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Episode 572 - The Dream of Akinosuke (Patreon)

Published:
2021-11-18 22:40:57
Imported:
2022-01

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Content

It's the wedding episode! Tune in for a magical marriage in fairyland that just MIGHT not be what it seems as we cover The Dream of Akinosuke, a Japanese folktale translated by Lafcadio Hearn!

Special thanks to reader Kristofor Barnes!

We pulled this story from the anthology Fairies.

Read Eat This Not That at British Faeries!

And here is The Revolt of the Evil Fairies 

Next up: The Shining Pyramid by Arthur Machen

Comments

Jeremy Impson

Aww congratulations! I'm so happy for both of you.

Anonymous

Another day, another Fae! Last time I described the Fachan. This time, I'll go with the Buggane. (Pronunciation note: just say "Buggin.") The Buggane is found on the Isle of Mann, a wee island nation in the UK that can be found in the sea between Ireland, Scotland, Lower Scotland, and Wales. The Buggane itself is a big, shaggy beast with great yellow tusks and glowing eyes, with several notable legends about it. According to the tale of a tailor that stayed the night in the ruins of St. Trinian's church on a dare, for instance, the Buggane is hurt by the rays of the Sun. Another tale tells that the Buggane was ferocious enough to fight the Irish giant Finn Maccool—though said Large Lad didn't want to duel at first, and had his wife disguise him as her infant, leading the Buggane to assume the boy's father must be truly massive. There's also smaller scale tales of the Buggane sowing mischief by tearing thatch roofs off cottages, blowing smoke down chimneys, and the like. At least one story—where the Buggane accidentally stows away on a ship bound for Ireland—shows it controling the weather. All of this coupled with the fact it can shapeshift make it, to say the least, one threatening mother. And, following Ken's earlier comparison of fairies to the mob, the Manx Fae can actually call the Buggane down on people that offend them. As an aside, the Buggane was actually the real hook that got me into fairy folklore; specifically when I encountered it in my best friend's...uhh...My Little Pony fan fiction. ...Don't look at me like that.

Anonymous

The taking of food from the Otherworld resulting in supernatural entrapment is a very old motif. It's definitely there in the myth of Hades and Persephone where she cannot fully be liberated from Hades because of some pomegranate seeds she ate. This element is present in the myth as early as the 5th C BCE. It's also kind of freaky that he basically destroys the society he lived in. His kids are probably dead in the ruins of the nest. He's the Lovecraftian horror destroying a world on a whim. Love the end note about the Revolt of the Evil Fairies. Colour prejudice within Indian and other Asian ethnic groups is something I'm deeply familiar with and while the circumstances there aren't fully analogous to colour prejudice within African-American culture, there are commonalities and it's a fascinating topic.

Anonymous
>>72081718

Wait, Kwaidan? The horror anthology film Kwaidan? The one with the most talented actor to ever live, Tatsuya Nakadai??? I highly highly *highly* recommend everyone check it out. It's a bit uneven, as is the curse of the anthology film, but the second tale (with the aforementioned Tatsuya Nakadai) is one of the best examples of visually representing a sense of the cosmic I've seen. The film as a whole also has a stunning style about it because it's filmed on sound stages. That'd normally just be a budget limitation, but Kwaidan turns it into a feature. By using beautifully detailed (and sometimes alien) matte painting skies, outdoor scene take on the uncanny feeling that they're too vaste to be artificial, yet too claustrophibic to be natural. Scenes exist in the terrible hiatus that feels like an entire living world unto itself that is merely a play, and the people living out their lives within it don't realize that their arcs are already written and set. For this reason, I've always been convinced that Kwaidan's visual style would be a fundamental necessity for adapting tales from The King in Yellow to film.

Anonymous

Looking forward to the Shining Pyramid!

Anonymous

What do you mean, Chris? You still live here in Pittsburgh. Anyway, see you down in the ant farm.

Anonymous

Thank you so much for covering another Japanese tale, gents! Japanese folklore and the Shinto religion are riddled with creatures and categories that resist translation. I don't blame Hearn for going with "goblin" since it more or less gets people in the right head space. One of my first big theater jobs in Japan was directing a musical comedy. The show was basically a series of interwoven folktales similar to the Fractured Fairy Tales cartoons I grew up on. The show was a big hit with audiences of all ages in Japan who understood all the references. Plans were made to bring it to the US in English. I was young and ambitious and didn't realize how difficult the task would be. Which is good. It allowed me to dive in with a foolishness that resembled confidence. There were jokes that didn't work, words that wouldn't translate, grammar that needed flipping in a way that the songs still functioned as songs, and a host of stories that the American audience had no common reference for. I was blessed with uncommonly talented performers, a kick-ass music director, and a choreographer who could blend European mime with Japanese dance to bring animal characters to life in three seconds on stage. They saved my butt. Because an oni is not a demon, onigiri are not rice balls, kusa mochi is not cake . . . because my failures to bring out all the nuances were never noticed. Translation is hard. By the way, you are right that raishu can mean "next week", but it can also mean "leisure" and is a place in Chiba prefecture. If the word was written in kanji it would help a great deal to know what it was in reference to.

