#heian lit my absolute beloved

[maggiecheungs]

speaking of the joys of metafiction, i’m currently re-reading fumiko enchi’s 1965 novel a tale of false fortunes (namamiko monogatari), and it’s so deliciously layered—a precarious bundle of narratives built upon multiple incredibly tenuous sources, tied together by a thread of unreliable narration.

in the introduction, fumiko enchi states that the novel is as an attempt to describe/retell a classical text she claims to have read when she was a child, entirely through her own memory. this book never belonged to her—she borrowed it from the library of a prominent academic—and as an adult she was never able to find any trace of it anywhere else. futhermore, the manuscript she claims to have read was not the orginial; it was probably a copy made several centuries later, and it is apparently impossible to tell the original date of authorship, and whether or not it was intended to be fiction. enchi’s novel switches almost seamlessly back and forth the ‘recollected’ passages and her own commentary on them, thus blurring the line between the 'original' text and her own interpretations.

but that’s not all! this text she is describing (a tale of false fortunes) is a retelling of some of the events described in, and clearly a textual response to, the 11th century japanese classic history text eiga monogatari/a tale of flowering fortunes, which describes the political ascendency of fujiwara no michinaga. this time period can be fairly among historians—not because there’s a lack of sources, but because the sources we have are all so intimately connected to the political figures and powers of the day (which tends to be a problem with most historical sources, alas). essentially, the contemporary historiographical texts that we have are all committed to telling certain, selective narratives. which is to say that eiga monogatari (which was written about events that occurred during the author’s own adulthood, no less!) is very biased.

to add even another layer of intertextual confusion to it all, eiga monogatari itself is something of a composite text—the main author is generally assumed to be akazome emon, a lady-in-waiting to michinaga’s daughter empress shoshi, but there is still some uncertainty as to the extent to which authorship can be attributed to her. this is in large part because emon essentially plagiarised* other first-hand accounts of the events she describes. for example, there’s a section of eiga monogatari which is just copied without alterations or attribution from the diary of murasaki shikibu. so enchi’s book is allegedly based on a classical text, which is based on a different classical text, which in turn is stitched together from a bunch more other texts. it completely destroys any notion we might have had of an ‘original’ or ‘true’ narrative.

and to top it all off, the novel is almost as impossible to find in english as its alleged predecssor was to find in japanese. in fact (despite being a work of fiction by a prominent novelist) the english translation was published by the university of hawai’i press, an academic publisher who exclusively prints nonfiction and has printed a lot of translations of classical japanese historical writings. the publisher lends the narrative an air of credence; if you didn’t know better, you might think that enchi’s text was rooted in real life and literary history.

so in the end, the finished result is a gloriously metafictive romp through the liminal space between fact and fiction, history and memory, originality and replicas. it’s turtles all the way down, and it’s brilliant.

*a word with heavy connotations that might not apply in the same way in this specific historical context, which I won’t go into here