration management, with both subjects crucially linked to the book's main subject, namely, the *Camorra*. When Saviano expresses disgust at the image of the dead bodies of Chinese migrants and at Naples's port as an anus, he is setting the stage for his denunciation of the *Camorra* in ensuing chapters, which he does only with greater intensity and indictment. The psychological distance created between Italians and Chinese migrants in the first chapter of *Gomorra* prepares grounds for similarly emotionally charged distance between ordinary Italians and the *Camorristi* in the rest of the book. The Chinese-Italian commercial conflicts, as examined in the book's first chapter, functions effectively as the first major example to tease out Saviano's arguments on the *Camorristi*'s economic empire. These are all points that we can use to argue for the Orientalist modality in *Gomorra*, that is, the way of using the Chinese Other to better reveal aspects of the Italian Self. Let me examine in detail one such example from Saviano's book, that of the parallel between the Chinese mafia and the *Camorra* in Naples.

Xian is the book's only Chinese migrant insider in *Gomorra*, who is in charge of the Chinese-owned warehouses around the port area. It is through the interactions Saviano the journalist has had with Xian that Saviano the narrator claims the similar traits shared by the Chinese mafia and the *Camorra*. As Saviano tries to engage Xian in a conversation about the Triad, the latter shows no particular interest in this topic, offering, in a satirical vein, Euro, Dollar, and Yuan as his own triad. Momentarily Saviano goes on to state a main thesis in *Gomorra*—i.e., the *Camorra*, like the Triad, is an advocate of its low-ranking members, who survive the travails of life, often suffering from considerable economic and social hardship. A characteristic of Saviano's condemnation of Chinese migrants in his book is to target at the elites in the hierarchy of the Triad—who do not figure in the book—rather than at low-ranked intermediaries like Xian and at migrant workers. On the contrary, in the Chinese migrant press, the transnational elites tend to associate the local underclass—including Italians and Chinese and other migrants—with crimes of an economic nature (Malavolti 2006, 150–152; Bauman 1998, 125–126). These opinions by elite Chinese migrant entrepreneurs only endorse further Saviano's analysis of a particular condition of ordinary migrants, who are simultaneously criminalized and protected (or perceived to be protected) by their elite counterparts.

Saviano will use this insight gained from the Chinese migrant experience to apply to the dynamics between the *Camorra* and local populations in Naples. Xian as a go-between is precisely how the *Camorra*, like the Triad, controls the "intermediate stages, financial transfers, and investments—everything that makes a criminal economic outfit powerful" (12). In the later chapter titled "The Secondigliano War," Saviano elucidates the exemplary nature of Xian's case for Italians. There, when Saviano describes how residents of Secondigliano depend on the *Camorra* for a living, detest state negligence of their social plight, and protest against a large-scale police raid in the area, the reader would legitimately recall the similar relationship between Xian and the Triad as described in the first chapter. *Gomorra* intimates that Neapolitans' rapport with the *Camorra* can be paralleled to Xian's with the Triad, both misdirected, and yet essential, for the survival of socially disadvantaged people.

The Orientalist punch of these narrative details is that the ultimate goal of the Triad/*Camorra* parallel is to interpret the *Camorra* as a social malaise in Italy, and not to investigate the Chinese organized crime on its own terms. To be sure, from a conventional perspective this goal is entirely justifiable, because Italian journalism is mandated with the task of critiquing social phenomena occurring on Italian soil for Italian readers. Moreover, as Said reminds us, since the Orientalist's vocabulary and language often do not even try to be accurate, there really is no point examining the accuracy of Saviano's empirical knowledge of the Chinese migrant community. Rather, the critic's task should be to show to whom and for what reasons such an account is written (Said 1978, 71–72). But my view is that immigration to Italy and the multicultural social reality in the country during the 2000s have made such a conventional perspective on national journalism obsolete and even dangerous. Italian national journalism is compelled to develop an intercultural competency that is able to adequately address the non-Italian native Other's diversity as well as to reevaluate the Italian Self's own assumptions. This point is particularly valid when we consider that unlike in the case of texts analyzed by Said, *Gomorra* was contested by Italians and by Chinese migrants, as the book's readership faced a Europe composed by very heterogeneous communities of migrants and natives, intellectuals and laymen, artists and journalists. A socially engaged author like Saviano would certainly appreciate this point.

We will further understand Saviano's Orientalizing tendency in his depictions of Chinese migrants by observing the absence of it in Garrone's film version of *Gomorra*. Despite Saviano's collaboration on the film's screenplay, the social denunciation, testimonial mode, and moral indignation of his book are almost entirely missing from the film's realistic prose—the product of a conscious choice by Garrone (Braucci 2008, 73; De Sanctis 2008, 36; Antonello 2011, 378; Porton 2009, 1415). Drawing on the second chapter of Saviano's book, where the Orientalizing discourse is much less present, Garrone tells the Chinese storyline in four segments, which are distributed at several places in the film. Chinese migrants matter in the narrative economy of Garrone's film only insofar as they clash with the *Camorristi*'s investment in the Neapolitan garment industry. By hiring the seasoned Neapolitan tailor Pasquale Del Prete (Salvatore Cantalupo) secretly to teach high fashion skills to migrant workers, Chinese entrepreneurs including Xian (Ronghua Zhang) cause disturbance to the financial backup his long-time mentor and contractor Iavarone (Gigio Morra) has maintained with the *Camorristi*. Thus the criminal bosses must eliminate their business competitors, the Chinese migrant entrepreneurs and workers in Naples.

If there is an Italian-Chinese cross-identification to be found in Garrone's film, then it must be one between a Neapolitan (Pasquale) and a Chinese migrant (Xian) based on social marginalization.2 This is quite a departure from the Italian-Chinese cross-identification through organized crimes—i.e, the analogy between the Triad and the *Camorra*—in Saviano's book. The film does not chastise the less than honorable tactics Xian uses to persuade Pasquale into working for his factory. Instead, Garrone crucially asks why Pasquale agrees to teach Chinese migrants. The initial motivation seems to be the lucrative pay— Pasquale would receive 2,000 euro for each of the ten sessions taught. In the Chinese workshop, Pasquale expresses his gratitude toward the appreciation shown by Chinese workers who clap and bow, calling him a master. He later relates this scene emotionally to his wife upon returning home. Other examples of Garrone's positive representation of Chinese migrants in the film include the seriousness with which they stitch the garments by applying skills they have learned from Pasquale, the orderliness of their factory, the good quality of their garments, their conscience to hide him in the trunk of the car that would eventually save his life, and even their food that Pasquale has learned to appreciate. When confronted by Iavarone, Pasquale justifies his decision to work for the

2 Shelleen Greene reads this as the solidarity between two global southerners as envisioned by Pier Paolo Pasolini (Greene 2012, 250–252).

Chinese by commenting dryly that his skills as a tailor have not benefited from his friend's tutelage. In fact, Pasquale goes to reason, not only has Iavarone exploited him for his labor and craftsmanship, but the contractor has also failed to protect his life by informing him about the killing planned by the *Camorristi* during a car ride. Pasquale's ultimate exit from the fashion world to work as a truck driver also signals the exit of Chinese migrants from the film's narrative.

Garrone's film offers a sober representation of Chinese migrants, viewing the *Camorra* and the illegal business practices of Chinese migrants as two somewhat related, but fundamentally different, phenomena. No reference to the so-called Chinese mafia is mentioned in the film. The film's de-emphasis on Chinese criminality effectively counters the damage caused by Saviano's book on the public reputation of Chinese migrants in Italy. Most importantly, the storyline involving Chinese migrants in Garrone's *Gomorra* is not intended to tease out the illegal activities of the *Camorra* by way of analogy. Instead, the Chinese storyline gives but one among several examples of the range of criminal and economic networks of the *Camorra* in the film.

#### *2. The "Chinese Mafia" as a Postmodern Cliché*

Broadcast as a primetime program on RAIDUE on August 29, 2006, *Vendetta cinese* is a free-standing episode in the television serial *L'ispettore Coliandro/Inspector Coliandro* (2006, 2009–10, 2016), offering a tongue-in-cheek depiction of the Chinese mafia. The film tells the story of the young police officer Coliandro (Gianpaolo Morelli) in Bologna who, while investigating a traffic incident involving a Chinese boy, accidentally discovers a Triad-managed underground network specialized in the trade of human organs. Coliandro then teams up with the Chinese female officer Sui (Jacelyn Parry) from Hong Kong in their ultimate success in dismantling this network.

The directors of *Vendetta cinese*, Manetti Bros. (Marco Manetti and Antonio Manetti), are versed in multimodal films, having previously made *Torino Boys/Turin Boys* (1997) and *Zora la vampira/Zora the Vampire* (2000), in which they tell allegorical stories through immigrants in Italy in a thriller and in a film noir. Conceived holistically by fiction author and screenwriter Carlo Lucarelli, *L'ispettore Coliandro* presents several episodes, including *Vendetta cinese*, which reflect on the criminalization of migrants in mainstream Italian media. The main filmic mode to do this preferred by Lucarelli is the *poliziesco* or *giallo* genre. Such long-running popular television series produced by RAI Fiction as *Don Matteo* (2000–present) and *Il commissario Montalbano/ Commissioner Montalbano* (1999–present) may have also contributed to Lucarelli's choice of this particular film genre for a ready market of television spectators.

#### 78 *ZHANG GAOHENG*

*Vendetta cinese* performs an explicitly postmodern pastiche on its narrative by reenacting stock elements culled from a variety of film genres, including the crime film, film noir, Kung Fu movies, and comedy film. The ostensibly socio-criminal explanations of Chinese migrants in Italy and the Triad merely serve to foreground intra-cinematic moments. The film's two leads are fascinated by cinema—Coliandro views his missions through the optics of James Bond films, while Sui mentions Hong Kong cop movies as a source of inspiration for her to join the police force. The narrative conceit of *Vendetta cinese*  is then to have these characters act out their fantasies based on movies within the film's diegesis. While Coliandro chases criminals on the streets of Bologna, Sui fights with gang members in Kong Fu moves. The film thus creates a rupture between its narrative and social reality, both of which refer to the Chinese criminality in Italy, consciously disrupting the two's indexical bonds.

