Sickness in a Foreign Land (異鄕に病む)

In “Sickness in a Foreign Land,” Hayashida blends social realism with the otherworldly realms of the supernatural, commenting on the loneliness of bachelor life through allusions to the ghost stories in Ueda Akinari’s Tales of Rain and Moonlight (Ugetsu monogatari, 1776). Of these tales, “The Cottage in the Wilderness” (Asajigayado) may be the closest intertext. In that tale, a man returns to his home after a long absence and sleeps with his wife, only to realize that this encounter was an illusion. In Wilfrid Whitehouse’s 1941 translation, this passage reads, “something fell on his face which he took to be raindrops. He looked up and saw that the roof seemed to have been blown off by the wind, and from where he lay, he could see the moon, wan in the morning light … He realized that his wife must had died long before … and some goblin had appeared to him in the guise of his wife, or perhaps it was that her yearning spirit had returned to greet him … Thinking of that old line, ‘I alone remain unchanged,’ he wandered sorrowfully about the grounds” (554).

The “old line” referenced in Ueda Akinari’s tale comes from a famous poem in Ise monogatari (Tales of Ise, c. 9th century CE), which associates the absence of a past lover with the absence of the spring moon: “Is it then true that/ There is no longer a moon, / That the Spring is not / The Spring of former days – that/ I alone remain unchanged” (tsuki ya aranu haru ya mukashi no haru naranu waga mi hitotsu wa moto no mi ni shite; Whitehouse 1941, 557). Hayashida’s emphasis on the moon as a possible addressee may continue in this tradition of associating the moon with a past or absent lover.

[1] “The moon, after the rain lifts” refers to a famous phrase in the preface to Ueda Akinari’s Ugetsu monogatari (Tales of Moonlight and Rain; 1776), a collection of nine ghost tales. The complete phrase is “a night with a misty moon after the rain lifts.”