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  • Narrative Realism and the Modern StorytellerRereading Yanagita Kunio's Tōno Monogatari
  • Melek Ortabasi (bio)

This book is present-day reality. I believe this alone is an excellent reason for it to exist.

—From the preface to Tōno monogatari

IN 1908 Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962), best known as the founder of minzokugaku (native ethnology), came into contact with the oral narrative of Tōno, a town in what is now Iwate prefecture, through Sasaki Kizen (or Kyōseki , 1886–1933), a native of Tōno then living in Tokyo as a university student and aspiring writer. Having interviewed the younger man a number of times and impressed by his stories, Yanagita traveled to Tōno in August of the following year to familiarize himself with the area. The eventual product of this acquaintance and visit was Tōno monogatari (Tales of Tōno), a collection of short tales and a number of local songs that appeared in 1910 as a privately published edition of 350 copies, most of which were distributed to Yanagita's family and friends.

Tōno monogatari evolved through several stages, now well known to scholars of the work.1 Written in a spare, classical literary style (bungotai) quite unlike the northern dialect in which Sasaki told his tales,2 and different as well from the genbun itchivernacular then being employed increasingly for fiction, the slim volume ranges over local legends, personal anecdotes, historical [End Page 127] trivia, landscape descriptions, and random observations pertaining to the cultural geography of Tōno. The 119 short tales, many of them fragments, are numbered and sometimes annotated and illustrated (see figure 1). Preceding them are a preface, in which Yanagita briefly recounts his own visit to Tōno and why he thinks the tales are valuable, and a short protoclassification by "type" ("Daimoku" , Topics/Classification; see figure 2 for a sample of the latter).3 In the context of the realist and (auto)biographically oriented prose fiction that was then gaining popularity among Yanagita's literary peers, Tōno monogatari's lack of a sustained narrative or identifiable characters is obviously unconventional. As Yanagita himself noted in the preface, the book was "nothing like the current fashion."4


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Figure 1.

Diagram accompanying tale 80, which begins, "In order to really understand the preceding tale [i.e., tale 79], it is necessary to diagram the layout of the Tajiri house." Tale 80 is basically a description of the house itself. A note above the text comments, "If one travels in this area, what is most noticeable is how the houses are all shaped as illustrated below. This house is a good example" (Tōno, p. 64). The previous tale, 79, details the encounter in this house between a man named Chōzō and a ghost who seems to walk through walls.

[End Page 128]


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Figure 2.

The first page of Yanagita's protoethnological tale classification system. Three of the topics are focused on typically folkloric issues: "the origins of gods," "village gods," and "house gods." Preceding them, however, is a more structural category, "landscape," also an important feature of the collection. The numbers indicate tales, not pages.

Many have acknowledged the text's literary quality, but given these circumstances, it is perhaps unsurprising that Tōno monogatari has long been read as a founding text of minzokugaku, the discipline that Yanagita famously ushered into existence and tirelessly supported throughout the latter half of his life, rather than as a literary work. Its growing status as a pioneering example of folklore study has simultaneously obscured the literary context in which Tōno monogatari initially appeared as well as its textual properties. In fact, Yanagita, demonstrating an awareness of contemporary developments in written literary style, as well as the problematic and noninclusive nature of emerging generic requirements, wrote Tōno monogatari as a challenge to the conceptions of narrative realism championed by his Naturalist peers. Like the more canonized products of the late Meiji literary community, this supposed textual oddity, with its distinctive style, content, and narrative stance, reflected a conscious search for a "truth" worth...

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