A discussion of the film's postmodern orientation was at the heart of Lucarelli's defense of his film script in the major Italian daily newspaper *La Repubblica*, which the writer offered in the wake of the protest of the Chinese migrant community in Bologna who judged *Vendetta cinese* to be a kitsch juggling uneasily between realistic and intra-cinematic components (Lucarelli 2006, 1)*.*  In response to the Chinese migrants' Marxian, or Gramscian, interpretation of the film (Yar 2010, 68–82), Lucarelli gives a postmodern defense. Elsewhere in his corpus, the author intimates that postmodernity is a characteristic of the life style encouraged by the urban sprawl created around the city of Bologna and in the Via Emilia area (Pezzotti 2012, 93–101). Let me unpack Lucarelli's postmodern approach before evaluating its implications within the cultural landscape concerning the Chinese migrant community in contemporary Italy.

After proffering an apology to Chinese migrants who were offended by *Vendetta cinese*, Lucarelli expresses his "esteem and sympathy" for their contributions to Bologna. To his knowledge, continues the writer, neither the Triad nor human smuggling exited within the Chinese community in the city. Lucarelli then presses on to make two interrelated key observations. First, he gives a dualistic depiction of the criminal and benign portions of the Chinese migrant community in Bologna; and second, insofar as the criminal portion of the Chinese community may be related to the Triad and Italy has its own native organized crimes, including notably the *Cosa Nostra*, it makes sense for the author to highlight the Chinese-Italian cross-identification through their similar organized crimes, in a similar vein to Saviano's reasoning in *Gomorra*:

The bad guys are from the Triad, which is a body extraneous to the Chinese community, just as the *Cosa Nostra* is to Sicilians. However, it is possible that there were problems of underground conditions ("clandestinità"), legality [sic], and organized criminality among Chinese, even though not here in Bologna; thought ("spunto di riflessione"). The rest is fiction.3

that the *Cosa Nostra* and *'Ndrangheta* laundered money, even here in Bologna; that the University (in Bologna) was restless. The noir should serve as food for

Lucarelli's Manichean understanding of the Chinese community, which Manetti Bros. express cinematically, underpins the storyline involving Sui in *Vendetta cinese*. Sui chases the Triad boss Lu Yang (Hal Yamanouchi) from Hong Kong to Bologna. Disguised as a waitress to work in a Chinese restaurant in Bologna, Sui receives instructions on the Italian-style *omertà* (oath of silence) from Lu Yang: "You only speak what's necessary, you only see what's necessary, and you only hear what's necessary." Coliandro's colleague explains the Triad to him by comparing it to the "Italian-American mafia" as well as by contrasting it with the "old and very integrated Chinese community in Bologna." In one scene, two second-generation Chinese migrants, or Chinese Italians, are having an aperitif and conversing in fluent Italian. Further, to highlight the parallel worlds within the same community in the film, the Triad members are mostly confined to nocturnal or enclosed settings, and their scenes are often underscored by several eerie-sounding, authentic Chinese and Chinese-sounding melodies. In contrast, Sui often appears in broad daylight, and to accompany her actions are musical motifs that recall James Bond movies. Ultimately, these depictions reinforce Lucarelli's claim about the analogy between the Triad and the *Cosa Nostra*, which was already a media cliché in the 1990s and was updated by Saviano and others to correlate to the *Camorra* during the 2000s.

To be sure, for Lucarelli postmodern literature continues the Italian tradition of writings that show civic commitment (*impegno*). According to critic Giuliana Pieri, Lucarelli creates a new persona for himself—"the crime writer as serious historian, and the crime writer as investigative journalist"—rather than have his fictional heroes take on these roles (Pieri 2007, 201). Consider that the marginal place occupied by migrant characters in Lucarelli's novels and those in his screenplays for *L'ispettore Coliandro* may well reflect the marginalized status of these characters in Italian society (Pieri 2007, 197–200). Further, Lucarelli's *Febbre gialla*, on which *Vendetta cinese* is based, gives some agency to Chinese migrants. The Chinese children imprisoned by the Triad eventually overwhelm their captors by assaulting them with needles that they use to manufacture leather goods. In the abovementioned news article, Lucarelli states that *Vendetta cinese* is intended to ridicule the political correctness of overemphasizing the bright sides of both Italian and Chinese communities, which Italian institutions tend to perform in public. A critique of the authorities and institutions and their dominant discourses is surely one aspect of the civic commitment which Lucarelli bestows on postmodern literature.

Lucarelli does not err in making quasi-sociological investigations into current affairs in Italy through postmodern writings which draw on the noir, *poliziesco*, and *giallo*, with reference to Chinese migration to Italy and to other social issues. However, the end result in our case shows the writer's imperfect knowledge of some basic information about Chinese migration to Italy and of its political implications for a national cultural industry already slow to integrate diversity into its areas of interest. Lucarelli does not consider the social validity of his hypotheses in the above-mentioned quotation. Neither does the author question the effect his statement regarding the Chinese in Italy may have had on the Italian public, who is largely misinformed by the mass media on Chinese migration to Italy and on the presumed Chinese mafia. Thus Lucarelli is unwilling to show sensitivity to the political and public stakes of the economic tension between Chinese migrants and native Italians during the 1990s and 2000s. The disavowal of temporality and historicity in *Vendetta cinese* with regard to this contemporary reality manifests a principle inherent in much of the postmodern writing in which realities from different epochs often coexist (Jameson 1991, 307–10). Perhaps Lucarelli also understands the limits of any utopian efforts to attend fully to the representational needs of a minority community as heterogeneous as the Chinese in Italy.4

A related example of these dynamics is Lucarelli's *Febbre gialla*, which displays various features of postmodern pastiche, including the literary-cinematic hybrid and a typical postmodern thought process. The exploitation of child labor by the Chinese criminal organization is a central concern in the novel. Written in a language that lends itself easily to cinematic images, the short story refers to the Kung Fu movie genre and to films starring Italian comedians Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia that feature an imaginary China. In the short story, when Vittorio (Coliandro's counterpart) goes to a Buddhist center and sees a Chinese woman wearing kimono, the reader is made to think that Lucarelli's text proves to be unfortunate in showing a commonplace confusion of various East Asian cultures. A classic example of this confusion in another Italian text is the supposedly Chinese Kung Fu fighter who is dressed in the Japanese style in Mario Caiano's Spaghetti Western film *Il mio nome è Shangai Joe/My Name is Shanghai Joe* (1973). Further on, however, the reader finds out that these Chinese wearing kimonos are from Japan (Chinese migrants living

4 For a similar case of the tension between postmodern and more stake-driven interpretations of cultural encounters, see Clifford 1997, 207–208. For other examples of Italian postmodern literature that concern Chinese migrants, see Zhang 2013b.

in Japan, or Japanese natives?), and that Vittorio may have visited a Japanese, not a Chinese, Buddhist temple (But is this because of Vittorio's own monocultural confusion, or the deception of the Chinese in the temple about their nationality?). No matter how improbable the plot now turns, it does set up the reader's assumption only to challenge it at a later time, in a typically postmodern way. Following a theorization on self-management in the postmodern era by Jean-François Lyotard (1984, 35–36), we may interpret this narrative to be an example of legitimating a knowledge of the Chinese migrant community in Italy not by focusing on the truth claims his novel makes about it, but rather by giving prescriptive utterances about it (e.g., "A Buddhist temple must be Chinese") that allow the reader to doubt and counter this proposition and to draw their own conclusions.

However, for Chinese migrants in Italy who have been vilified by years of media misrepresentation and subjected to institutional rulings that discriminated against their rights to commerce and trade in Italy, Lucarelli's postmodern narratives may well seem too semantically ambiguous, and at times, demeaning to Chinese. When migrants in China need money to travel to Italy, a cop explains in *Febbre gialla*, "then someone comes and assumes the debt, and this someone is the Triad, that is, the Chinese mafia. The Triad puts in money and organizes the trip by first amassing illegal migrants in the holds of ships and then inside lorries of containers" (Lucarelli 1997, 28). As this and similar information is articulated in a quasi-sociological language, however it may be intended to elicit an ironic reaction from the reader, the information's impact on readers of differing cultural backgrounds and social experiences is far less predictable than Lucarelli is inclined to acknowledge. This is not the place to relate the details of Italian media discourses on the itineraries of human smuggling from China to Italy.5 Suffice to note that Chinese migrants who protested following the screening of *Vendetta cinese* did not share the pleasure that some viewers derive from—in Robert Stam's words—the "display of cultural capital made possible by the recognition of the references" to filmic and novelistic genres, part of the postmodern contract (2000, 305). These migrants were not entertained by the ironic depiction of them on screen. Postmodern pastiche and irony, which very likely were perceived as Italian or non-Chinese by these Chinese migrants, were not claimed by them as part of their cultural repertoire. Instead, engaged in "old-fashioned secondary identification with characters" (Stam 2000, 305) as they were, migrants expressed their disbelief at this exaggerated narrative and went on to demand clarification on the content of the text, that is the misinformation the text performs about them.

5 On this topic, see Ceccagno and Rastrelli 2008.

Undoubtedly, if we were to follow Fredric Jameson in noting postmodernism as a historical and not merely stylistic conception (1991, 45–6), we must acknowledge how the protest of Chinese migrants was motivated and marked by moralizing statements on *Vendetta cinese.* But I argue that the crux of the problematic representations of Chinese migrants in *Febbre gialla* and *Vendetta cinese*, when analyzed from the perspective of cultural politics, concerns once again the Orientalist discourse in Italian narratives of Chinese migrants. In the final analysis, Lucarelli's book does not engage with the Chinese community in Italy, a literary practice that illustrates Linda Hutcheon's observation that "the postmodern is not transformative in aspiration or totally oppositional in strategy" (1988, 213–4). Like those in Saviano's *Gomorra*, Chinese migrant characters are again being exploited for the benefit of a more nuanced characterization of Coliandro/Vittorio as an inept Italian male cop extraordinaire, the main source of comedy in the two texts. The 1997 edition of *Febbre gialla* uses a Mandarin text, which is a transcript of a document left by the Chinese boy when he flees from the Triad on a motorbike in front of Vittorio's eyes. The Mandarin document, which is unintelligible to an Italian speaker like Vittorio, absolves him from being an omniscient character in the novella. Similarly, Lucarelli indicates the impossibility for him to inhabit a truly Chinese perspective in his narrative by using random Mandarin words from the transcript to indicate dialogues uttered by Chinese migrant characters in the rest of the novel. In the end, the readers know more about Vittorio's inability to effectively engage in intercultural encounters than about any aspect of the Chinese migrant community in Italy. The two narrative devices logically lead Lucarelli to fall back on his Italian perspectives in judging Chinese-related materials and Chinese migrants. As Mark Chu comments on the use of the transcript, "If the discourse of the Other is meaningless, then the Other is denied subject status" (2001, 53).