Anonymous

So glad you guys are finally back in Japan and have finally covered some Lafcadio Hearn! Japan has produced so much great weird fiction I hope you can get around to covering some more of it in the future. Maybe a whole month dedicated to it? Please! You've already covered Edogawa Rampo, but you absolutely must read Akutagawa Ryūnosuke at some point. Akira Kurosawa's classic film Rashomon (1950) is based on two of his short-stories. I'd also recommend Ueda Akinari and Okamoto Kidō as must reads. Similar to Hearn there is English author A.B. Mitford's collection Tales of Old Japan (1871) which is worth a look with the story "The Vampire Cat of Nabéshima" undoubtedly being the most famous. Sakutarō Hagiwara's "The Town of Cats" (1935) is like a better version of Blackwood's "Ancient Sorceries" and Izumi Kyōka's "Sea Daemons" (1906) has an Innsmouth-vibe to it. Also considering how much you seem to enjoy Pu Songling's Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio and Hearn's Kwaidan you would probably also get a kick out of Yanagita Kunio's similar collection of Japanese folklore Legends of Tōno (1910). There's also a whole world of explicitly Japanese Mytho fiction out there. It would be awesome if you could cover some of Asamatsu Ken's Mythos stories but considering your rule about only covering dead authors you would probably object. Lastly let me address the bit about ants. Insects hold a special place in Japanese culture. Check out the documentary Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo (2009) for a deep dive on that. But Hearn knew this and in Kwaidan the back half of the book is dedicated to "Insect Studies." He offers three: one on Butterflies, Mosquitos, and lastly Ants. I won't try and summarize everything Hearn says about the Japanese view of ants but the main takeaway is that the Japanese have long looked to ants as role models for a perfect society. Also butterflies do represent the human soul! There's actually a more contemporary Japanese horror story by author Kamon Nanami called "A Piece of Butterfly's Wing" which is creepy even without the cultural context but so much more chilling if you understand the role of the butterfly in Japanese culture. Looking forward to you covering Machen's "Shinning Pyramid" next week. I just published an essay on Machen's fairy stories earlier this year in the new collection Arthur Machen: Critical Essays (2021) called "Fear, Fairies, and Fossils."

Anonymous

A slight clarification on the opening. The Tang Dynasty is a Chinese period of history. “The Dream of Akinosuke” is believed to be a later Japanese adaption of the Chinese tale “The Governor of Nanke” which derives from that period and place. The corresponding periods in Japanese history would be the Nara and about halfway through the Heian Periods.

Anonymous

I'm still working my way through the early episodes, and you guys are on Japan now? WTF, did you run out of English horror? LOL

Anonymous

BTW at 9:05 in this episode, you're riffing about the inheritance of myth into more myths and stories, and reminded me of this book I read recently: https://www.amazon com/Jesus-Mysteries-Was-Original-Pagan-ebook/dp/B000FC1IW2 Where a couple of classical historians suggest that the entire Jesus story was just the reworking of another myth about another guy, which was itself probably just another myth about another guy, etc, ad infinitum.

Anonymous

A short one! It was fun, but I almost wish you dedicated a full episode to the story about the children's play; that sounded awesome. The fairy story worked generally like most fairy stories do in the West, although generally people don't get to return from fairyland without consequence like this guy did. In fact, other than being insects, these fairys were hardly scary at all.

Anonymous

I’ve been reading Pu Songling recently and there are a number of stories in ‘Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio’ where supernatural beings take the form of insects. In Chapter 82 of the Penguin Classics version of that book there is a story titled ‘Princess Lotus’ that is almost the same story as ‘The Dream of Akinosuke’, although the fairy kingdom is made up of bees and not ants. The protagonist, Dou Xu, falls asleep, gets invited to a royal party, falls in love with Princess Lotus, marries her, and then, the day after the wedding, a giant python attacks the palace. Dou takes Lotus to his house, since it’s right next door to the palace, and she pleads with him to go back for her parents, the King and Queen, but Dou says “That would be an extremely difficult undertaking”. Princess Lotus falls into a fit of weeping and this seems to wake Dou from what has apparently been a dream….or so he thinks. He hears a buzzing and finds two or three bees on his pillow. The bees attach themselves to his sleeve and won’t let go. A friend of Dou’s suggests that he build a hive for the bees. He does so and soon a swarm of bees takes up residence in the new hive, Dou’s next door neighbor has been keeping bees for years and often shares the honey with Dou. Dou pays the neighbor a visit and they go to inspect the man’s hives, which they find in ruins. On closer inspection they find a snake which Dou kills. The bees remain with Dou in his new hive and thrive….so a happier ending. Chapter 83, ‘The Girl in Green’ tells another tale of supernatural bugs in which a man is visited by a beautiful ghost, who seems to be afraid of something. They spend the night together but when she goes to leave in the morning she asks the man to watch her while she makes her way out of his garden as she has a strange foreboding about something outside stalking her. He watches her leave his property but as he turns around to go back inside he hears the voice of the Girl in Green crying out desperately for help, but doesn’t see her anywhere. Eventually he locates the sound of her voice coming from a green hornet trapped in a spider’s web. He frees the hornet and takes it inside to recover. The hornet, feeling better after awhile, makes it’s way to his inkwell and covers itself in ink. She writes “Thank You” on his table top and then flies away.

