Takaoka’s Travels
By Shibusawa Tatsuhiko
Translated by David Boyd
Monkey (2024)
ISBN-13: 978-8988688709
Review by Chris Corker
In a sacred garden, a high-maintenance pig with the paws of a tiger poops out the digested dregs of human dreams, their foul smell a symptom of the melancholy of the land. ‘How difficult life must be’, laments its keeper, ‘when there are only unpleasant dreams to eat’. One hope remains: a truly great dreamer must arrive and allow the animal to feast on their own vivid unconscious fantasies. While this story constitutes only one episode of many in the novel, Takaoka’s Travels by Shibusawa Tatsuhiko itself thrives on dreams, blending both the wondrous and terrible into a work of enduring imagination.
In the ninth century, the middle-aged Prince Takaoka finally makes a religious pilgrimage to India, a land that he has pined for since he was a child. His companions are two Japanese monks, the burly Anten and polymath Engaku, and Akimaru, a former slave girl disguised as a boy. While their journey lasts only a year, the characters find themselves on a number of unlikely adventures, with the book being split into episodes that are often accompanied by the introduction of mythical lands or beasts. Prince Takaoka was a real historical figure who made his own journey west before vanishing, but history here soon cedes ground to fantasy.
The obvious comparison for Takaoka’s pilgrimage to India is the 16th century Chinese epic, Journey to the West, which is equally full of imaginary creatures, otherworldly feats and religious miracles. As with Monkey and Pigsy in that story, it is the companions who demonstrate the real strength and guile, while Takaoka, like Journey to the West’s Tripitaka, is pretty useless in a fight and has a knack for getting himself into trouble. One thing he does have over his Chinese counterpart, however, is the ability to keep a level-head at such times, and perhaps even take glee in these various setbacks, which if nothing else are always eventful.
Indeed, Takaoka makes for an intriguing protagonist, not least because of his struggle between his Buddhist disavowal of the world of sensations and his attraction to the, sometimes carnal temptations on his journey (Shibusawa made a name for himself translating the fiction of the Marquis de Sade, and does not shrink from eroticism here). Takaoka even begins to wonder at this tendency in himself: ‘Doesn’t this feel a little too good?… If I keep going like this, who knows where the pleasure will take me?’ Usually, these pleasurable interludes return him to where he began, enacting a Buddhist cycle of renewal that allows for self-reflection.
While often joyous in its embrace of absurdity, at the heart of Takaoka’s Travels is a spiritual journey in which the prince-turned monk tries to reconcile himself to the life he has lived thus far. This really comes to a head with Takaoka’s foreshadowed death, a disquieting revelation described as ‘an aerial root, finding purchase on a wall and burrowing into it, cracking it open little by little’, but ultimately the prince’s unflappable character allows him to find a form of divine resignation, viewing his demise with only a ‘vague anticipation’. As translator David Boyd notes in his afterword, the encroachment of death in the novel mirrors real life, with Shibusawa himself suffering from a terminal illness while writing it; when the book won the Yomiuri Prize in 1987, the author had already passed away. While this means that both the part-fictional Takaoka and his part-creator are struggling with existential concerns, the seemingly effortless humour and imagination here means that the novel is never maudlin.
In fact, amongst the real events, places and extensive history that encompasses centuries of Buddhist belief, there is a fantastical and childlike playfulness in the novel, reminiscent of Lewis Carol, which prevents it from ever becoming dry in tone. This gently mocking – and sometimes fourth-wall breaking – voice is well-reproduced by translator Boyd, whose matter-of-fact tone always hides behind it a knowing grin.
The release of Takaoka’s Travels is part of a collaboration between Stone Bridge Press and the literary journal Monkey: New Writing from Japan, which has been a pioneer in bringing new Japanese fiction to English-speaking audiences through translation (full disclosure: the author of this review has had their own translated work published in the journal). One can only hope that collaborations such as these continue to be successful, allowing English-speaking readers to have access to works of such unashamed, genre-challenging strangeness.
An array of unfamiliar names and an assumed knowledge of Buddhism can admittedly be a little overwhelming for the uninitiated, but none of this is necessary to enjoy the fantastical world that Shibusawa constructs in Takaoka’s Travels. Replete with conversant sea creatures, alluring bird-women, giant ape bouncers and horny dragons disguised as lightning, the book continues to engage with an exoticism founded on pure imagination. Dreaming, writes Shibusawa, is ‘something at which the prince was particularly adept’, and so the author himself is keenly gifted at setting loose coquettish dreams that erotically entwine, bringing forth a world that never fails to deliver on wonder.