Banner Image Source Original image held by the Harvard-Yenching Library
of the Harvard College Library, Harvard University
Current Issue

December 2023

Volume
83
Number
2
About the cover

Surely every moviegoer and novel reader in the Anglophone world has encountered the raw material for the subfield of classics known as reception studies, which examines the many afterlives of characters and stories from Mediterranean antiquity. Thus, the goddess Circe, who makes a brief but memorable appearance in the Odyssey and features in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, may be best known nowadays as the eponymous protagonist of Madeline Miller’s best-selling novel, published in 2018. Circe’s story in Miller’s account is immediately recognizable to anyone who has read Homer, yet the character herself speaks to twenty-first-century audiences in ways that ancient authors could not have countenanced or indeed even imagined.

Classical tales have been retold and adapted for centuries in East Asia as well. Japanese and Korean readers know the Monkey King from the Chinese novel Journey to the West (Xiyou ji 西遊記) at least as well as their Danish and Luxembourgish counterparts know Jason and his Argonauts of Greek mythology. This issue of HJAS features an exercise in East Asian reception studies by Paize Keulemans, who looks at the afterlife of the sixteenth-century Chinese tale Outlaws of the Marsh (Shuihu zhuan 水滸傳) as an enduringly popular Japanese video game, Fantasy Outlaws of the Marsh (Gensō Suikoden 幻想水滸伝). Also rendered in English as The Water Margin, Shuihu zhuan has had an extraordinary afterlife in Japan since its introduction in the early seventeenth century. Indeed, William C. Hedberg characterizes it as the most important work of Chinese fiction in the development of early modern Japanese literature and a key text in shaping the Japanese imagination of China.1

Among the countless literary adaptations and retellings of Shuihu zhuan in early modern Japan, my personal favorite draws on the real-life conflict between outlaw gangs led by Shigezō of Sasagawa 笹川繁蔵 and Sukegorō of Iioka 飯岡助五郎. In 1850, an Edo-based professional “sermonizer” (kōshakushi 講釈師) named Takarai Kinryō 宝井琴凌 composed a fictional account of the conflict, which he performed as an oral tale (kōdan 講談) of swashbuckling adventure called the Tenpō Water Margin (Tenpō Suikoden 天保水滸伝). (Tenpō refers to the era, 1829–1844, during which the key events took place.) The hugely popular tale quickly morphed into other genres. Although it is best known today as a narrative ballad (rōkyoku 浪曲), it was also adapted for the Kabuki stage and other styles of theater, as well as countless films, television programs, novels, popular songs, manga, and anime. Although the Tenpō Water Margin has little direct connection with its Chinese namesake, its story of outlaws battling for turf on the banks of the Tone River evokes the original strongly enough to make the name-borrowing natural.

Shuihu zhuan was a charismatic subject for Japanese woodblock-print artists. Perhaps most famous is Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s 歌川国芳 comprehensive series of prints, The 108 Heroes of the Popular Water Margin (Tsūzoku Suikoden gōketsu hyakuhachinin no hitori 通俗水滸伝豪傑百八人之一個; 1827–36).2 The prints were such a big hit that they sparked a craze for Shuihu zhuan-themed tattoos.3 Kuniyoshi’s prints and the tattoos they inspired have themselves become the subjects of modern-day reception. The tattoo artist Chris Brand’s series 108 Heroes of Los Angeles reimagines Kuniyoshi’s prints in a style that combines Japanese and Chicano black and gray tattooing techniques to depict Chicano heroes of the 1980s.4

The print on the cover of this issue of HJAS is from The Illustrated Water Margin (Suiko gaden 水滸画伝), an 1856 book comprising three short volumes of text by Ryūsuitei Tanekiyo 柳水亭種清 (1823–1907) and illustrations by Totoya Hokkei 魚屋北渓 (1780–1850).5 It depicts a scene from the beginning of the tale, in which the Song emperor Renzong 仁宗 dispatches Marshal Hong Xin 洪信 to Dragon Tiger Mountain, where he is supposed to obtain medicine to combat a plague. He encounters a tiger and a snake during his ascent of the mountain. The beasts terrify but do not harm the hapless marshal.6 Because Hokkei died in 1850, six years before the publication of The Illustrated Water Margin, the illustrations were necessarily repurposed from other works. Many, including the one featured here, originally appeared in the Album of Suikoden Portraits with Kyōka Poems (Kyōka Suikoden gazōshū 狂歌水滸伝画像集), published in 1829.7 Incidentally, the kyōka—comic verses—in the album do not refer directly to the Shuihu zhuan. HJAS thanks the Harvard Art Museums for their kind permission to reproduce the image.

  1. William C. Hedberg, The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: “The Water Margin” and the Making of a National Canon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).
  2. See Inge Klompmakers, Of Brigands and Bravery: Kuniyoshi’s Heroes of the Suikoden (Leiden, Nld.: Hotei Publishing, 1998).
  3. Hedberg, Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction, p. 93.
  4. Todd Honma and Anthony Francoso, “21st Century Suikoden: Tattoo Reinterpretations of the ‘Water Margin’ as Racialized Resistance in Chicano Los Angeles,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 31.1 (2017): 55–68.
  5. Ryūsuitei Tanekiyo, Suiko gaden, 3 vols. (Edo: Kansendō, 1856).
  6. For the narrative of Hong Xin’s expedition to Dragon Tiger Mountain, see The Broken Seals: Part One of The Marshes of Mount Liang by Shi Nai’an and Luo Guanzhong, trans. John Dent-Young and Alex Dent-Young (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1994), pp. 7–24.
  7. Totoya Hokkei, Kyōka Suikoden gazōshū, vol. 1 (n.p., 1829), Asian Art Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/78625.

