Ambiguous Bodies: Reading the Grotesque in Japanese Setsuwa Tales (review)

Setsuwa are a form of anecdotal tale literature composed in Japan between the ninth and fourteenth centuries. Compiled by monks and courtiers—the twelfth-century Konjaku monogatarishu is the largest collection, with more than one thousand extant tales—they reflect an enormously diverse array of topics. Buddhist didacticism is a frequent theme, yet these collections are also replete with heroic adventure, ghost stories, romance and not a few off-color jokes. The sheer number and diversity of these tales have made them an invaluable resource for scholars, who have mined them for information on the religious, political, social and cultural landscapes in which they flourished.

Although translations of many setsuwa stories have been available for some time, English-language scholarship has only recently begun to consider the genre with the kind of extended critical attention that it deserves. Michelle Osterfeld Li's careful and engaging study provides a welcome addition to this growing body of scholarship. At its heart is a close reading of selected tales, focusing primarily on the Konjaku: she provides original translations of some twenty tales, along with synopses of many more. Her stories run the gamut from the horrific (in one story, an infant is torn apart by bandits, and demons messily devour their victims in a number of others) to the simply strange (like the story of a woman who becomes pregnant after eating a turnip, or of the snake who dies after performing fellatio on a sleeping Buddhist monk). Together, they provide the reader with some sense of the attraction these stories have held, not only for their compilers, but for those who have read and retold them for centuries. From time to time, she points out the enduring social and psychological resonances of these stories. Her discussion of man-eating hags as an expression of family resentment towards the aged is a particularly good example, providing a lucid explanation of the otherwise baffling conclusion of one tale: "parents who are extremely old always turn into demons and, in this way, try to eat even their own children" (180).

More to the point, her careful, contextualized reading of these stories provides an erudite demonstration of the extent to which they repay such efforts. For all the marvels and monsters that appear in their pages, setsuwa are not fairy tales; their authors routinely provide the reader with names, dates and places, locating the anecdote firmly within the world of the reader. Rather than viewing these details simply in terms of the rhetoric of verisimilitude, Li turns to historical records and contemporary literature to unpack the complex associations that these names, dates and places likely held for their authors and audiences. In the process, she uncovers levels of meaning that would otherwise go unnoticed by modern readers.

Li begins her work with a historical survey of the development of setsuwa as a category in modern Japanese literary theory, but her study wisely makes no claims to consider the genre in its entirety. Instead, her deliberately partial selection of stories is driven by her interest in the grotesque. Drawing primarily on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (with frequent references to Wolfgang Kayser), her goal is not simply to employ the grotesque as a lens through which to better understand setsuwa, but to engage in an essentially comparative enterprise, placing these two literary forms into conversation.

In the process, she presents interesting insights about setsuwa. Her chapter-long exploration of the female demonic, for example, complicates what could easily be read simply as an expression of (especially Buddhist) misogyny, and indicates the potentially empowering elements of this imagery. At the same time, she suggests some valuable correctives to the folk origins of the grotesque implied by Bakhtin. Common people may figure prominently in setsuwa (as in Rabelais), but these works are first and foremost the province of the elite, if only by virtue of their written medium. Yet one need not romanticize the grotesque as an authentic voice of the folk to...