If Mikhail Bakhtin is right in asserting that "The primary stylistic project of the novel as a genre is to create images of languages" (1981, 364), then the visual contrast between the Italian and Chinese languages in the pages related to the transcript allows the Italian speakers among the novel's readers to experience Vittorio's confusion. But in fact the transcript in the 1997 edition is not wholly intelligible to Chinese readers either, as it appears to feature various font styles in typesetting that correspond to specific systems of classical Chinese calligraphy. In the 2012 reprint of *Febbre gialla*, the Mandarin transcript is replaced by a passage set in traditional Chinese characters that is partially grammatically coherent. The text now translates, in broken Mandarin, the Italian passage that immediately precedes it, which describes the moment in which Vittorio grabs this document in the air, preventing it from being blown away. The text in the 2012 edition remains perfunctory within the Mandarin-speaking fictional world in the novella, where the Chinese migrant characters inhabit. The text still signifies confusion, for Vittorio as well as for Italian and Chinese speakers. And the text is still postmodern in that it refers to the main text of the novella itself. Lucarelli still does not give voice to the Chinese migrants involved. For the 2012 edition, the writer still withholds dignity to Chinese migrant characters because, to borrow Bakhtin's insight, his "parodic stylization" of the Mandarin text attends neither to Mandarin Chinese's "own internal logic" nor to the language's capability of "revealing its own world" (Bakhtin 1981, 364).

*Vendetta cinese* goes further than *Febbre gialla* in its use of the Orientalizing discourse by enacting the masculinist dichotomy of whore/Madonna in depicting women, and by way of synecdoche, the supposed dualistic division within the feminized Chinese migrant community. In several scenes in the film, Sui, the Madonna figure, fights a female Triad killer Shin (Rong Mei Li), the whore figure, in Kung Fu moves. When Coliandro is being assaulted by two Triad killers, Sui intervenes and defeats the male killer easily. When the two women confront one another, Sui gradually looses her grounds until Coliandro, having regained his consciousness, triggers his gun. In keeping with the American outlook in his oeuvre, Lucarelli's novel and his screenplays are inspired by the American cop film in which gun fighting and car chasing are de rigueur (Pezzotti 2012, 93). The efficacy of the gun in sealing the victory of good over evil remarks on the men's dominance over women, the West over the East, and the superiority of western technology over Chinese traditional martial arts. The gun's function is similar to that of the electricity used by the Brits to stun Chinese and Asian infidels in the final scene of *The Mask of Fu Manchu* (Charles Brabin 1932). In both films, western masculinity is revitalized through the conduit of a plot involving Chinese.

Given the importance of Coliandro's gun and the narrative centrality he occupies in *Vendetta cinese*, the whore/Madonna dynamics ultimately contribute to building the image of Coliandro as an antihero, a construction typical of the Italian police dramas from the 1990s. While the young cop's survival depends on female enablers and his characterization resembles an ordinary citizen, he remains the representative of institutional morality, with whom the average viewers are supposed to identify, after having been disarmed of their distrust of the Italian state through the film's narrative (Buonanno 2012, 119–121). These depictions of Chinese femininities gain interpretive power only when they are put into dialogue with the Orientalist legacy of gender dynamics between Italy/Europe and China. There is not enough textual evidence in *Vendetta cinese* to suggest a postmodern reading of this gendered cliché, because there is no clear subverting of it to be found anywhere.

#### *Conclusion*

Representations of Chinese migrants in the cultural texts examined in this article indicate that the "Chinese mafia" has become a regenerative principle with which to organize cultural debates about Chinese migration to Italy. The ability of this principle to construct new narratives about Chinese migrants in Italy is also evident in numerous television serials which catered to a wide range of viewers when aired on Mediaset and RAI channels, including "Un cinese di nome Gioia/A Chinese Named Gioia" in *Carabinieri* (Raffaele Mertes 2002) on Rete 4, *La moglie cinese/The Chinese Wife* (Antonio Luigi Grimaldi 2006) on RAIUNO, "I tuoi rimorsi/Your Remorses" in *La nuova squadra/The New Team* (Claudio Corbucci 2008) on RAITRE, and "L'invasione cinese/Chinese Invasion" in *Tutti per Bruno/All for Bruno* (Francesco Pavolini 2010) on Canale 5.6 Saviano's *Gomorra* drew from and inspired these television shows, all of which arguably Orientalize Chinese migrants in order to explore Italy-centered issues or the nuances of Italian characters. Regardless of whether the association of Chinese migrants with the Chinese mafia is reinforced in Italian mainstream media, or contested in the Chinese migrant press, the "Chinese mafia," together with its Orientalizing modality, has been a cognitive cornerstone for addressing Chinese migration to Italy in contemporary Italian culture.

#### *References*

6 For references to the Chinese mafia in the news reporting of the 2007 riot in Milan's Chinatown, see Zhang 2013a.

# JAPANESE STUDIES

# LITERARY BUSINESS TRIP IN THE LATE EDO PERIOD: JIPPENSHA IKKU AND THE SHINANO DISTRICT AS DOCUMENTED BY TAKAMI JINZAEMON'S DIARY

# *Mario Talamo* University of Catania

#### *Abstract*

In her short essay included in a miscellaneous dedicated to travels, the writer Hayashi Mariko argues that individuals leave their houses in order to amuse themselves, to relax from stress, and to discover hitherto unknown places and cultures. An important role in Jippensha Ikku's travels was surely played by the aforementioned motivations but, as I argue, the main reason why the author was induced to travel lies in his constant search for inspiration. By roaming the most remote districts of Japan, he found interesting and inventive ways to pay back the favors received by friends and acquaintances.

#### *Keywords*

Jippensha Ikku, travels, Shinano, Advertisement, Hizakurige series, Acquaintances

#### 要旨

十返舎一九を旅に誘う動機として重要な役割を果たすのが未知の異文 化との対話であった。それは文学作品の商品化と強い関わりがあっ た。各地の名所を紹介することにより、読者層の関心と支持を獲得で きるからであった。

本稿は、松本の版元高美甚左衛門への訪問を中心にして、十返舎一九 の旅に対する態度を明らかにすることを目的としている。

キーワード 十返舎一九、旅、信濃、広告、『膝栗毛』シリーズ、知人

> 玉くしげふたつにわかる国境 所かはればしなの坂より Shinanosaka, border between two countries, Here onward, different the places and different the goods. (*Hizakurige*, I, 84)1

1 The entire apparatus of quotations from the *Tōkaidōchū hizakurige* is from Nakamura 1976.

*Transcending Borders. Selected papers in East Asian studies*, edited by Valentina Pedone, Ikuko Sagiyama, ISBN 978-88-6453-403-9 (online), ISBN 978-88-6453-402-2 (print), CC BY 4.0, 2016 Firenze University Press

#### *1. Introduction*

An appreciable amount of Japanese pre-modern literature is devoted to travels. From the Kamakura period (1192–1333) onwards, and even earlier, if we consider Ariwara no Narihira's journey from Kyoto to the eastern provinces, monks and occasional travelers, both men and women, recorded the main places along the route, including food and other attractions. By surveying the entire corpus we can clearly see the evolution and representation of social schemes related to travel, from a period when moving from a place to another was still dangerous, even risking death, to a new historical phase when the countrywide road network was provided, and old routes were connected to develop into what we nowadays call Gokaidō, the five main roads of the country, that, from Edo, connected the main financial and cultural centers of Japan, such as Kyoto, Nikkō, and the like.2 It was during the Edo period (1603–1867) that travel became a commodity and a pleasure affordable for everyone, and literary productions reflected how funny and entertaining this development could be. These productions were no longer tied to old traditions, inspired by the famous places of poetry (*utamakura*), but, instead, they granted the author's creativity greater freedom of expression, resulting in immense and original literary production, whose nature was primarily secular.3

During the peace imposed by the Tokugawa regime, travel outside the country was prohibited; yet both travel and narratives of travel flourished domestically.4 It was during this period that Jippensha Ikku (1765–1831) released his very successful series of travels accounts, such as the *Tōkaidōchū hizakurige* (1802–09),5 the *Enoshima miyage* (Souvenir from Enoshima, 1809–10), and the several diaries and fictional travel accounts issued in the immediate aftermath

2 The five main roads connecting the military capital with the rest of the civilized country were respectively: the Tōkaidō, the Nakasendō, the Nikkōdōchū, the Ōshūdōchū and the Kōshūdōchū. This system of five central highways served the need to bring together many regions, and to foster their interactions.

3 Yasumi Roan completed in the seventh year of Bunka (1810) a work largely devoted to travel do's and dont's titled *Ryokō yōjinshū* (Precautions for Travelers), whose main purpose was to provide those who traveled with extensive advices.

4 The long years of peace, together with improved economic conditions, the development of an integrated transport network that increased commoners' needs, the spread of fraternity groups (*kō*), and the practice of alms-giving, according to Constantine Vaporis (1989), all played a part in making travel possible for a wider specter of populace.

5 The work has been brilliantly translated into English by Thomas Satchell under the title of *Shank's mare* (1960).

of the great fortune arrived at by the *Hizakurige*, which dealt with the adventures of two idiots from Edo, Yaji and Kita. This whole literary tradition was termed *hizakurigemono* after the first successful sample.

Ikku made an extensive use of highways connecting the center to the rest of the country to inform his travel accounts. For this, he travelled extensively throughout Japan, leaving Edo at least once a year in order to visit villages, to report travel time for distances, to judge the quality of the roads and inns, and to describe – often in relation with his plots – towns and locations, with the intention of weaving those data into the adventures of his two main characters. His travel records were then widely read by people willing to make the most of the flourishing printing industry and to follow the two protagonists' ribaldries. It was in this time that many Japanese wanted to know more about their country and to better understand it, and this quest was helped by the great popularity of his masterpiece. The pre-modern readers, namely those who enjoyed reading Ikku's works, and to whom the author referred, had a strong desire for travel, as they strove against being confined to their own localities.