Steve

Kokuo sounds a bit like Cocaigne, no not that one. It's a magical land of luxury and comfort. Ok, perhaps a bit like that one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockaigne

Anonymous

The episode was great but hearing more talk about Changeling the Lost (the reboot) made my day lol. It’s my favorite game, I’ve even written and published supplements for it. Has the show ever recorded a one shot before? I bet that would be super entertaining. They could do a Call of Cthulhu game.

Anonymous
>>72101995

That’s interesting. In another comment I referenced Pu Songling’s ‘Princess Lotus’ that has a similar story arc, minus the lifetime lived in a day theme. The Tang was so much earlier than Pu’s Qing Dynasty period that I wonder if the original story had changed through time and retelling or if Pu was using a different source, or perhaps he just wanted to put his own more positive spin on the tale. BTW, I noticed ‘Tang’ was pronounced to rhyme with ‘Bang’ instead of ‘Bong’ on the podcast. Pinyin is weird, but short ‘A’ sounds are most often pronounced with something like a short ‘O’ sound in that system. Been trying to get my head around that for years. Even Google pronounces it like the breakfast drink instead of the barbecue utensil when you search on how to say it. I’ve recently found some YouTube sites that go into pronunciation for various languages but not all are reliable.

Anonymous

I read the story last week and liked it but was underwhelmed; I completely lacked the context that Tokoyo referred to the fairy realm or dream world. I thought it was just an older spelling of Tokyo! Wouldn't you believe it, the story is a lot more interesting when you have the cultural context. Also I'm a huge Trek fan and always love it when Lackey brings it up. The Inner Light is a great episode.

Anonymous

Kwaidan is a great collection of old Japanese ghost tales and the movie made from it is really cool too you should definitely check them both out! I love old Japanese ghost stories and lore as well as their modern ghost movies and writings.

Anonymous
>>72095278

Yeah, all the homophones in Japanese are a lot of fun. Well, not so much fun to translate or memorize sometimes, but you take the rough with the smooth.

Anonymous

Chris, I was certain you were going to go for that episode is Season 4 where Riker had to marry an ant, but there are a lot of episodes to choose from.

Anonymous
>>72085057

Yeah, I was going to say--this is "The Inner Light" if the planet wasn't destroyed until Picard went back and leveled it with phasers to find his old house.

Anonymous
>>72114235

Really, based on what I know of hornets, the ending should have been "and then she stung the shit out of him. The moral: Do not fuck with hornets in any sense of the word."

Anonymous
>>72114405

Or the Big Rock Candy Mountain, especially the one with the adult lyrics with alcohol rivers and the railyard watchmen being blind.

Anonymous
>>72123105

Speaking of Trek marriages, DS9's "You Are Cordially Invited" is on our TV right now as I read this thread (part of our sixth or seventh rewatch of the series), and it's always bugged me--ha, bugged--that there aren't any Enterprise guests at Worf's wedding.

Anonymous

The NWOD Changeling is pretty cool, but there's a soft spot in my heart for Changeling: The Dreaming, to the point that it's the only RPG for which I can claim a complete collection. The two games actually complement one another well: Changeling: The Lost emphasizes the horror of fairy tales and the difficulty of being forever changed by trauma, whereas C:TD focuses on magic and wonder and the challenge of maintaining a certain childlike hope in the workaday world without, on the other hand, losing yourself to pure fantasy.

Anonymous

Chad said English fairy tales from 1720 had fairis with electric guitars followed by "Actually, that's not true". Wait a second! Chad will tell us when he makes something up? Does that mean all the other stuff Chad has said that seemed, um fanciful, are all actually true?

Anonymous

I also feel for Akinosuke's kids, who are going to get bullied at school for being part human and part ant. Although they will likely stay in good health having so many antibodies.....

Anonymous

Picard had to go back to his boring old life of being a Space Captain.

