Tun-huang by Yasushi Inoue, translated by Jean Oda May, preface by Damion Searls (New York Review Books, 2010)
A view both macroscopic and microscopic emerges in Yasushi Inoue's historical novel of ancient China. Looking from afar, the protagonist Hsing-te sees someone as a “black speck” trailed by a long tail. It is a woman committing suicide.
Then it happened. Hsing-te saw the black speck, which had stood motionless for a while on the wall, suddenly leap off. It dropped beside the wall, trailing a long tail behind it. It was over in a second. There was no reaction in the gathering; no one else seemed to have noticed.
In time, he remembers her up close—her eyes, nose, mouth, and smile—yet always returns to her final act as seen from a great distance, as “that small dot tracing a fine line as it fell to the ground.”
Hsing-te seldom thought of the woman now. It was not that he made an effort to forget her, but somehow as time passed he thought of her less often. It did not mean that his love for the Uighur woman had decreased. He thought of her infrequently, but whenever he did, her image was always clear. In fact, each time it became more vivid. Hsing-te could recall the woman’s eyes, nose, and mouth. He also remembered her complex smile the last time he had seen her—joy, sorrow, and surprise all fused together. And he remembered, with vividness and clarity, that small dot tracing a fine line as it fell to the ground from the wall of Kan-chou.
Elsewhere, Inoue writes of “Turfan soldiers, like little moving dots, covered the plains as far as you could see.” Standing atop a fortress, “People walking about looked as small as peas.” From a window, “a large flock of birds at the edge of the sky migrating to the south like specks of dust.” By the novel’s end, a group of men is described as “walking toward the northern section of the Thousand Buddha Caves resembled ants compared to the scale of the mountain.”
The images of specks, dots, peas, and ants convey the infinitesimally small roles of individuals within the vast expanse of history. History in Tun-huang unfolds simultaneously at two scales: the intimate world of memory, grief, and daily life, and the vast movements of armies, kingdoms, and civilizations. The shifts in perspective recall Benjamin's “old rapport between the microcosm and macrocosm.”
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Damion Searls, in his preface to Inoue's 1959 historical novel Tun-huang, grouped the novelist's fiction into four genres: historical fiction, love stories, postwar sociopolitical fiction, and autobiographical writings. Of these, I've sampled only two. Chronicle of My Mother was a candid autobiographical novel about the novelist's aging mother, and Bullfight was a reportage and commentary about the staging of the sport and its cultural significance in postwar Japan. Both books were reviewed elsewhere in this blog.
Having read Tun-huang late last year, I can now attest to the marvelous prose and generous ideas that inform Inoue's sporadically translated writings. Searls also admitted that these four genres were not mutually exclusive, with certain works overlapping across genres.
Searls quoted a fan letter from Peter Handke to Inoue (dated 1988, published 1992) to illustrate how the Japanese novelist's writings “feel lived from within, not described from without, despite the scrupulous research.”
The unique thing about your work, for me—and the books of yours I feel closest to are The Roof Tile of Tempyō and Tun-huang—is that every story presents a vision, and that unlike the visions in books by other authors, I can always follow the vision as I’m reading, always believe it; you have lived and felt these images and have the simplest and airiest language for them that I have ever seen. I don’t need to first believe your illuminations, they are simply there in the book, as facts. [italics in the quoted material]
To reinforce Handke's praise, Searls quoted from another story by Inoue rather than from Tun-huang itself, which he posited as perhaps the writer's greatest work in his greatest genre. I would instead highlight passages from the novel that demonstrate this organic beauty and lightness.
He could not tell how much time had passed. His sleep was broken by the plaintive cries of the camels and the whinnying of the horses. The surroundings were so brightly lit up that they seemed dreamlike. It was undoubtedly night, but the bodies of the camels and horses appeared to have caught fire as they stood against the red glare. The resonant, earth-shaking war cries seemed almost hushed in the startling clarity.
Hsing-te raced up a hill. From that vantage point, he saw a fiery column shoot into the air in the wide plains not far from where he stood. Reflected in its glare was the movement of a large cavalry force. This was unmistakably a battle between the main strength of the two armies, but Hsing-te could only see a small portion of the fighting. The scene reflected in the light was only the orderly advance of the cavalry troops thrusting forward; several units emerged from the darkness one moment, and then sank into the shadows again.