A good part of the almost three-hundred works of Ikku is devoted to travel, and deals with the contrast between the *chihō*, the countryside, and the *chūō*, the center, referring to the city of Edo, and this contrast between Edo and the rest of the country, including Kyōto and Ōsaka, became increasingly evident during this period (Kishi 1963, 124). From the An'ei period (1772–81) onward, but particularly during Bunka and Bunsei (1804–30) periods, we notice how the *gesaku* (playful writings) tended to be countryside-oriented. Nakayama (1979) argued that this tendency originated in the publication of the *Inaka shibai* (The countryside theater) issued by Manzōtei (1756?–1810?) in the seventh year of Tenmei (1787). Farmers' and peasants' attitudes, slangs, and mispronunciations of the common language were often considered hilarious, and this contributed greatly to the widespread reading of these publications.6 In the immediate

6 There is a noteworthy quantity of Japanese pre-modern literature which dwells on an alleged contraposition between an individual, or a locus, considered the paradigm of normality – such as the inhabitants of the city, or the *tsūjin*, likewise known as the well-traveled man of the world, whose deep knowledge of brothels enabled him to cope with every situation – and a different entity, whose lack of conformity engendered something considered ironic. Behind this irony reflection was hidden. Shikitei Sanba (1776–1822)'s *Ukiyoburo* (The bathhouse of the floating world, 1810–20) and *Ukiyodoko* (The barbershop of the floating world, 1811–23) brought the strangers to the bathhouse and barber shop and there they interacted, and, by way of their interaction, they provoked laughter in the readers. They likewise allowed strangers to meet and to mingle. Contrary to Sanba, who allowed strangers to come to the cities, Jippensha Ikku sent his protagonists wandering in the countryside in his *Tōkaidōchū*

aftermath of the unpredictable and yet surprising popularity earned with the *Hizakurige*, the author, sometimes of his own accord, sometimes forced by the publisher aiming to profit from the success enjoyed by this type of production, edited works on travels, both long and short. Furthermore, by composing a sequel about the famous duo's travels to Miyajima, Kinpira, across the Nakasendō road, to Kusatsu and finally back to Edo, which kept him busy for more than twenty years, Ikku found new ways to cash in on the popularity of the twosome. At which point, he decided to focus on narrations of short trips, such as the *Roku amida mairi* (A comic account of the pilgrimage to the six Amida, 1811–13), about the six ritual pilgrimages to the Buddha Amida, very popular at the time, or his *Enoshima miyage*, a brief and entertaining description of the short trip of two rascals – no longer known as Yaji and Kita, but as Dontarō and Nesuke – to celebrate the ongoing exhibit of sacred images of the goddess Benzaiten in Enoshima, during the sixth year of Bunka (1809).

Jippensha Ikku's travel production can be divided into two subsections: the works dealing mainly with a hilarious enterprise, with two protagonists who closely resembled Yaji and Kita, with a plot constituted by short stories rearranged and adapted into a new format, written for the consumption of others in the third person, and, secondarily, more serious and introspective accounts. In this case the author happened to be the one and only protagonist, a cultured traveler who enjoyed the view and tended to place great emphasis on the literary dimension of his enterprise, such as his numerous diaries – *Ikku no kikō* (Ikku's travel account, 1815), *Kokkei tabigarasu* (The hilarious vagabond), but to mention a few – deciding to write his diary in the first person singular in imitation of a chronicle-writing poet.7

*A vrai dire*, no matter how prolific the author could be, works about travels were the only part of his oeuvre which gained a widespread reputation, proving the general appreciation by the readership of the perfect mix of entertainment and information. The capacity of this literary sub-genre to sell and to attract a multilayered and varied audience was the principal reason why it invaded the

*hizakurige*, a representative example of this more imaginative narrative. As Inouye (2007) argues, the development of a modern consciousness in Japan happened by way of challenging the mores of location, and travels had a great influence on this. Despite what many scholars think, Japan's modernity was not imported from western countries, in the immediate aftermath of Commodore Perry's arrival, as it was first felt during the Edo period, when the process was accelerated by urbanization and travels.

7 Much Edo-period travel writing is squarely self-centered; the individual, more than a pre-ordinated rhetorical tradition, assumes center stage, with realistic observation and individualism that seem to go together.

late Edo publishing world. As the Tōkaidō road – which had a leveling effect, as it put the wealthy and the poor together on the same horse, and strangers in the same bed (Inouye 2007, 191) – the production inspired by this sort of journey had a great grip on society, and readers from whatever class enjoyed its reading, resulting in its great popularity. Economy and wealth were essential for the new professional author, born during the last part of the Edo period, in the aftermath of Kansei reform (1787–93), when the highest ambition of every literate became to publish and to make a living with his earnings. Therefore, no matter how abused a topic or a specific production could be, as long as it was popular, and if it sold well, publishers eagerly welcomed its publication.

According to Hayashi (2002, 46–47), we leave our houses to be able to relax and to get in touch with hitherto unknown culture and places; to Jippensha Ikku, however, undertaking a journey was not simply a delightful activity, it represented a suitable source of inspiration and a way of documentation. Ikku enjoyed observing people in their usual attitudes along the road, allowing their daily life, talks and activities to inspire him like every respectable travel writer. A rather large part of the *entr'actes* described in his masterpiece grew from his thorough and continual observation of the surrounding environment. However, travels had many peculiarities and offered the individual who decided to embark in this sort of activities a wide range of opportunities, ranging from the composition of poetries to, for example, the observation of flowers in full blossom or a crescent moon. Ikku, with his peculiar sense of business, tended to travel across Japan both for his pleasure and for his creative needs, while on the lookout for episodes that might interest his readers. During his life, he regularly left the city of Edo to undertake journeys which could last from one to several months, in order to become acquainted with regions and areas that he intended to describe, or in which he might set new episodes of his productions. Many of these travels were also financed by the publishers and, quite often, by accepting invitations from friends and long time admirers, he mixed business with pleasure. In the long list of journeys registered by Katō (1996), we see in particular how Ikku adapted travels to his means of documentation: in Bunka period, when he struggled with the publication of the *Hizakurige*, he moved to Ise in the second year of Bunka (1805) and then to the Kansai region during the following eighth year (1811), when he was forty-seven, in order to glean information on the Kisokaidō.8 Three years later, during the eleventh year of

8 The author intended to visit the Kamigata in order to record and to gather information on the region, that he knew only in part, due to his seven years in Ōsaka. As he recorded in the introduction of the seventh volume of the *Hizakurige*, "although I had lived in Kansai for many years, I spent my time mostly in Ōsaka and headed only Bunka (1814), he left for the second time heading to the abovementioned highway, and then visited Matsumoto. We have many letters and correspondences exchanged between the author and his acquaintances, recording invitations to which the busy Ikku not always replied, it being impossible to accept all his friends' calls, due to publishing engagements that could not be postponed, in the need to serially produce more than thirty works per year. The list of his travels could be longer, but, this time, I intend to focus on the journey to Matsumoto, in order to look at this city as a case study, with the aim of showing in details the cultural interactions that often arose between host and guest, particularly when the latter was an eminent man of letters, and the former was an amateur composer eager to obtain literary visibility.

#### *2. Ikku's travels to Matsumoto and the Shinano district*

Throughout his prolific output, the author went regularly back and forth along the Tōkaidō road: "during these years many times I enjoyed travelling along the Tōkaidō" (*Hizakurige*, III, introduction), as he confirmed in his introduction to the third volume of the *Hizakurige*. The *kyōka* from which the epigraph at the opening of this present article was taken comes from the first volume and represents one of the several poetic spaces related to travel. However, whereas his trips along the coast were quite frequent, Ikku visited Shinano only four times: the first during the aforementioned eighth year of Bunka (1811), then subsequently in the eleventh year of the same period (1814), when he spent a good month visiting the local publisher Takami Jinzaemon, to collect information and details concerning the region and its dialects, as the fifth volume of the *Zoku hizakurige* (Sequel of the *Hizakurige*, 1810–21) – whose narrative was framed by a journey to Shinano – received some negative reviews, due to the author's lack of familiarity with local traditions and languages. His third travel, dated from the first year of Bunsei (1818), shortly before the publication of the first installment of the *Kokkei tabigarasu*, drew on the four months spent at Suzuki Bokushi's house; the fourth and last journey occurred the following year, during the preparation for the second volume of the abovementioned travelogue.

Shinano corresponded approximately to the prefecture of Nagano and, at that time, it was a quite popular and attracting place where, alongside amazing

sporadically to Kyōto". Ikku had to cancel the trip to Kamigata due to a temporary blindness that prevented him from visiting the region. This may be the main reason why the author often recurred to travel guides in the last four volumes of the work, in particular, from the pilgrimage to Ise to the city of Ōsaka.

vistas, religious benefits from merciful deities (Zenkōji) and echoes of classic poetry, the availability of services and amenities was very much appreciated.9 Commoners nonetheless visited the region attracted by its gastronomic specialties and traditional lifestyle which differed considerably from those in the city of Edo. Ikku's travels to the region, besides having a strong marketing impact, as we will see, had also a strong cultural element, as he documented details of daily life and languages. There were two roads connecting the region to the military capital: Nakasendō, which ran parallel to the Tōkaidō, further inland toward the mountains, and Kōshūkaidō, with a constantly increasing number of commuters moving along them.

When Ikku moved toward Shinano found a place not lacking in any amenities, as the commodification of culture and the economy of consumerism had transformed it into a region easy to live in, in spite of the common feelings toward mountain regions. Conversely, only fifty years before, when other illustrious men of letters visited the district, as we will see with Takebe Ryōtai's journey, it was not so hospitable. Resulting from the beneficial outcomes that Kyōhō Reform (1716–45) had on the countryside, Matsumoto and the surrounding towns increased their population and moved toward a rapid industrialization process. However, it was only in the aftermath of the second important reform of the Edo period, held during the Kansei era (1789–1801), that the overall productive sectors of the region developed, resulting in a general raise of the living standards, economic growth, and cultural flourishing. The resultant consumerism turned many traditional *meisho*, or famous sites, into tourist attractions in which poetic reverberations were enhanced by the availability of material amenities and attractions for all tastes.10

9 According to Shinno (1993, 160), to the people of the eastern part of the country, Zenkōji was probably a sacred location as important as Ise. It had a pedigree dating to the ancient period and occupied a special place in the religious history of the eastern half of the country. Some scholars have argued for a link between Zenkōji and Shinran (1173–1262), when he was exiled to the east.

