"I would rather be a faithful dog than an unrighteous man"

About this book

This dissertation focuses on the novel Nansô Satomi hakkenden (Eight dogs of the Satomi clan of southern Fusa; 1814-1842) by Kyokutei Bakin (1767-1848). Hakkenden was widely read and celebrated through the late nineteenth century. However, literary modernizers rejected it, in large part because of its didacticism, what Bakin called kanzen chôaku , "promoting virtue and chastising vice." This dissertation confronts Hakkenden 's didacticism, and thus contributes to recent efforts to reassess Japanese literature of the nineteenth century and contextualize its modernization. After two introductory chapters, I explore (in Chapters Three and Four) how Bakin's didacticism resulted from his engagement with the Ming-era Chinese vernacular novel Shuihu zhuan (The water margin), of which Hakkenden is an adaptation, and note that didacticism for Bakin was as much a question of form as of content. In terms of content, kanzen chôaku implies a clear distinction between good and evil, a black and white worldview, but in Bakin's practice the result is a series of gray areas. I demonstrate this through chapters examining the novel's treatment of gender, species, and social class, devoting a separate chapter (Chapters Five through Seven) to each. Tokugawa society presumed moral hierarchies in which men were considered morally superior to women, humans to animals, and samurai to commoners. Hakkenden challenges this received wisdom, first by showing good and evil each occuring on both sides of these binaries, and then by destabilizing these binaries themselves through presenting characters who cannot easily be categorized within them. In my concluding chapter (Chapter Eight), I show that Bakin's creation of moral gray zones extends to the presentation of good and evil, as well, producing unexpected results in the area of form. Kanzen chôaku promises that good will prevail, but in Hakkenden the rewards for good and the punishments for evil are often deferred or disguised. This maintains narrative interest over the novel's great length, while suggesting the difficulty of moral judgment and the nobility of moral action in a world where the consequences of one's actions are seldom immediately apparent. As an appendix, I also provide a translation of the book's first fourteen chapters.