“The Carp of My Dreams”—Ueda Akinari (1734-1809)

夢応の鯉魚 (“Muō no rigyo”) is, in my view, a standout in the influential collection of supernatural short stories 雨月物語 (Ugetsu monogatari, “Tales of Moonlight and Rain”). The collection is in a late and relatively pellucid form of Classical Japanese, and comprises reworkings of older Japanese, Chinese, and Indian material. Published in the midst of Japan’s isolationist Tokugawa period, the collection has occasional nationalist and nativist overtones, but, unlike certain later material, this has a tendency to enhance rather than sap its narrative and emotional strength. This story, which, following Anthony Chambers, I have translated “The Carp of My Dreams,” is a bit different from other stories in the collection for its relatively light tone; its story of a Buddhist monk who paints fish and his reward from a lake god has tensions and ambivalent points, but nothing like what appears in other Ugetsu offerings like “A Serpent’s Lust” or “The Kibitsu Cauldron.”