10 Further information concerning the *meisho* is available in the large bibliography by Plutschow and Elisonas, according to whom, a place, to be defined as famous, needed "political prominence, ritual status, or historical, poetical and prurient associations" (Elisonas 1994, 260). Hence, for a location to be recognized as a *meisho*, geographical assets had to be complemented and validated by a layer of additional symbolic attributes; a literary, historical, or religious aura was essential to make the transition from "pretty place" to "famous site" (Nenzi 2004, 289); travelers around Shinano could worship at the Zenkōji and enjoy the natural scenery in many places. However, in comparison with the far more visited and famous Sagami, along the coast, with its great number of *meisho*, such as Kamakura, Enoshima, but to mention a few, Shinano

## *3.Takami Jinzaemon's diary*

The author's journeys to Shinano were recorded in diaries or short accounts by a local community of literati who jotted down notes illustrating the reputation Ikku enjoyed. The aforementioned Takami Jinzaemon owned a book shop in Matsumoto; in his diary he welcomes the author's arrival in the city in the eleventh year of Bunka (1814):

文化十一甲戌歳七月晦日、江戸より十返舎一九子并門弟花垣両人遊 歴に尋ね来る。尤も、著述の膝くり毛、近々出版江戸帰路二及び、木曽 路迄、夫より此松本へかかり善光寺通りの趣き出版之もやうなれ共、土 地の風俗并言葉なまり等しれかね、遊歴傍来る。

The last day of the seventh month of the eleventh year of Bunka, Jippensha Ikku visited our city accompanied by his disciple Hanagaki11. His masterpiece, the *Hizakurige*, which will be soon issued, is along the road that would bring its twosome of protagonists back to Edo, more precisely at the height of the Kiso road. Subsequently, he is planning to take them to Matsumoto, and then to describe the entertaining journey to the Zenkōji. However, he came to make the most of his time and, besides traveling, he intends likewise to learn the mores and the dialects of the region. (Suzuki 2001, 7–8)12

The city of Matsumoto, despite its less favorable position, in the inner mountains of Japan, was a lively cultural place; it had many circles devoted to *haikai* poetry and to prose, and its relative nearness to the new cultural center enabled this region to receive from Edo, the pinnacle of Japanese civilization, an extensive range of new trends and popular productions. Takami Jinzaemon did not descend from a dynasty of publishers; he was the first in his family to set up an activity related to publishing. He was born in the fourth year of Tenmei era (1784) and died exactly eighty years later, in the first year of Genji (1864)13 and, before choosing the name under which we know him, he inaugurated his

could be considered as a newly developing region where the road to consumerism was yet to be fully marked.

11 Hanagaki, likewise known for Tanbaya, was a carver from Bakurochō who specialized in *ukiyo-e* paintings.

12 The entire collection of excerpts from Takami Jinzaemon's diary comes from Suzuki (2001). If the source is the same, from now onward, I will not specify its provenience, mentioning between brackets only the page number.

13 Takami Jinzaemon's old publishing house is still operating and at full production after more than two-hundred years, and, most importantly, it is the house that released Suzuki's work.

publishing activity under the pseudonym of Shimaya Yoichi. In a *zuihitsu* titled *Toshi no otamaki* (The New Year Columbine), issued by his house during the twelfth year of Bunka (1815), he recorded the milieu of the city of Matsumoto at the end of Kansei period, when he set up his book shop. We read:

おのれなりはひに書肆の事の起りハ、父母の家に有し総角の頃よ り、絵草紙、あるハ物語り軍書様すべて物の本を好みてみる事一壁な りき。

I became a publisher by occupation as, since I was a child, and my hairs still combed in the child fashion, I was fond of reading every sort of books, stories, tales of war and picture books. (186)

此松本二て其頃迄ハ文屋という店なく、皆片店二而わづかに売の 巳。大部の本類ハ都而三都へ見物に行人、あるハ偶タマタマ、飛脚等 にたくして買うる事なり。こは寛政の年の末頃の事。

Heretofore, in the city of Matsumoto there was no bookstore, and all the shops sold only a small quantity of books, of a certain type. For the most part, books were indeed brought by those who travelled across the three main cities, who were able to buy them, and to serve as occasional couriers. This situation did not change as far as the end of Kansei period. (250)

Takami Jinzaemon opened his book shop during the ninth year of Kansei (1797). Heretofore *jōruribon* and *kusazōshi* were the only texts available in Matsumoto. Fortunately, the situation rapidly evolved and, in a few years, precisely during the Bunka period, we read the following excerpt:

夫より近々文花ハ盛りになりて、毎度江戸名古屋表へ仕入二行。 近年学びの道大にひらけ而、先ハ此市中に予が店書肆一家を成せり。

Lately the culture is in blossom, thus we often trade with Edo and Nagoya. Recently the Way of Learning became accessible to everybody willing to study, and I set up the first bookstore in the city. (251)

It was during the Bunka period that the cultural policy held by the *han* of Matsumoto delivered the first benefits, which led to an increase in the demand for literature and culture in general. The city of Matsumoto was thus included as integral part of the communication net which linked Edo to Kyōto and Ōsaka, passing by Nagoya and other neighboring centers. The inhabitants of the city enjoyed poetry and novels, and measured themselves, from time to time, against the composition of prose and poetry.

The volume from the *Zoku* edition that is framed by the journey to the city of Matsumoto is the eighth, released during the fourteenth year of Bunka (1817); through its pages the author represents this place as rich and splendid as Edo. So far, this was not the first meeting that occurred between Ikku, who turned fifty at the time, and the young publisher. During the first year of Bunka (1804), in fact, Jinzaemon made his way to Edo to buy stocks and products for his bookstore. It was during this short trip that they met for the first time.

おのれ、江府へ文化甲子之年、店書物類并諸品仕入二行。其節通油 丁蔦屋重三郎同道二而、両国万八楼二書画会江行。彼一九子并京伝子、 外馬琴・画工菊丸等面会す。

I travelled to Edo during the first year of Bunka to buy books and other stuff for the store. On this occasion, by accompanying Tsutaya Jūsaburō from Edo Tōriaburachō, I participated in a composition meeting, in Ryōgoku, at the Manpachirō inn, and had the chance to meet his disciples Ikku, Kyōden, Bakin and the painter Kikumaro. (10)

In the first year of Bunka Jinzaemon visited the city of Edo, and met for the first time the local community of literati and painters. The Tsutaya Jūsaburō mentioned in the excerpt, who drove Jinzaemon around the city and to Ryōgoku, was the son and heir of the great publisher, who died at the age of forty-seven, during the ninth year of Kansei (1797). Jinzaemon's account continues:

わけて一九子と厚意二成。夫より吉原及び所々遊ぶ。吉原次郎庵 といふ医者、其外通油丁[書林]村田や治郎兵衛[ひざくり毛版元一 九作]、菊丸子などと角丁之中まん字や二遊ぶ。并大門通つたや[茶 や]所々遊歴之内ちぎり置。

I got particularly close with Ikku, who was very kind to me. With him I visited the Yoshiwara and many other places: we went to encounter the doctor Yoshiwara Jirōan, and, most importantly, the publisher from Tōriaburachō named Murataya Jirōbee who releases the *Hizakurige*; then we celebrated with Kikumaro and many others to the Manjiya in Kadochō. Besides that, right when we were in a tea house called Tsutaya, in Daimondōri, he promised me to visit Matsumoto. (12)

Thus, in the aftermath of a joyful night, during which the happy fellows visited several *maisons de rendezvous*, the publisher invited Ikku to visit Matsumoto, but the author could not honor his promise. Jinzaemon had to make his way back to Edo another time before Ikku could live for Matsumoto:

其後、文化七年同仕入用二出府する。其せつも又々ねんごろに往 来。漸々今年来る。

Subsequently, I left my province heading back to Edo for the same business, during the seventh year of Bunka (1810), and therefrom I went back and forth every year. He [Ikku] will finally pay all my visits back this year. (*Ibid.*)

The author, as we noticed by the list of travels to Shinano mentioned before, visited for the first time the region in the eighth year of Bunka (1811), but he could honor his friendship duties toward Jinzaemon only in the eleventh year of the same period (1814). His stopover was a long awaited event: Ikku was a real celebrity and his love for the countryside in general, being himself a native of Suruga, in Shizuoka prefecture, made him even more popular among the readers who lived far away from the principal cultural and political centers. The *Hizakurige*, with its description of villages and remote towns, was considered a form of production close to readers' tastes, which, as we may notice by the words recorded in many introductions and postfactions, held in due consideration the readership opinion.14 Suffice it to say that the travel to Matsumoto itself was due to suggestions from the audience, for the author's observant eye and acute sense of hearing presented an untruthful description of the local dialects.

However, the journey across the countryside was not only due to the author's need to record it. It played a way more practical role in Jippensha Ikku's creations. We read that several individuals, in the hopes of convincing him to represent the places they loved the most – perhaps their inn or teahouse – acclaimed Ikku during his trip to Shinano.

#### 新田町大圧家長丸、是ハ彼新田通り之趣よりみのち橋など之景色、 膝くり毛二かかせんとのねぎ事二而兼而文通いたし、待居ル。

At the height of the town of Arada, Osamaru from the Daishō thought that, instead of the main road to Arada, the panorama from Minochi bridge would be worth viewing, and, since he has been in correspondence with Ikku for few months in the hopes to convince him to introduce these locations in his masterpiece, he waited for him. (14)

Events like this were the reason why Ikku's *chef d'oeuvre* established such a widespread reputation among the readers. The author not only drew inspiration from travels; he occasionally even accepted suggestions from passionate

14 Many episodes of the entire work were introduced by popular acclaim, with the audience who demanded to read Yaji and Kita in true-to-life situations, such as the episode of the *sakayaki*, presented in the fifth volume of the *Hizakurige*, for, as Ikku registered, readers were eager to see the two protagonists at the barbershop.

fans. Osamaru's dream, however, came true in the ninth volume of the *Zoku* edition, when the publisher decided to present his illustration of Minochi Bridge (figure 1), while his two *kyōka* were presented as *gasan* in books seven and eight respectively.

