On the Road to Hindustan

天竺 Tenjiku and Poem Pillows

1.

Takaoka’s Travels by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa
An important new translation by David Boyd

Prince Takaoka was a ninth-century Japanese prince. The third son of the reigning Emperor Heizei, he longed to see India and embarked on a dangerous voyage when he was around sixty years old. The Prince was a historical figure, who is known to be the first Japanese person to have visited Malaysia, where he supposedly died having been eaten by a tiger.

Shibusawa’s novel opens when the prince is still a child. This was when his desire for India began, when his father’s favorite consort Fujiwara no Kusuko told him about this magical land, whispering in his ear those three magical syllables: Hin-du-stan, which cause him to “quiver with sweet intoxication.”

Has that ever happened to you before?

It’s true that we can long for certain places like we can long for certain people— even some places to which you’ve never been.

I definitely felt that way about India when I was young. It seemed like a one-word poem.

India.

Hindustan.

Hinduka (Persian) -> Tianzhu (Chinese) -> Tenjiku (Japan)

天竺 Tenjiku is the old (archaic?) word for India, and can connote Indian style. As you can see from its etymological roots, the word, which came into Japanese from Chinese, had its origins in the Persian term from Hindustan. Hence, Boyd’s choice to use the word Hindustan in his translation.

2.

Utamakura 歌枕, or "poem pillows," are place names and locations that strike a deep chord in readers of Japanese poetry and so they are used to evoke much more than the place name itself.

For example the Tatsuta River for a thousand years has brought connotations of beautiful autumn leaves, or leaves floating away on the river, or the autumn brocade of leaves reflected in the water… just mentioning it in a poem can become a pillow—fluffy with meaning and emotion.

Another famous scene is Amanohashidate (Japanese: 天橋立, lit. 'Heaven's bridge') which forms one of Japan's three scenic views. Mere mention of it will bring up centuries of literary allusions.

I think Tenjiku is like that. A word that brings a lot with it. Or as I like to call them, one-word poems.

3.

My review of Shibusawa’s surrealistic masterpiece first appeared in Kyoto Journal.
(A great digital issue, by the way!)

Here it is below:

Tatsuhiko Shibusawa’s novel, Takaoka’s Travels, opens when the prince is still a child. His desire for India begins when his father’s favorite consort, Fujiwara no Kusuko, told him about that magical land, whispering in his ear those three magical syllables: Hin-du-stan, which cause him to “quiver with sweet intoxication.”
This is the same consort who is later blamed for the end of his father’s short reign, when in 810, the emperor’s brother Prince Saga demands the throne for himself. This resulted in both the emperor and his son Prince Takaoka removing themselves from power and becoming monks. Reminiscent of the “Kiritsubo” chapter in the Tale of Genji, Kusuko was long seen as part seductress, part witch. She would not only beguile the emperor, but would entrance the prince with her wondrous stories of the holy sites of Bodh Gaya and Nalanda and the miraculous sound of the Kavalinka bird.
How Takaoka pines for India! And so, as soon as he is able to do so—near the end, as it turns out, of his life —he sets sail west and then south and then north and then west again. Like so many travelers before him, the prince is going in search of knowledge; he wants to uncover the roots of Buddhism in the land of Lord Buddha’s birth.
This is a pilgrimage in every way reminiscent of the one undertaken by the Chinese monk Xuanzang, who a century earlier snuck past the gates of the capital in Chang’an to travel to India, where he too hoped to uncover the true nature of the sutras. His story, like the prince’s was one of magical encounters that reads like they are drawn from an Umberto Eco novel. In Shibusawa’s version, for example, Prince Takaoka encounters an ape that guards a harem of beautiful bird-women in Cambodia and a dog-headed man who can tell the future. There are ghosts and pirates and monks mummified in honey. And also one perfectly shaped pearl.
Takaoka’s Travels was the winner of the prestigious Yomiuri Prize in 1987 and the translation by David Boyd was the recipient of the 2022-23 William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award for Japanese Translation. He is skillful enough to retain the surreal quality of this novel while doing a fabulous job with the Tang dynasty vocabulary employed in this novel, which purports to be a historical fantasy form the 9th Century.
Shibusawa, who was himself a translator of French literature, would have been pleased. This was his only novel; in Japan he is perhaps best known as the translator of Marquis de Sade. He and his publisher were taken to court for indecency for that translation. Interestingly, as Boyd explains in his translator’s note, Shibusawa was found guilty, not just for the translation but for intensifying the scandalous parts!
Boyd also makes note of the author’s love of curiosities. This was typical of most pre-modern travel literature where pilgrims went out in search of fantastical objects as well as wisdom. As Boyd suggests, the book of Takaoka’s voyage reads like a Cabinet of ancient Asian Curiosities, from Tang China to the Buddhist kingdoms in Malaya and Sumatra.
This is the first work by Shibusawa to appear in English, and one must be grateful to Peter Goodman and the Stone Bridge press for making it available.