Anonymous

That lifetime lived in a moment motif also made me think of Star Trek. But the best Trek series, DS9. When O’brien gets sentenced to life in prison for violating some cultural taboo on a planet he lives an entire lifetime in a prison cell over just a few hours of realtime. I always remember when he gets back to DS9 he starts hoarding his food because in prison he was only fed randomly and Kieko is horrified.

Anonymous

Also when he dug out the ant city to find the tomb of his ant-wife... did he destroy the entire world he had helped care for? Did he scatter and presumably kill his old neighbors, friends, employees, and even family? If you take it literally that he did have this experience and he did live there for 20+ years among and side by side daily with this civilization then he was their destruction.

Anonymous

The prejudice within a POC community based on skin color and other features is called colorism and is very much part and parcel with our history of systematic racism and multi-generational oppression. In North America you have it tied to the One Drop Rule with the idea of “Passing” and the literary trope of “the tragic mulatto”, whilst in the Latin American countries the system of white supremacy and racial hierarchies were mirrored in the social ordering of the casta system. Read about the Brown Paper Bag Test and the associated privilege of African Americans possessing lighter skintones over darker skinned people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Paper_Bag_Test#Color_discrimination Somewhat related and something I have meant to write to you about for quite a while now. Last year I came across a new paperback edition of “The Black Vampyre: A Legend of St. Domingo”. It was a story I was unaware of. Written in 1819 its described as “the first black vampire story, the first comedic vampire story, the first story to include a mulatto vampire, the first vampire story by an American author, and perhaps the first anti-slavery short story." The printed version has extensive notes and expanded material from the second printing. Whilst it is from an anonymous author, his identity is pretty solidly guessed. The author is not an African-American but all those earlier descriptors I laid out above about the story are true and it was very exciting for me to come across an African-American themed vampire story from the early 19th century. The book version I read is here: https://www.amazon.com/Black-Vampyre-Legend-St-Domingo/dp/1914090004 The wiki is here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Vampyre:_A_Legend_of_St._Domingo And a free pdf happens to be here: http://jto.common-place.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/08/Black-Vampyre-for-JTO.pdf

Anonymous
>>72122947

The sequence in Kwaidan of two men lost in the snowy woods, with giant eyes in the sky, is some borderline cosmic horror imagery.

Anonymous

On the comment of the Fairy playing an electric guitar. There is a story called the Gold Bearded Man in the Andrew Lang Crimson Fairy book. In the story a baby from the moment its born can speak every language and play every instrument of music. The illustration on page 208 has the baby stringing a lute https://archive.org/details/crimsonfairybook00lang . Maybe the Gold Bearded Man story is based on the electric guitar playing fairy

Anonymous

Two things I forgot in my comment above, I'm super excited for the Shining Pyramid and does anyone remember the White Wolf Changeling card game? I remember having the starter set for it and some boosters, would have been in the 90s, I really enjoyed it immensely back then though I had forgotten about it until all this talk about the Changeling games brought it out of my memory.

Anonymous

A fine modern example of wee folk paying back a gift debt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqFOOHTLjYY&t=12s

Anonymous

I was completely expecting the protagonist to get the short end of the stick. Surprisingly i enjoyed not having my more cynical expectations met for once.

Anonymous

Bringing up the subject of food from another world made me think of the story of Izanagi and Izanami who were the creator deities in Japanese myth. Izanami gave birth to a fire god that wound up killing her and she went to the land of Yoma but ate the food there so she became stuck. Izanagi went to go get her but was horrified by her undead appearance and ran away and supposedly this is why life and death is a thing because Izanami was mad and swore to kill Izanagi's creations so he would just make more in response.

Ben Gilbert

The classic version of the story is Christina Rossetti’s poem the Goblin Market.

Ben Gilbert
>>72415496

And from there go check out Hope Mirlees novel Lud-in-the-Mist.

Jeremy Impson

The episode of Rachel Watches Star Trek that I most look forward to is TNG Inner Light. Chris doesn't seem to be worried about spoiling it, which must mean he's confident that Rachel doesn't listen to this podcast.

Rick Hound

Now I’m wondering how many Irish Greek writers are out there. I know a few Brazilian Japanese authors and one Paraguayan French author, now I’m interested in another unexpected author of that nature. Also a fellow Dresden fan.

Anonymous

I love it when you folks cover Hearn! I first learned of him when my wife and I spent ten months in Japan right after we got married. The previous tenant left a collection of his stories in our apartment, and they were great. Then we learned that the temple where the story of Earless Hoichi took place was in the next city over from us, so we had to go! The first two or three attempts to drive to Shimonoseki were thwarted by monsoon season - no way were we going to make it in the wind and rain. We still joke that something was trying to stop us. We did eventually get to the location several times, and it made the story feel that much more real!