My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (74 page)

In medieval Japan, there emerged a kind of popular entertainment known as
sekkyō-bushi
—stories that itinerant storytellers would recite and sing to musical accompaniment. The most famous
sekkyō-bushi
is the tale of “Sanshō the Steward” (
Sanshō dayū
), which Western audiences might know through a modern retelling by the novelist Ōgai Mori or the 1954 film adaptation by the celebrated director Kenji Mizoguchi. The earliest known written versions of the story, recorded in the early seventeenth century, describe the tale of a brother and sister separated from their parents then sold into slavery by unscrupulous slave traders. With the divine aid of the deity bodhisattva Jizō, the son eventually escapes and travels across the country to find his mother, who has gone blind and has been reduced to poverty. Happily, his tears restore her sight. Meanwhile, however, things do not end so happily for the daughter who remains in slavery. She sacrifices herself by refusing to tell where her brother has gone, and as punishment, her owner tortures her in grisly ways until she is dead.

In the process of exploring the world of
sekkyō-bushi
and Japanese folklore, Hiromi Itō, the author of the version included in this anthology, came across an alternative version of this story recorded in northeastern Japan. In August 1931, the anthropologist Nagao Takeuchi recorded an account of spirit possession from a medium named Sue Sakuraba. She had learned the text from her predecessors, yet when she performed it, the text appeared to be the spontaneously generated speech of a spirit possessing her. Interestingly, this alternative version recorded from the shamanesses focuses exclusively on the daughter, who does not die but instead escapes and struggles toward freedom. In fact, it is she who is the centerpiece of this version.

In Itō’s retelling of this seemingly more “feminist” version, she adds a subplot that describes the sexual subjugation that a young girl separated from her parents might likely have undergone. (The original versions of the story do not involve any explicit reference to sexual subjugation.) Moreover, Itō adds the sections about the character Anjuhimeko’s attempt to locate Tennōji, a temple in Osaka that was known for being a refuge for the poor and sick.

Perhaps the most important original addition, however, comes in the ending scene with the
yamanba
mountain witch. Throughout much folklore, the
yamanba
has represented a nonconformist who rejects home, work, and family to live in the wilds and follow her own will. In Itō’s poem, the
yamanba
represents the voice of a powerful, liberated sexual desire ordinarily constrained by patriarchal society. In the scenes when she copulates with the stone pillar, Itō is refashioning the creation myth told in the eighth-century semimythological history of Japan called the
Kojiki
(Record of Ancient Matters). According to the
Kojiki,
the male deity Izanagi and his female partner Izanami descend to earth from the heavens and erect a great pillar. After walking around it, the two have conjugal intercourse for the first time, but this intercourse fails because the female deity Izanami speaks before her male counterpart, thus failing to cede to the “proper” order of things. The result of their union is a malformed “Leech-Child” that they set adrift on the sea. In Itō’s reworking, the
yamanba
takes her own sexual desire firmly in hand and copulates wildly with the stone pillar. Rather than subjugating her desire to the “proper order of things,” she celebrates it in a way that brings her ecstatic, orgiastic pleasure.

—JA