Hidden between the lines of Japanese Buddhism’s translation into English is a long and complicated relationship between Japan and the rest of Asia. Travel to mainland Asia, or significant breaks in access to its lineages, shaped much of the religious and political life in Japan. Its contemporary Buddhist forms were shaped by Japan’s history with what we now recognize as China, Korea, and South Asia. 

The mid-20th-century author, translator, and self-styled iconoclast Tatsuhiko Shibusawa’s prize-winning novella Takaoka’s Travels animates a curious and largely forgotten figure from Buddhism’s movement between Japan and the continent in the person of Prince Takaoka, a 9th-century traveler. His story offers a unique set of refracted views for English-language readers interested in Buddhism and literature, or Japanese literature more generally. Japanese literature in translation is sometimes presented as an insightful Eastern mirror for Western audiences. This retelling of a premodern Buddhist narrative is a story of travel and contention within the Asian continent, and offers glimpses of Japan’s relationship with its premodern neighbors. It also suggests what Asia might mean to modern Japanese authors dealing with an entirely new geopolitical reality after World War II. 

In this book, we follow an archetypical example: a search for the origins of the dharma in “Hindustan,” award-winning and attentive translator David Boyd’s rendering of tenjiku, one of the very broad terms from translated Buddhist sutras for “South Asia.” The word literally means something like “heavenly lands.” 

The novella’s settings and plot devices should be recognizable to those familiar with the tropes of Buddhist travel narratives, but the structure of the narrative and its thematic threads veer off in unexpected directions. Put simply, Prince Takaoka, an original disciple of the recently passed esoteric Buddhist master Kukai [Kobo Daishi], goes on a journey to visit the Buddha’s homeland propelled by a childhood dream of South Asia. The narrative is based on a historical figure of the same name who left a record of his travels on the continent, although his legacy is eclipsed by that of more prominent figures from the Nara and Heian Buddhist world. These include the aforementioned Kukai and the founder of Tendai and Mt. Hiei, Saicho. In any case, the prince does not reach India during his travels on the continent. In Shibusawa’s rather fantastic telling, the prince, two monks, and a mysterious young page who joins them early in their journey are waylaid at nearly every turn, sometimes by fate, and sometimes by the doing of the easily distractible prince. They have difficulty understanding just about everything they encounter. Is the prince motivated by a search for the true and authentic dharma, or is he fixated on the quasi-erotic fantasies of this faraway land planted in his mind by Kusuko, the infamous lover of his father, the then emperor? This line becomes blurred as each passing adventure yields less Buddhist instruction and more wanderlust in the prince.

A third-person narrator’s musings give us some historical context, recalling the ancient cosmopolitanism of the lands through which the prince and his retinue make their way. They travel first to Southeast Asia, making appearances in Ptolemean or Confucian annals, and then arrive at a port of arrival for ancient Buddhist travels. Yet despite the geographical certainty, we are more often than not left adrift between the boundaries of time, both cosmic and historical. While the group appears to be moving southwestward, encountering new beasts, strange peoples, and even stranger plants, each chapter progresses through fantastic, hazy transformations, linked by foggy dreams. The human shape of characters shifts and doubles in unexpected ways, defying the boundaries of sex and gender, human and animal, and between creatures real, imaginary, and unimaginable. Time moves backward and forward. Dreams multiply, divide, and nest inward on themselves. It is difficult to tell if characters are falling asleep or waking up.

There are hints of what reimagining Japan’s mythical South Asia might mean for Shibusawa. His stylized past is set in a distinct, terse prose style, which makes the mythic feel present and ordinary, yet full of wonders both strange and crude. Some of the dialogue feels somewhat stilted, but something is bound to go amiss in translating Shibusawa’s modern retelling of a centuries-old tale. Structurally, one could make comparisons (as the book’s publisher does) to experimental Italian author Italo Calvino. The book is relatively short, with flowing, compact, and seemingly chronological vignettes that recall Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Stylistically, the work is not overly dense, even as it attempts to imbue premodern Asia with a sense of wonder. I would venture to say we’re closer to the Marquis de Sade, for whom Shibusawa served as the first Japanese translator. As the novella progresses, we find more and more that there is little pure and holy hidden on the continent, waiting to be discovered. There is, rather, a funhouse of disappearing mirrors, odd doubles, and delirious transformations. The prince finds himself visited by Oedipal bird-women, and confronts a fantastic array of quasi-human genitalia. Prophecies of the New World’s discovery by Columbus are challenged by giant anteaters in what is now Vietnam, as the erudite priest among their party admonishes: “Another anachronism, staring us right in the face. This is like the people of the Caribbean watching Columbus make landfall and saying, ‘Hey look! It’s Columbus! We’re discovered!’ ”

There is little mystic among this mystery—narrator and protagonist are equally confused on their way to a failed spiritual mission. Nor does the narrative move consequentially enough to offer a vision of literary, moral, or spiritual awakening. Rather, the haziness clears in each chapter to give way to mesmeric adventures that will zig where you expect the literary portrayals of Buddhism to zag. 

One might be tempted to read much of the eroticism, taboo sexuality, and gender transformation in this work as indicative of its interest in Tantric Buddhism, or even to see some of these moments as a predilection for the erotic and grotesque in postwar Japanese art and literature. This is especially true for some of the more troubling moments from the text. Not much of the eroticism on display in this work is between two consenting adults, if it is between two humans at all. 

In his time, however, Shibusawa was shaping a different kind of iconoclastic image. As Boyd reminds us in his afterward, Shibusawa was fond of discussing topics that “polite society” tended to ignore, to the point of being the subject of one of the most famed obscenity trials in postwar Japan for his translations of de Sade. Additionally, at that particular moment in the history of modern sexuality, the expression of non-normative, and specifically same-sex, desire was quite firmly mired in the discourse of abnormal pathology. By extension, it was (and still is, in many places) an accusation that aims to deprive one of the rights and rational faculties that would otherwise allow them recognition as a citizen and member of the human race. Thus, the premodern world’s porous sense of boundaries, unplaceable beings, and spiritual iconoclasts, many of whom are still used for moral dog-whistling in East Asia today, offer an especially fertile site for experimentation in ways to talk about sex, gender, and sexuality. 

Boyd cites the prominent 20th-century critic and philosopher Takaaki Yoshimoto, who, writing about Shibusawa, called him a zealous collector, and this work a “cabinet of curiosities.” There is an enjoyable sort of voyeurism in viewing his depiction of the premodern world, free from hand-wringing about the essence of Asian aesthetics or its unifying spiritual truths, which could be seen as merely one person’s strange relation to the past. In Takaoka’s Travels, new life is breathed into ancient curiosities and, at its best, the work earns moments of genuine literary wonder.