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124 GHOSTS, MONSTERS, AND DEITIES of loyalty, and I shall charge him with this important task. Keep trying as long as the life-giving water in your saucer sustains you. Keep your wits about you. Now hurry along!” So ordered, the Kappa sped out of the palace as if on wings. translated by David Sitkin + 1%-#  The Secret Recipe of Our Handmade Soup Stock SHIBA ZENKŌ Illustrated by Kitao Masanobu (Santō Kyōden) Z When Thousand Arms of Goddess, Julienned (Daihi no Senrokuhon), an adult comicbook by Shiba Zenkō (1750– 1793), was published in 1785, disarticulation of the human body firmly gripped the Japanese imagination. Practitioners of Western science in Nagasaki had begun performing the first autopsies over the preceding decade or so, and European anatomies had already been rendered in such efforts as Sugita Genpaku’s New Anatomical Atlas (Kaitai Shinsho , 1774). When Mount Asama erupted in 1783, spewing volcanic ash as thick as fur, reports described the gruesome sight of severed limbs floating downstream into Edo proper. Little wonder that many works of popular fiction featured wandering organs, detached eyeballs, even transplanted heads. An act of multiple amputations kicks off the story when the Thousand-Armed Goddess of Mercy, having fallen on harsh economic times like any mortal, resorts to chopping off and renting out her extra arms to various characters missing one or more arms of their own. What follows is far-fetched comic pastiche—a “hodgepodge” (fukiyose) in the contemporary idiom (though the term still survives today as an old-fashioned name for chirashizushi, a savory assortment of raw fishes and cooked vegetables served over a single bed of rice). Armlessness is the particular common denominator that gathers together stock characters from a variety of otherwise unrelated stories (drawn from history, folklore, literature, and contemporary life) and plops them into the same fictional bowl. Some of this armlessness is literal, some figurative. General Taira no Tadanori (1144–1184), whose verse “Blossoms at the Old Capital” was famously listed in one of the imperial poetry anthologies as “author unknown,” actually lost an arm at the battle of Ichi no Tani (recounted in GHOSTS, MONSTERS, AND DEITIES 125 Tale of the Heike). Tamuramaru, the protagonist of a nō play, is in possession of all his limbs, though he must “arm” himself against a revolting demon. The sheer incongruity of these characters occasions much of the humor, as do some deft pictorial touches and puzzles: which wooden clogs outside the shop, for instance, belong to which customers? Yet the strings of puns on arms, hands, limbs, and amputation weaving their way through the story must also have had eighteenth-century readers in stitches. Providing the keystone for the wordplay is the original title, which conflates two sets of associated phrases, one culinary, the other Buddhist: (1) “radish julienne” (daiko no senrokuhon), “handmade cuisine” (oteryōri), and “broth ingredients” (oshiru no mi); and (2) “thousand-armed Goddess of Mercy” (daihi no senju kannon), “esoteric” (o shiru nomi), and “account” (roku). Blending these together yields something like “Thousand-Armed Goddess of Mercy, Julienned: The Secret Recipe of Our Handmade Soup Stock.” Some of the story’s bawdy jokes and double entendres get set up by the implied “radish,” slang for phallus, specifically the castrated looking, manmade variety. Although cuisine features less prominently than religion, the list of rental terms and prices smacks of a restaurant “menu board.” The goddess’ mercy, embodied in her helping hands, is put up for sale, like some dish of radish julienne . In a world where everything, even religion, has become a commodity, the producer and the middleman as well as the buyer must take their chances financially. The goddess fetches a gold coin for each arm at the beginning, thoughintheendsheacceptsafractionofthatrateatarelativeloss.Whatselfrespecting goddess, after all, would re-equip herself with arms used to squish insects(indirectviolationofBuddhistprecept),muchlesstopleasurepeople? Still, behind the veils of whimsicality and of simplistic allegory urging “Caveat emptor!” lurks a bit of satire, at its zenith during the middle to late 1780s in this kind of comicbook (kibyōshi). Zenkō takes an oblique swipe at the fiscal reforms of the infamous Tanuma Okitsugu (1719–1788), a powerful official in the shogunal government. Tanuma’s enforced belt tightening was widely reviled as exacerbating the hard economic times, and in Zenkō’s comic imagination, the Buddhas too must perforce suffer and skimp. In an effort to unburden samurai of their debts by debasing the currency of other social classes, Tanuma had imposed upon the merchants a silver...

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