Figure 1. Minochi Bridge.

山ふかき木曽路ながらも名物のくしのはをひく往来の人 Travelers, as numerous as teeth of combs, But not those renowned as special product from the Kiso road, In the deep of the mountain. (*Zoku hizakurige*, VII, 1, 6*u*)15

15 The entire collection of excerpts from the *Zoku hizakurige* comes from the text held by Waseda University Library, issued from the seventh year of Bunka (1810) to the fifth of Bunsei (1822), by Murataya Jirōbee, Eiyūdō, and others publishers who shared the publication of the work in the immediate aftermath of Murataya's bankruptcy.

たち杉はますぐにのびて明王の利剣のなりにみやしろの山 Cedars, standing as swords, Growing high and straight, Akin to sharp sabers of wise lords. (*Zoku hizakurige*, VIII, 2, 16*u*–17*o*)

These *kyōka* were signed by Osamaru and represented Ikku's personal expression of thanks for the generous hospitality received from him. *Kyōka* were one of the most useful and yet practical means of communication: their authors were generally chosen among Ikku's entourage and close collaborators.16 However, the first real exchange of favors between Ikku and Jinzaemon begun a few years before, during the Bunka period, when a collection of *senryū* composed by poets from the city of Matsumoto, the *Kokin inakadaru* (The Rustic Barrel, a Collection of Ancient and Modern Comic Verses),17 was issued; its introduction was drawn up by Ikku who pointed out: "the publisher came and asked me to write this introduction" (181). *Kyōka* and introductions were often used as means of exchange of courtesy between men of letters.

Ikku's trip to Shinano represented a rare and yet important occasion for several aspiring literati to attain visibility and to prove their skill at composing to one of the most popular authors of the time, who eagerly welcomed suggestions and contributions from local circles to introduce in his works. Although many people invited the author, he spent most of his sojourn at Jinzaemon's residence. The publisher thus wrote: "Jippensha and Hanagaki sojourned at my place, and everyday many painters and poets waited for them" (18). The author took part in several banquets, such as the gathering organized at the Seihōin,

16 Ikku's attitude to use his friends and acquaintances as poets was already clear in his *chef d'oeuvre*. In particular, book five, released during the third year of Bunka (1806), presents *gasan* signed by the members of three different local groups of amateurs, namely those from Owari, Suruga, and Mikawa. It has been demonstrated that, such a show of solidarity towards small groups of *gens de lettres*, often confined in isolated villages in the countryside, required a corresponding pecuniary compensation that the members of the circles paid to Ikku in exchange for some literary visibility in one of the most popular work of the time.

17 This collection of *senryū* was selected and edited by the first comic poet from Matsumoto, Inakabō Sōji; he played an eminent role in developing this genre in his city, and the abovementioned *Inakadaru* was meant to mark his consecration as man of letters. Unfortunately, he died shortly before the completion of the work, in the second year of Bunka (1805), assigning his disciples for the duty to end the collection, which presents no official date of publication, although many scholars argue that it was likely to have been released not that far from Sōji's death.

where he encountered the Misuzu *renga* circle that lavished him with food and, of course, a conspicuous amount of *sake*. Everyday composition meetings were organized in Ikku's honor, in several places, and the number of admirers and experts gathering for him increased day by day, with Jinzaemon who even noted their names in his diary: among them, he mentions Kiyosaburō Somendo, Atsumaru, Matsunari, Idemaru, Kimaru, Mitsuru, and Okazumi.

Ikku's trip to Shinano was not entirely devoted to celebrations, gatherings and banquets; as stated before, his real intention in engaging this month-longtrip was to collect information on the district. Hence, the three of them engaged in a trip around the most celebrated parts of the area, starting with the Manganji in Kurio:

八月十一日 新田より折々むかひ来る故、己も同道二而三人行。長 丸方二一宿。夫より栗尾満願寺へ行く。雨ふる。待もふけの馳走種々。 明朝御隠居此頃よりかこひの持山の内茸狩。松茸沢山二とり出す。両人 執持。さておのれは其せつ小笹原様十五日御着の処、兼而御宿わり被仰 付あれば、種々用事故花垣子同道二而先へ帰る。一九は廿日頃迄遊ぶ。

The eleventh day of the eighth month, I met Ikku and his disciple coming from Arada and decided to join them so that we became three. We spent one night at Osamaru's place and then moved to the Manganji in Kurio. It rained. Many people treated us with food. The day after we went mushroom hunting on the mountain with a hermit and they collected many of them, especially the pine mushroom. They were both really good at it. At this point, as mister Kozasawara was supposed to visit me the fifteenth day of that month, and, since I had previously booked a room for them but also due to many other affairs, I decided to leave with Hanagaki in advance. Ikku enjoyed that place as far as the twentieth day. (24)

The Manganji temple in Kurio framed the narrative of the eighth volume of the *Zoku* edition: at the end of a very detailed descriptions of the thirty-six temples comprising the complex, and of Jūhachimachi no saka which, according to Ikku, led the travelers straight on top of the clouds, surrounded by a forest where old pine trees and ancient Japanese cedars grew wild, while the pure water gushed from the rocks, the text reads:

方丈をすこしはなれて、いんきよ所のある所へともなひてゆく。 ここは見はらしのよき所にて、当山の隠寮なり。かけひの水にてあし をあらひ、ざしきへ打とほり見るに、小庵なれどもきれいにして、庭 などもよく[後略]

They headed together to a place akin to a hermitage, quite far from the hut. As it was very suitable for panoramas, someone decided to turn it into a hermitage on top of the mountain. After washing their feet with the water of a bamboo pipe, they passed through the *zashiki*, and realized how little this place was, but still it was very pretty. Also the garden was very good [*Omissis*] (*Zoku hizakurige*, VIII, 2, 32*u*)

Judging by the author's words, the narrative is very close to Jinzaemon's description of the location, with the hermitage occupying central stage. Here an old man of about sixty years, akin to a hermit, perhaps Jinzaemon's father, draw direct inspiration from the real man who showed Ikku his mercy, and who was rewarded with a walk-on in his work. However, the fourth of April, Jinzaemon recorded the following message:

此節、栗尾山観音開帳。七日より十六日迄。当年江戸より一九子、 栗尾山れいげん御法の花といふ新板ゑ入本作し来ル。

Meanwhile, they are holding an exhibition of the sacred images of Kannon in Kuriosan. It goes from the seventh to the sixteenth day. This same year, Ikku will prepare a new illustrated book titled *Kuriosan reigen minori no hana*, especially for this event. He plans on sending us a copy directly from Edo. (32)

It goes without saying that the good hospitality Ikku received during his short visit at the Sanctuary of Kurio was paid back with a brand new publication, dwelling exclusively on the exhibition held there. Ikku's *cadeau* was published in the thirteenth year of Bunka (1816), and it was titled *Shinshū Kuriosan Kanzeon minori no hana* (The flowers of the Holy Law of the Kannon from the Mount Kurio in Shinano), in three volumes, decorated by the expert brush of Katsukawa Shuntei (1770–1820). Ikku's travels across Shinano continued with a pilgrimage to the Mizusawa yamadera, where he spent three or four nights. Along the road, the number of admirers grew richer and¸ in addition to the already large group, Jinzaemon reports that: "many of us visited Mizusawa, including my wife and my mother" (28). Subsequently they moved toward the Hofukuji and the baths in Asama.

其後、植原保福寺へ重宝の松二行。隠居家へ登り遊びて帰宅。此前 二浅間湯へ一日行。

Then we headed to the Treasure Pine of the Hofukuji in Uehara; we went up to the hermit's house to celebrate and then went back home. But before that, we decided to spend one day at the baths in Asama. (31)

Ikku left Matsumoto in the thirtieth day of the eighth month, after a good month spent in the city, surrounded by a constant audience of admirers and friends. He moved back to Edo with plenty of memories and souvenirs of the warm hospitality that required to be rewarded.

#### *4. Senbetsu and payments*

As mentioned before, Ikku's journey across the countryside was not only an unrepeatable opportunity for local men of letters and amateurs to attain a widespread reputation by captivating the author's sympathy, in the hopes to be rewarded with a place in his masterpiece, or a very brief quotation among the *gasan* that decorated its illustrated apparatus; it constituted likewise a very rare if not unique event in the literary panorama of Shinano, a former remote province whose kaleidoscopically variegated cultural network was striving to obtain some literary visibility and to officially acquire a fair reputation. From the Edoites' perspective, Matsumoto and the entire Shinano region appeared as a remote land, dominated by wild mountains and nature – to pass through which almost five hundred tunnels were dug (Karaki 1986, 152) – and whose geographical proximity to the new political center did not bring any particular benefit. Conversely, at Ikku's arrival, he found a culturally lively milieu whose literary tradition had developed since a very long time. Takebe Ryōtai,18 more than fifty years before Ikku, in the thirteenth year of Hōreki (1763), traveled to Matsumoto and spent twenty-eight days in the city to discover that there was plenty of literary circles, with eminent and prestigious figures, unfortunately still unknown, such as Momohatatei and Tomoume (54).

