Monumenta Nipponica

In The Rhetoric of Death and Discipleship in Premodern Japan, H. Mack Horton offers his readers annotated translations of two modest texts—Sōgi shūenki (The Death of Sōgi; 1502), by Sōchō, and Bashō shūenki (The Death of Master Bashō; 1694), by Kikaku. Although these texts were composed almost two hundred years apart, Horton justifies bringing them together because they are both death accounts (shūenki) written by a disciple of a well-known master of linked verse. The texts are, he asserts, "among the most important death accounts in the premodern Japanese literary corpus" (p. xvi). Initially, Horton translates shūenki as "thanatographies" (p. xi). This may be an allusion to Harold Bolitho's coinage "thanatologues" in Bereavement and Consolation, but whatever the case Horton thankfully abandons this awkward neologism thereafter for the perfectly serviceable term "death accounts."¹

According to Horton, accounts of the death of a well-known poet increased in number in the early modern period. Regrettably, he declines to investigate why this should have been the case: "The trajectory of the development of death accounts is complex and imbricated into the variegated history of death writing in its various Chinese and Japanese forms, a subject that would require a separate volume to detail. Suffice it here to say that The Death of Sōgi was an important precursor to the many accounts of the deaths of linked-verse poets that subsequently appeared during the Edo period" (p. 21). I must demur. The simplistic intertextual history proffered here—text X preceded and influenced the form of text Y—does not suffice as a historical explanation of either change or continuity. Horton is clearly capable of more and, I believe, he owes his readers more. After all, when he published an annotated [End Page 322] translation of Sōchō's journal in 2002, he simultaneously issued a separate volume that provided historical context for the poet's life and his journal more broadly.²

My dissatisfaction with this study does not seem to be widely shared, however, at least if the dust jacket comments of three reviewers are indicative of the state of the field of Japanese literary studies. Midorikawa Machiko clearly finds Horton's study to be more than sufficient, calling it "a model of what an annotated translation should be." For his part, Steven D. Carter lauds this work not only as a "masterful study, well researched and elegantly written," but also as one that provides "original answers to two important questions: how disciples of a dying master respond to his death in their own relationships and practices and how they represent loss and recovery in their own writing." Laurel Rasplica Rodd, too, praises the author's "meticulous scholarship and elegant translation."

I do not question Horton's abilities as a translator. His renderings are accurate, and his copious annotations are based on an in-depth knowledge of the Japanese secondary scholarship. Whether his translations are "elegant" or not, however, is a matter of aesthetic and, thus, subjective appraisal. Suffice it to say that translating poetry is much trickier than translating prose. I have two intertwining reservations concerning this study: First, is this model of annotated translation sufficient as scholarship in the twenty-first century? Second, is the author's sociohistorical contextualization of these texts adequate and accurate?

The book's structure seems to indicate that Horton has checked each box in the list of requirements for a "masterful" work in the academic genre of an annotated translation of a Japanese literary work. Horton's study in toto consists of 166 numbered pages, 24 of which are occupied by front matter. The translations of the two primary texts occupy only...