Literary Echoes in "Kenkai" : Interaction between Ueda-Akinari's Work and Chinese Fiction

Abstract

"Kenkai," one of the stories in Harusame-monogatari, has been regarded as a failure since its missing second part was discovered in the edition published in the fifth year of the Bunka Period. That the story ends in a bad guy's reformation is certainly disappointing, but it is very likely that Ueda-Akinari deliberately made such a banal ending, following the plot of its sourcebook, that is, Saiyu-ki, Although the influence of the famous Chinese tale on the story is seldom known, the character named Daizo, a wild strong man, is obviously modeled after the monkey king Sun Wukong. But the story is more than a mere adaptation of the old legend; the author successfully turned it into his own version of Bildungsroman where a natural man grows up to be a courageous and virtuous monk.