Before Ikku's return home, Jinzaemon added a further paragraph to his diary:

所々より餞別集る。在町合せ五両斗凡出来る。悦び、又栗尾さし て別るる。池田[中や瀬左衛門/角や源之助]其外仁熊村などへ添書 認遣ス。追々所々二滞留二而越後辺遊暦いたし、十月二入、江府へ帰 宅之由書状来る。

Parting gifts gathered from several places. We barely collected from the neighboring villages an amount of five *ryō*. With great pleasure we headed to Kurio and then we parted. I handed him a presentation letter for the village of Ikeda [to Nakaya Sezaemon and Kadoya Gennosuke], and for the group of Nikumamura. He said that, little by little, he intends to stop by several places,

18 Takebe Ryōtai (1719–74), likewise known as Kitamura Hisamura, was the second son of the head of the Kitamura *han* in Hirosaki; he moved to Kyōto at the age of twenty-one, abandoning his parental household, and travelled then to Edo where he formed a *haikai* circle. However, he is way more renowned as Takebe Ayatari, popular writer of *yomihon* (reading books), such as the *Honchō suikoden*, and painter under the nickname of Kan'yōsai. He subsequently joined Kamo no Mabuchi's disciples and his Kokugaku School.

to visit Echigo,19 and to come back to Edo at the beginning of the tenth month. At which point, he will inform me of his return with a letter. (34–35)

In order to celebrate his departure, inhabitants and men of letters from Matsumoto regaled Ikku a parting gift of five *ryō*, not much of a large sum, especially considering that, as one of the leading writers of the period, he could afford to travel. This served to wish him a safe trip to Echigo, the neighboring region where the author intended to travel around in search of inspiration and sources of documentation. *Senbetsu*, or partying gift, was a common practice among those who gave hospitality to eminent travelers or friends, and Ikku, being a great voyager, was used to get money for his return trip. It goes without saying that five *ryō* were not a sum that could enable any individual to cope with a long journey, as the one the author intended to undertake, but they represented a kind show of affection if not a sign of thanksgiving for the good company and the entertainment donated to a usually isolated district. Jippensha Ikku often received friends or supposedly disinterested benefactors' gifts. As mentioned before, the most part of the poets of the fifth volume of the *Hizakurige* were unknown, and, most importantly, they did not belong to Ikku's entourage. Next to each name reported at the bottom of the composition, the author recorded its provenience, and we can point out three groups: Owari, Mikawa and Suruga. The former had a special status and it was numerically larger than the latter two; its leader was a man of letter named Kinometei Dengaku, who, according to Tanahashi (2008),20 met Ikku during an *utaawase* and helped him collect verses to adapt in the fifth volume of the *Hizakurige*. Verses from the abovementioned section of the work aimed at introducing and promoting amateur circles from small villages along the Tōkaidō road, where Ikku had some acquaintances, as happened with his friends from Matsumoto. In both cases, as witnessed by Jinzaemon's diary, and by a letter that the author himself sent over Dengaku, he received a parting gift.

19 Jippensha Ikku visited Echigo three times: the first immediately after his sojourn in Matsumoto, the second in the first year of Bunsei (1818), while visiting his friend Suzuki Bokushi, and the third and last in the ninth year of the same period (1826). According to Ikku, Echigo was mainly the land of the so-called *shichi fushigi*, the seven wonders, and its purpose in travelling across that region was mainly secular. 20 The letter, dated from the twenty-first day of the first month of the third year of Bunka (1806), was presented in Takahashi's article, and it is property of the University of Nara. The first scholar who deciphered its meaning was Professor Nagai Kazuaki.

# *5. Quotations as mean of thanksgiving*

As we saw, Ikku visited the Shinano district and the city of Matsumoto, where he took advantage of his friend's hospitality. The most part of the advertisements in his productions, therefore, are reserved to this benefactor and host: firstly, Ikku presented three *kyōka* by Jinzaemon in the *Zoku hizakurige*:

丸山といふハ今井の四郎兼平の城跡なりといへば What you call Maruyama is nothing but the vestiges of Imai Shirō Kenpei's castle (*Zoku hizakurige*, VII, 1, 1*u*–2*o*)

はや春のおしよするかとしろ山の雲のはた手になくほとときす Sparrows singing on top of the clouds in Shiroyama; Perhaps they think spring is coming soon. (*Zoku hizakurige*, VIII, 1, 17*o*)

鶴尾山松尾寺薬師 色かへぬ松尾寺なれはおのつからここにちとせをふるき霊場 Matsuodera Yakushi in Tsuruoyama: The temple that keeps unchanged its colors, In solitude an old hallowed ground stands here from centuries. (*Zoku hizakurige*, VIII, 2, 11*u*–12*o*)

Ikku's gratitude toward Takami and his activities did not conclude with this; during the thirteenth year of Bunka (1816) Jinzaemon headed back to Edo in order to accomplish other duties. According to his account, he left Matsumoto in the twelfth day of the fifth month and, after worshipping at the Myōgisan,21 one week later, he reached Edo accompanied by Moji no Fudehiko, a poet from the Mizusu group. Unfortunately, when the next day they visited Ikku's household, he was absent.

此せつ旅行二而留守也。内方の衆いろいろともてなし、又酒汲楽し み篭にのりて吉原仮宅浅草山の宿なるふしみや方江行。

When we visited him he was not home. All the people of the house, servants and maids, treated us very kindly; they poured us some sake and we really en-

21 Constantine Vaporis (1995) emphasizes the role of pilgrimage to explain how commoners came to engage in long-distance journeys. Because of their sacred nature, he argues, religious journey were not subject to the restrictions that the government placed on the movements of travelers. Thus, it is no surprise that a business trip, such as Jinzaemon's one to Edo, debuted with the worship at the Myōgisan, as, by taking advantage of this loophole, commoners used pilgrimages as an excuse for recreational journeys.

joyed the atmosphere, then we took a palanquin and headed to the Yoshiwara quarter, more precisely to a *karitaku.*22 We finally made our way to Asakusa, at the Fushimiya inn. (48)

Three years later, during the autumn of the second year of Bunsei (1819), Jippensha Ikku left his residence to go back for the third time to Matsumoto, kindly treated by his old friend Jinzaemon, in whose diary we read:

今日十返舎主外二供壱人入来、滞留する

[Twelfth day of the ninth month] Today Jippensha visited me in company of another friend; they are going to spend the night here. (*Ibid.*)

十返舎扇面など認。八ッ頃より一九子同道、平瀬村[小松平十郎之 隠宅へ行]。月晴るる夜九つ時帰宅。

[Thirteenth day of the ninth month] Jippensha chose the paper for the fans. Around the eighth hour, I left with him and his disciple for the village of Hirase [we visited Komatsudaira Jūrō's hermitage]. We made our way back home around the ninth hour of a night of shining moon. (49)

十返舎発枚。浅間へ送る二付、母并内行。[中略]夜四つ頃別れ 帰宅。

[Fourteenth day of the ninth month] Jippensha left. When I accompanied him to Asama, my mother joined us. [*Omissis*] I went back home at night, around the fourth hour. (*Ibidem*)

As the first excerpt clearly demonstrates, Ikku visited Matsumoto in order to partake of a composition meeting, in addition to his usual documenting activity. Materials collected during this brief staying became a part of the aforementioned *Kokkei tabigarasu* – specifically the fifth year of Bunsei (1822) issue – a *gōkan* dedicated to Ikku's solitary journey, in which he even mentions Takami Jinzaemon, referring to him as "an old friend of mine."23 In addition to that,

22 The *karitaku* was a provisional housing, built within the red light district, or in its immediate proximity, where inns, teahouses and brothels could have a temporary accommodation in the aftermath of fires, floods, and other cataclysms.

23 *Kokkei tabigarasu* was created as a patchwork of several topics, with the travel being the leitmotif of the entire production. It is composed by twenty-six volumes, irregularly published along more than twenty years, and each of them presents a narrative framed by the description of a specific region; for a detailed list of contents see Katō 1996, 131–32. The work thus stands as a long record of annotations of weird and perhaps the most important of the advertisements that the author could have possibly done to Jinzaemon with his literary output came with the thirteenth volume of another *gōkan* titled *Muda shūgyō kane no waraji* (Golden straw sandals for a useless study trip, 1813–33), which reports an illustration representing his publishing house with the inscription "Keirindō" and the variety of items sold, "Chinese and Japanese books" (figure 2). In his desire to promote his friend's activity, Ikku prominently adopted the use of the visual image, a true-to-life picture which constituted the best promotion to Takami's activity and the expression of the author's feelings of gratitude.

Figure 2. Takami Jinzaemon's shop.

singular things that Ikku observed during his journeys, and that struck his curiosity. To create long lists of *mezurashiki mono*, of rare things, as the author said, represented the real essence of the *Tabigarasu*, which stands far from Ikku's typical comic production. The author *de facto* felt the need to break away from his old style by writing a work in which the humor was deliberately not based on dialogues, and, furthermore, without characters that could stand as Yaji and Kita's imitations. We thus see that the real protagonist of the work is the author, who, by limiting the dialogues, wanted to put himself under the spotlight, and to enter a way more private dimension.

#### *Conclusions*

What I just recorded may apparently seem the description of a good friendship liaison between one of the mainstream *gesaku* writers and the publisher of a small city in the countryside, but it clearly shows many cultural dynamics which constituted the very foundation of the circulation of book during the late Edo period. We should not forget that this period, especially in the immediate aftermath of Kansei reform, besides being characterized by a culture mainly popular in its contents, was likewise renowned for the increasing importance placed on the countryside, whose number of potential users, or buyers in our case, could decree the success or the failure of a literary production. It was therefore Ikku's intention to attract those readerships to his masterpiece by involving directly some of the most notorious local literati.

During the first part of the Edo period, those who shared interests in literature and poetry were not that numerous, therefore, authors like Ikku, or as Takebe Ryōtai, as we saw, by travelling across the rural areas of Japan, were likely to find nothing more than a limited amount of circles, whose members entirely belonged to the upper class, and were totally devoted to composition. The massive development of the late Edo literary production leveled the differences between centers and countryside and brought to a general flourishing the entire productive panorama of small cities, especially when they were in the vicinity of the main centers.

As we noticed, the sojourn of perhaps the most renowned and yet – *stricto sensu* – popular literate of this period constituted an unrepeatable and rare event for both the author and the readers; the former was sure that, by spending a good month in Matsumoto, his rising popularity would grow richer and, by mentioning names of characters met along the road, or even by portraying publishing houses or locations particularly popular among the citizens of that specific part of the country, he would have met their interest and, at the same time, ensured a rise in the sale of his masterpiece. The popularity of Ikku's oeuvre was built on this presentation of places familiar among a certain readership; the collaborative attitude between the author and the audience constituted a part of his immense success, ergo one of the reasons why the *Hizakurige* enjoyed such a great reputation. As a professional writer, Ikku realized that he would have rendered the local space in order to capture the hearts and the imagination of the reading public, and this was the principal need that brought him to travel across the country.24

24 Other reasons why Ikku's narrative was so well appreciated lie in the prurient component of Yaji and Kita's adventures, which tickled the readers' curiosity. Secondarily,

# *References*

one curious aspect of the *Hizakurige* is the financial status of the twosome: Yaji and Kita are poor but, although they never work, they do not run out of money, and they magically have enough to survive. Their poverty represents an easy to relate to aspect. In addition to that, we should mention the narrative conducted in the third person: as third-person characters, Yaji and Kita are available to the readers and impersonal to be shared by many. By quoting Inouye (2007, 194), they are empty place holders and movable existences. In terms of social class, too, Yaji and Kita are presented with an ambiguity that makes it impossible to position them precisely on any social mapping. However, their very likeable essence lies in their pretentiousness to be this or that person.

