La belle dame sans merci : les fantômes médiévaux à l'âge moderne
Authors: Lachaud François 
Published: March 2010

Dreams and Ghosts is the title of a book published in 1897 by Andrew Lang. Andrew Lang's title provides in itself an ideal summary of this article, the first one in a series devoted to the theme of necromancy in pre-modern and modern Japanese letters. This essay is an enquiry into the genealogy of the fantastic tale (gensō bungaku) in the modern era in Japan and an examination of the strong connections it established with traditional religion and the classics. In order to be read meaningfully, modern Japanese tales of the fantastic call for a closer examination of their classical forebears. They also require to be read in the light of various religious discourses born in the modern era, especially Buddhism. Eventually, they need to be confronted to their coeval Western counterparts in order to grasp both the differences in their treatment of the supernatural and the similarities in the motifs they commonly use.

The following pages deal with two illustrious writers Kōda Rohan (1867-1947) and Izumi Kyōka (1873-1939) who were the most famous heralds of resistance to modernity among the literati. Their best fictions belong to the genre (in fact, Kyōka 's entire career was devoted to the exploration of this Twilight Zone of Japanese imagination). Rather than giving a general survey of their works belonging to this precise category, the article is an examination of the use they made of the notion of dreams and ghosts, as they inherited it from the medieval corpus of the nō plays. The structure of the mugen nō (nō of illusions and dreams) they transposed into their fictional works is also closely connected to the Buddhist notions of redemption, of the after life and of gender.

The introduction deals with the general situation of Buddhism in modern Japanese letters and with the functions of the religious past in Rohan and Kyōka 's tales. The first part deals with the origins and the definition of the word mugen nō from Zeami's time to its revival in the Taishō era (1912-1926). The three other parts of the article are devoted to representative fictions of Rohan and Kyōka read in association with Buddhist motifs and the world of the nō plays. Many recurrent images run through texts like Taidokuro (Facing the Skull) (1890), Kōya Hijiri (The Holy Man of Mount Kōya) (1900) and Shunchū (One Day in Spring) (1906). In this article, we have dealt mainly with the oneiric structure of these texts and with the motif of the femme fatale around which the various tales develop. These two themes - one is structural (narrative patterns) and one belongs to the history of representations (ghosts), allow us to read these texts in close connection to the various classical sources meaningfully used by their authors to give birth to their fictional worlds. The form of the dream-play revived in the modern era, equally shows the possibility of transforming the writing of fiction into a necromantic rite of placation. In using Buddhist notions of the afterlife and of desire through the prismatic lens of the nō plays, these texts vindicate the classical notion of literature as a form of sacred conversation between the living and the dead.