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.