# CROSSING THE BORDERS OF THE PHENOMENAL WORLD: BUDDHIST DOCTRINE AS A LITERARY DEVICE IN KŌDA ROHAN'S EARLY WORKS

# *Luca Milasi* "Sapienza" University of Rome

#### *Abstract*

This paper attempts to present the literary personality of the novelist and exegete Kōda Rohan (pseudonym of Kōda Shigeyuki, 1867–1947) in the cultural context of modernity.

Behind the façade of old-style literatus, Kōda Rohan strives to seize the opportunity to reform the concept of fiction in his own way. His goal is that of proposing an alternative model of fiction that is distinctively unique in comparison to a sheer imitation of Western culture, particularly in its romantic stances. The main device he employs to pursue his goal at an early stage is a coherent and thoughtful reliance to the view of the doctrinal foundations of East-Asian philosophies as a literary theme. Rohan's case is exemplary in that his wide reliance on (and almost constant allusions to) pivotal Buddhist concepts as literary technique offer an allegory for the new significance that its author attributes to the creative process behind writing fiction at a time of reform and change. Moreover, in his early work, Rohan's preoccupation over presenting a view of Romanticism more coherent with his own's cultural asset was also at stake.

By means of a thorough rethinking of the broader significance of key philosophical concepts in Rohan's early fiction, I shall present concrete examples to back up the view that the heavy reliance on Buddhist doctrine informing Rohan's first attempts at literary creation conceals an eminently modern interpretation of the main stances of Japanese pre-modern culture, which testifies to the author's relevance as a modern thinker.

#### *Keywords*

Koda Rohan, *furyubutsu*, romantic mysticism, buddhism; Lotus Sutra, fiction.

#### 要旨

本稿では、幸田露伴の作品と仏教との関わりを考察する。特に、『法華 経』、『般若心経』など、東アジアの大乗仏教の主な経典から、小説家 露伴はどのようなモチーフを取り入れ、それらの経典からインスピレー ションを受けて彼の初期小説にどのような女性像が描かれたのかを検討 する。更に、露伴の他の著作、エッセイなども考慮に入れつつ、『風流 佛』という小説の譬喩的解釈を示す。『風流佛』の主人公珠運の美の 探究と、その探求を妨げるかのような珠運の初恋というプロットの展 開が、著者の思想の変遷においてどのような意義を持つかを検討し、

*Transcending Borders. Selected papers in East Asian studies*, edited by Valentina Pedone, Ikuko Sagiyama, ISBN 978-88-6453-403-9 (online), ISBN 978-88-6453-402-2 (print), CC BY 4.0, 2016 Firenze University Press

坪内逍遥などが小説の革新を唱えていた過渡的な時期の文壇に露伴は どのような貢献を与えようとしていたかを明らかにする試みである。

キーワード 幸田露伴、風流仏、浪漫派、仏教、法華経、小説。

# *1. The literary context: Rohan's personal view on the reform of Japanese fiction in the 1880s*

As Donald Keene suggests in his well-known and acclaimed volume, 'Dawn to the West', Kōda Rohan, along with Ozaki Kōyō, was one of the more active writers in the last two decades of the 19th century (Keene 1999, 150). The onset of Rohan's fervent literary activity follows after the tumultuous first decades following the Meiji restoration which infused new life in the country's cultural milieu; particularly after the foundation of the first literary circle of any distinction, the Ken'yūsha, in 1885 (Keene 1999, 119–121), by a group of young writers which, although soon to be overshadowed by another popular trend, that of the Naturalist school, enjoyed wide popularity in the first few year after its constitution. The literary renewal of this era continued throughout the 1890s, marking an especially fecund period of literary flowering. A passionate call for a renovation of fiction was also being advocated by seminal critics such as Tsubouchi Shōyō and writers such as Futabatei Shimei, who did not belong to any mainstream movement per se. Newly introduced ideals of the novel, variously inspired by European movements, particularly Romanticism, Naturalism, and the psychological novel, had left young writers the difficult task of establishing a new identity for Japanese literature, pushing those who dared venture in the realm of new trends towards a vital rethinking of the overall value of literature, particularly prose fiction, in the new cultural context of modernity.

Although sometimes regarded as an old-style literatus, Rohan had gained a momentum as a prominent writer of new fiction already by the time of his debut novel *Tsuyu dandan (Drops of Dew)*, which had appeared serially in the magazine *Miyako no hana* in 1889.1 The novel's setting in America matched

1 Rohan's literary debut features a Western contemporary setting and a simpler style but shares with the work that will be our main focus, *Fūryū butsu* 風流佛, published later the same year, a strikingly similar outlook as It emphasises the power of romantic love (*koi*, Kurita 2007, 382–391). It also shares the link between sensual love, compassion, and the fundamental quality – or character – of enlighten beings, see Kurita (Ibid., 408). Rohan maintains the philosophical trend towards Buddhism and Christianity throughout the whole first half of his literary production (Okada, 2012), the novelties of the Meiji era with a distinctive literary quality, reminiscent of Asian masterpieces such as the Chinese short stories collection *Jingu qiguan* (*Stories of marvels, past and present*), conjuring up in both readers and critics alike the impression that the author was most likely deemed to be one of the best candidates to the sound reform of fiction advocated by critics.2 Nevertheless, with the publication of *Fūryū butsu* (*The bodhisattva of sensual love*), shortly after his first novel had registered such a considerable success, it may seem that Rohan had already decided to place himself against the flow. Although the setting is, formally, contemporary, as far as factors as crucial as the style, content, and literary techniques employed are concerned*, Fūryū butsu* seems to sum up a manifesto against current literary trends. The new novel was very well received too, but it was distant, in concept, from both his previous work and, seemingly, that of any of his contemporaries. The choice of a style resembling *gesaku* fiction, the plot, and the several quotations from earlier literature mark the beginning of Rohan's struggle to preserve the values of the Chinese and Japanese tradition against the ever spreading Western influence that had characterised the first two decades of modern literary history. Rohan maintained his general cautious view towards acritical substitutions of old models with new ones well into the latter part of his writing career, touching upon the subject in dedicated essays, such as *Shinkyū zen'aku shō* (Brief survey over the good and bad of old and new, February 1927).3

Being virtually the sole Meiji writer to survive WWII, it is possible that indeed Rohan felt at some point compelled to assume the role of Meiji Japan's living legacy in view of the circumstances and the public's expectations. It is also true that Rohan, compared to some of his contemporaries, has been underrepresented in Western literary studies; this could be ascribed to the difficulty of his prose, as Rohan's prevalent mode of expression at an early stage lied in a pastiche moulded after Chinese and Japanese classic and, even in late works, the author displayed a mastery command of such 'classical' and obscure stylistic models that now seem totally anachronistic. A closer look at what has been

including short stories more overtly concerned with, and influenced by, Western literary models, such as *Taidokuro* (Encounters with a Skull), see Tanaka (2015, 89–124). 2 As early as 1942, five years before Rohan's death, Yanagida Izumi, in his noted biography, stated that Rohan had been one a precursor (*senkūsha*) of the new novel of which Shōyō had been the first and foremost theoretician, confirming Rohan's canonization (Yanagida 1942, 70)

3 Now reprinted in the supplementary volumes of the *Complete works*, see Kōda (1980, 296–298)

termed the literary output of a 'nostalgic', nevertheless, suggests evidence that the respect professed by Rohan for Chinese and Japanese antiquity had not, in any case, prevented the author from innovating the concept of 'fiction' with original choices of content. Even more significantly, the key themes that Rohan derived from an apparently faithful imitation of classical models, and which constitute the recurring elements of his poetics, upon closer examination, do reveal an architecture that sensibly hints at presenting the author's original reinterpretation of Japan's cultural past in view of his perspective as a modern writer. The highly personal interpretation of even the more classic of themes in Rohan's prose clarifies all the implications behind the façade of 'classicist' and 'idealist' with which Rohan seemed to mask his intents. The influence that his early efforts exerted on writers such as Higuchi Ichi'yō (1872–1896) — one of the first modern Japan's first woman writers —, the Bungakukai (Literature club) circle, and writers as diverse as Tanizaki and Mishima should also not be overlooked. At an age in which a wave of unthoughtful nationalistic reactions to two decades of intense Western influence was raising, it may well be the case that Rohan, sensing the perils that laid ahead for the future of *belles lettres* amidst this cultural turmoil, had come to the conclusion that Japan's new fiction would emerge not from reshaping Japan's classical literature in form or content, but by implying a new, much broader outlook. The most striking example in this respect is precisely *Fūryūbutsu*: an exploitation of covert and overt references and recurrent allusions in the novel helps to detail how Rohan's narrative incorporates key elements of Buddhist doctrines into a main plot devised to entice his readers into a fictional world pointing to quintessential truths.

Rohan himself sums up his attitude towards classic themes in one of the most noticeable essays of his mature writings, the short article *Koten shingan* 'Classic texts for modern eyes' (April 1921),4 perhaps his most lucid statement about the need to re-read the cultural heritage of Japan in a distinctively new fashion. The essay opens with an advocacy of the need to approach ancient works such as *Kojiki* and *Nihonshoki* not so much for their relevance *per se*, but to offer a precise interpretative key in view of one's sensibility and experiences as a contemporary man. This particular essay is illuminating in that the author seems to clarify here an outlook which, in his early works of pure fiction, is an implied — not an overtly declared — perspective. In other words, Rohan mantains the attitude of consciously choosing old themes and styles not because of a lack of knowledge or a rejection of newly introduced Western models, but out of a perceived necessity to seize the opportunity to introduce them to a Japanese public

4 古典新眼, see Kōda (1954a, 349–353).