A Tale of False Fortunes

Prologue

When I was young, I knew Dr. Basil Hall Chamberlain by the name “Mr. Chamberlain.” Of course, I had not actually seen him, but I had become accustomed to hearing the name “Mr. Chamberlain” interspersed in my father’s conversations. My father, who had formerly studied philology under Dr. Chamberlain , always spoke of him casually as Mr. Chamberlain, in much the same fashion as university students even now refer to their professors behind their backs. I was probably six years old when my young ears committed Dr. Chamberlain’s name to memory. I am able to recall my exact age because that year we had moved from Fujimi in Kòji-machi to Yanaka Shimizu in Shitaya, and upstairs in our new house there were tall stacks of old books I had never seen before. For some time, scholars acquainted with my father and people from newspaper offices made frequent visits for the purpose of examining those tomes. Now as I commence writing, I open the Encyclopedia of Japanese Literature, where I find the following entry on Chamberlain: Basil Hall Chamberlain. Philologist. Born 1850 in Portsmouth, England. Died Feb. 15, 1935, at the age of 86. As a child he studied languages at a school in Versailles, France, and grew up aspiring to literature. . . . Illness resulted from excessive study and, on the advice of a doctor, he set out on a long ocean cruise. He arrived in Tokyo, where he devoted himself to research in Japanese literature. . . . In 1886, at the invitation of the Ministry of Education, he became a lecturer in the College of Humanities at the Imperial University, where he taught Japanese language and philology. In 1890, he resigned because of illness, and Prologue c 9 Prologue c 10 c A Tale of False Fortunes returned to England. . . . After that he made frequent trips to Japan and continued his research. In 1910 he made his last research trip, and bade farewell to nearly forty years of living in Japan. . . . Over many years, he had collected 11,000 volumes of rare and unusual books in Japanese and Chinese, known as the Òdò Library. Upon his departure for England, he considered it unbecoming for a scholar to take this collection to Europe, where there were few who would be able to use it, and gave the entire library to Ueda Kazutoshi. Such an act stands as eloquent testimony of his character. As we see here, Dr. Chamberlain’s final stay in Japan was in 1910. It was probably 1911 by the time the library was put in order and moved into my father’s house, or about the time we moved. If my mother, who died last year in her eighties, were here I could verify the date, but there are few among my acquaintances now who clearly recall those times. Dr. Chamberlain’s books bore a red stamp in large, square characters: “Òdò Library.” I had heard so few anecdotes about Dr. Chamberlain from my father that it was not until I consulted the Encyclopedia of Japanese Literature that I learned “Òdò” (King Hall) was a Japanization of Chamberlain’s own name—“Basil” from Greek basileus, or king. And so I ended up not knowing what sort of “rare and unusual books” the Òdò Library contained, but even now I clearly recall as a child, when I would go upstairs, seeing in my father’s study Japanese-style lidded book boxes made of unfinished wood and piles upon piles of old books in the sunlit area of the narrow, tatami-matted hallway. Most of them, of course, were stitch-bound books printed on light Japanese paper or handwritten texts in beautiful, flowing cursive. As a child I could not very well read such characters, so I looked at them with a curiosity peculiar to children—a strange blend of scorn and reverence—much like what I felt at seeing the contents of an old-fashioned wardrobe chest. From summer into autumn, I would dash about the parlor among books set out with their pages open for airing, and sometimes I would even try leafing Prologue c 11 through a worm-eaten volume. But when I was in the upper level of grammar school and had learned to read the old cursive syllabary at calligraphy lessons, my browsing turned into reading as I carefully followed each line of characters in books written in understandable styles of script. The...