The Kingless Generation

In part one of this second installment of our series on China as a silk road great power in pre-modern Japanese literature, we read Japanese playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s puppet play “The Battles of Coxinga,” about the half-Japanese, half-Chinese hero Coxinga (Zheng Chenggong) who fought the Manchu Qing dynasty in an attempt to restore the Ming dynasty. Chikamatsu’s most successful play in his lifetime, it is striking today for its geopolitical perspective: although ambitions of Japanese conquest and aggrandizement are present, China is looked up to as the indisputably superior center of civilization where we plucky Japanese are happy to be of service, and even if we lack intelligence and refinement, we have a grit and gristle and spirit (and the protection of the Japanese gods) that makes us uniquely able to save the day against the savage and treacherous Manchus of the Qing dynasty, who are depicted in a proto-racist way that we do sometimes see in Early Modern Eurasia, even in the East. Notice how this is the precise opposite worldview of imperial Japan, where the old nothern “barbarian” Altaic peoples were seen as Japan’s natural allies according to modern genetic theories, and everything Han Chinese became primitive or degenerate, and Anglo-American whiteness became the new object of an increasingly violent inferiority complex.

Next in our ongoing series ReOrient-ing early modern literature across Eurasia, we discuss the most widely visually represented of the sixteenth-century Japanese short-form ballads known as kōwaka, which arguably surpassed the noh theatre for patronage among the warrior elite of Japan’s age of civil war. First appearing in performance records at the height of the Tally Trade (勘合貿易) with China—whereby the military ruler of Japan (like the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu or the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi) accepted investiture as King of Japan from the Emperor of China in return for various samurai-bourgeois clans like the Hosokawa and the Ōuchi receiving trading rights in their designated port of Ningbo—this story legendarily depicts the founder of the Fujiwara courtier family (representative here simply of the Japanese elite) proudly marrying his daughter to the Emperor of China at the latter’s request. He is “overwhelmed at the honor of having the Emperor of the Great Country of the world for a son-in-law, despite being a mere subject of the Emperor of a small country.” This reflects the standard medieval Japanese worldview in which there are three main countries in the world: Japan which is a “small country on the margins” (辺土の小国), the Great Country of China, and India, which as the source of Buddhism may or may not be even greater than China. An adventure ensues involving a precious relic stolen by demonic forces, among whom are supposedly degenerate, northern nomad races according to a new, early-modern, quasi-racist logic, but one that is precisely opposite to that of the Japanese empire, in which everything Chinese was discredited and the Mongoloid, nomadic, and Altaic was elevated as the ideal. Here, by contrast, Chinese heroes are the most noble and orderly (even though they make mistakes), and they possess advanced technology that Japanese can only dream of. Many striking things to see in this glimpse of a different worldview from another time.

A chatty hangout episode on recent events, the class politics of fashion in our post-cultural moment, and an American (...?) Broadway musical from the End of History as performed in Japanese in air-conditioned chambers surrounded by hordes of shrink-wrapped Teslas on reclaimed land developed Tel Aviv–style in the middle of Tokyo Bay.

In this final episode of our first series on the 1,001 Nights, we take up Frenchman Antoine Galland’s adaptation, where we see a Europe that has only begun to see its nearest Afro-Asiatic merchant-capitalist great power as a different , “eastern” civilization whose cultural products must be held at arm’s length and ethnographically explained—rather than adopted wholesale without comment, as stories from the very same 1,001 Nights had been in medieval European literature like the Canterbury Tales (1387–1400) or Orlando Furioso (1516–1532). Galland introduces critical details and disparaging attitudes, writes new scenes not found in the Arabic, and sometimes misreads the Arabic quite dramatically. The things he needs to explain to his readers—that druggists can be respectable members of society, that poetry can express emotions vicariously—reinforce for us the low level of development of “Europe” as it begins to step onto the stage of history for the first time (it was not meaningfully continuous with Greco-Roman antiquity but rather borrowed most from the Arab-Islamicate Mediterranean world from whose side it sprang) and as an awkward newcomer rather than an overwhelmingly powerful main character (it would not even begin to dominate the Eurasian economy until after 1800). Finally, here too Galland’s central interest is evident in the bureaucrat-connected merchant rogues and organized criminals who are able to slip through the cracks of this highly developed and regimented society and accumulate capital—the Sons of the Silk Road who were already the main model for the Crusader bourgeoisie.

In addition to filling in more background knowledge from a scholarly article that I did find on this tale by Jamel Eddine Bencheikh, as well as some musings on the formation of the discipline of Anglophone Japan studies under the influence of Francophone Arabology, we explore this same tale in the nineteenth-century colonial-era British-Indian edition of the now much expanded and more textually baroque version known as Calcutta II. There, we find the first-person narrative interludes removed, or at least refocused away from the process of establishing a secure communication channel between the worker go-betweens, on behalf of the elite patrons. That process also becomes top-down rather than bottom-up, as the negotiation of the connection much more clearly follows an elite commission rather than arising on the initiative of the workers themselves. Meanwhile, textual change has obscured some storytelling choices we saw in the post-1450 version, sometimes strengthening the story but also often leaving loose ends dangling and vestigial inconsistencies that only make sense if we know what the passage used to say. In the way, the text of Calcutta II embodies the growth of oriental despotism or decadence precisely in the time of occidental colonization, both in its form and in its content.

I dust off my Arabic for some weird scenes in Silk Road–era Baghdad: a story of drugs and ego death, deadly secrets and the workers who keep them. The only tragic love story in the Nights, the story of the Persian prince Ibn Bakkār and the courtesan Shams-al-Nahār also features, only in this earliest available Arabic manuscript tradition, a meta-narrative device whereby first-person interviews with certain characters—such as would be collected by a prosecutor as evidence for a trial—are interspersed throughout this story of elite parties, exotic drugs, and forbidden obsessions.

One symptom of the neglect in Anglo-Zionist historiography of Arabic literature and culture—despite its role as the main heir to axial-age Mediterranean and Persian cultures and, as the western representative of the Afro-Asiatic merchant capitalist world system, key progenitor of “the West”—would be the neglect which the 1,001 Nights has suffered in literary scholarship. Everything I can find in English or Japanese is only interested in the impressions it left in the industrial-era European mind as a long-gone Other, but the fact is that we (finally) have a modern edition (by Muhsin Mahdi) and English translation (by Husain Haddawy) of the surviving (15th-c.) Arabic manuscript lineage which attests to the Nights as they were circulating before the rise of Europe—which modern economic history has shown to have occurred only after 1800. Nevertheless, I with my admittedly limited skills as a West-Asianist can find nary a comparative study of this text of the Nights in their prime with later developments and their European adaptations and distortions: only “post-colonial” (really covertly neo-colonial) navel-gazing exercises that reinscribe and eternalize the European gaze rather than casting it aside for the strange, two-hundred-year dream that it was, to look squarely at the genius of Arabic narrative and subjectivity in story that we see in the real roots and first rumblings of bourgeois revolution in West Eurasia.

In anticipation of future outings on some of the more interesting figures we've met thus far, we bring our introductory series on the Eranos milieu to a close with a discussion of the final years, as one august old racket came to an end but was simultaneously demolitioned, flipped, spun off, and otherwise psycho-entrepreneurially aufgehoben into various other cultic milieux just as our current moment of cultic conquest of civil society began.