The protagonist had just awakened from sleep and the flashes of fiery images provided an incomplete picture of the battle. Yet there is enough poetry to allow readers to imagine the violence behind the bloodshed. While crimson was the dominant hue, the play of light and shadows created a dynamic chiaroscuro of war—a cinematic encapsulation of conflict.
At twilight Hsing-te’s group was inspected. The yellow sun was setting in the west, and everything—the clearing where Hsing-te’s force stood, the city wall, the oasis stretching out east, and the plains in the west—was suffused by the crimson afterglow. To Hsing-te, who had only heard of Li Yüan-hao and now saw him for the first time, the youthful commander seemed magnificent. He appeared to be twenty-four or twenty-five. He was just a shade over five feet tall and slight in build, but he had a stately, imposing bearing. At the same time, bathed by the rays of the setting sun, he appeared to be crimson-colored.
...
Again Hsing-te was pushed out from the battlefield into a patch of quiet light. The sun shone; there was a hill; the dust billowed upward; and there were clouds in the azure sky. Lines of troops preceded and followed him. But the formation had been reduced, there was only a handful of scattered survivors. Hsing-te could only see a few familiar faces nearby. He tried to find Wang-li, but he could not see him anywhere. As he rode on, Hsing-te looked out toward the plains. There were two battlefields. And in the vast plain, lines of men and horses emerging from the combat crossed and recrossed like silk threads being pulled from a cocoon. The battlefield and lines of horsemen seemed to have a life of their own and did not remain still for a moment.
The image of warriors and horses crossing and recrossing like cocoon silk threads was astonishing. The novelist did not so much describe the battle but let the silhouettes, colors, and shades of the battlefield speak the unsaid.
Tun-huang reconstructed the chain of events and the human motivations behind concealing a significant trove of cultural and religious artifacts in a cave network in China, discovered in the early twentieth century. Inoue was unable to visit the site of his novel's setting (Kansu Province). His research on the period (the decade following the year 1026) did not yield a historical account. He had to write with the power of imagination, which informed his view of history as a chronicle of human folly and fallibility.
The stunning imagery belied the endless cycle of violence and the natural history of destruction. Humans are dwarfed by history and by the fateful weave of public and private incidents shaping history's nonlinear course.
Much of that effect owes to translator Jean Oda Moy, who took at least 14 years to complete her translation and deserves credit for her clear and dynamic rendering of Inoue’s imagery. Her moving work in Chronicle of My Mother, a novel so far removed in theme from Tun-huang, shows her facility in rendering Inoue’s registers and heart of being (kokoro).
How does Inoue transcend mere transcription of history? What Walter Benjamin wrote of Johann Peter Hebel might be true of Inoue's work.
When Hebel depicts the passing of fifty years of mourning this way, it almost becomes a lament, but a lament for the way of the world similar to those sometimes found in the opening pages of medieval chronicles. For we do not encounter the attitude of a historian in these lines, but that of a chronicler. The historian limits himself to “world history,” the chronicler recounts the way of the world.
Inoue's was a lived history. He was not a historical novelist in the sense of putting into words momentous events of history that have already come to pass. He is a chronicler of lived history in the way Walter Benjamin envisioned it, in the sense of incorporating the daily practices and struggles of ordinary life. Benjamin continued:
The [historian] is concerned with the web of events woven from incalculable threads of cause and effect—and all that he has studied or learned is but a tiny nodal point in this net; the [chronicler] is concerned with the minor events, narrowly circumscribed, of his town or region—but for him this is not a fragment or a mere element of the universal, it is rather something other and more. Because in writing his chronicle, the true chronicler also writes a parable of the way of the world. What the town’s local history and the way of the world reflect is the old rapport between the microcosm and macrocosm.
The everyday practices and rituals bathed in a dazzling chiaroscuro made for a dynamic rendering of human conflict. While Tun-huang concerned itself with the broader 11th century geopolitics in Central and West China and scenes of wars and looting at a time when two warring factions—the Uighurs and the Hsi-hsia—tried to wrest power from each other and rule the land, one cannot help but read, between these reconstructed scenes, the colors of current events. Wars have been ever-present across epochs. While the battle is witnessed up close, the true chronicle ultimately zooms out from that summit to behold the wider drama of human reckoning and futility.
Quoted passages of Walter Benjamin were from The Storyteller Essays (New York Review Books, 2019), edited and with an introduction by Samuel Titan, and translated by Tess Lewis.
