The Succession (Kuniyuzuri): A Translation from Utsuho Monogatari

U tsuho Monogatari1 -4M t4 ('The Tale of the Hollow Tree') is a court romance of the late tenth century, generally attributed, with some uncertainty, to the famous scholar and poet, Minamoto no Shitago NOlR, 911-983. In recent years the work has gained increasing attention from Japanese literary scholars because of the significant contributions it is thought to have made toward the development of the monogatari of the Heian period. Its great length runs to many times that of any previous work, and as the story progresses through its several parts, radical changes take place in the mode and technique of the narrative. In its first section it is pure romance, containing many elements of the fantastic and based heavily upon traditional materials; by its third part it has developed into an imaginative but essentially realistic narrative set firmly in a fictional world that reflects the court society of the time. For this reason, the work is often spoken of as having opened up new possibilities for fiction in a period when prose literature consisted of written versions of traditional oral tales, which were generally quite fantastic in nature, and ostensibly factual accounts, such as diaries and stories about actual historical figures. Utsuho Monogatari is thus held to have played a major role in paving the way for the brilliant Genji Monogatari iP fi; ('The Tale of Genji'), ca. 1010, written about a quarter century later. The tale is about three-fifths the length of Genji Monogatari, and has twenty maki, or chapters. It can be divided into four main parts, of which the passage translated here represents the climax of the third. The first part (Chapter 1) opens with Kiyowara no Toshikage's i shipwreck, his fantastic encounters with