Totoya Hokkei, The Illustrated Suikoden [The Water Margin] (Suiko gaden) [1856], Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Gift of Mrs. Henry Osborn Taylor, 1928.15.37. Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Editorial Preface & In Memoriam

Editorial Preface

Articles

King of Kings of China

Central Asian Political Imagination After the Fall of the Tang

Xin Wen
Abstract

As a reaction to the fall of the Tang dynasty (618–907), the kings of Khotan, a Middle Iranian-speaking oasis state in Central Asia, adopted Tang-style clothing, employed Chinese reign names, incorporated Chinese official titles in their government, and claimed to be “king of kings of China.” In this article, I uncover this previously overlooked story of Central Asian political imagination through an analysis of multilingual (Chinese, Khotanese, and Tibetan) excavated documents and mural paintings from Dunhuang caves. Unlike many other self-styled Tang successors in eastern Eurasia in the tenth century, the Khotanese kings’ claim is unique in its narrow adoption of the Tang legacy as first and foremost an imperial political apparatus. By creatively combining the Khotanese exogenous view of “China” with the understandings of Han, Tang, and zhongguo (central state) in their political language, the Khotanese kings crafted a uniquely non-dynastic way of imagining what “China” could mean.

摘要 (中文)

唐朝滅亡之後,中亞的于闐國王開始著漢式服飾,用漢文年號紀年,並在其政府中採用唐宋時期的一些官職。從于闐文材料可知,于闐國王甚至曾經號稱”震旦王中之王”。本文通過對多語言文獻的討論,揭示出這一段在中亞政治傳統中,對於中國王權的重新想象。

(Early) Modern Forms of Chinese Literary Play

Database, Interface, and Iconic Characters in Outlaws of the Marsh and Gensō Suikoden

Paize Keulemans
Abstract

The Ming-dynasty novel Outlaws of the Marsh famously tells the tale of 108 heroes who band together to fight official corruption from their hideout in the marshes of Mount Liang. In the sixteenth-century novel, these characters are firmly embedded in a narrative that poses the initial assembly and final disbanding of this group of heroes as inevitable. But can we also think of these characters outside of the necessity of plot and the demands of fate? This paper examines these questions through one of the most popular remediations of Outlaws, the Konami-produced Japanese video game series Gensō Suikoden. To do so, this study draws on terms often associated with contemporary digital culture—database, interface, and algorithm—to question our assumptions about the novel, in particular the way we have prioritized the structure of plot over the charismatic attraction of characters, whether as individuals or as a group of 108.

摘要 (中文)

《水滸傳》中的一百單八好漢誕生於宋江起義的曆史背景以及明代的章回小說。但於古代讀者而言,他們的人格魅力不局限於此。本文著眼於日本電子遊戲 《幻想水滸傳》,通過現代數字文化來分析明代小說,解讀其中獨立於故事情節的特點進而探討如何看待人物形象。

Stop the Presses!

Publishing Chinese Character Simplification, 1935–1936

Jeffrey Weng
Abstract

Simplified Chinese characters (jiantizi) were first implemented as official policy under the Nationalist government of the Republic of China in late 1935. Less than four months later, in early 1936, the policy was rescinded. Existing historiography emphasizes the role of conservative political opposition in simplification’s demise. However, the practical difficulties of simplification must also be considered. While promulgating simplification, the government also mandated the use of new phonetic annotations (zhuyin fuhao) in pedagogical publications. These two simultaneous demands on publishing companies imposed costs that neither the industry nor the government was willing to bear. Based on previously overlooked archival documents, along with examinations of the financial positions of the leading publishing firms and the national budget of China at the time, I argue that simplification’s failure should be attributed not only to political opposition but also to the material and economic constraints on the companies responsible for its implementation.

摘要 (中文)

1935 年國民政府實施漢字簡化政策,但旋即撤消。歷史學家迄今強調政治力對此政策導致的影響,而忽略物質因素。當時政府要求全國教育出版物需標明注音,致使印刷成本爆增。本文將根據官方檔案和出版業財務數據,論證漢字簡化政策的失敗除因政治因素,經濟面受限為另一主因。

Review essays

Chinese Historical Data in the Social Sciences: Three Cases

Peter K. Bol

Hegemonic Masculinity and Neoliberalism in East Asian Media Cultures

Diane Wei Lewis

Book reviews

Testing the Literary: Prose and the Aesthetic in Early Modern China, by Alexander Des Forges

Xiaoqiao Ling

Gods of Medieval Japan, by Bernard Faure

Fabio Rambelli

Craft Culture in Early Modern Japan: Materials, Makers, and Mastery, by Christine M. E. Guth

Mary Redfern

Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America’s Tea Cups, by Robert Hellyer

Taka Oshikiri

A Proximate Remove: Queering Intimacy and Loss in the Tale of Genji, by Reginald Jackson

J. Keith Vincent

Hegemonic Mimicry: Korean Popular Culture of the Twenty-First Century, by Kyung Hyun Kim

Gooyong Kim

Honor and Shame in Early China, by Mark Edward Lewis

Luke Habberstad

Brushed in Light: Calligraphy in East Asian Cinema, by Markus Nornes

Peter C. Pugsley

Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia, by Victor Seow

Ruth Rogaski

Language, Nation, Race: Linguistic Reform in Meiji Japan (1868–1912), by Atsuko Ueda

Michael Wert