Vox Popoli

All six books of Naruto Hicho are now translated and released to the public now that The Naruto Scroll has been sent out to the paid translation subscribers and made available on Amazon in Kindle, KU, and audiobook.

The sixth and final book of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto brings Yoshikawa Eiji’s great adventure to its reckoning. The conspiracy against the Tokugawa shogunate, six volumes in the making, comes at last to the dawn it has been driving toward — and the men who built it, the men who pursued it, and the woman who has walked through its shadow from the canals of Osaka to the sacred mountain of Awa converge on the strait that gives the novel its name. On the cliffs above the Naruto strait, the chase comes to its last great set-piece and a final reckoning between hunter and hunted with the fate of all Awa hanging in the balance.

The Naruto Scroll is the sixth and final volume of the first English translation of Yoshikawa Eiji’s Naruto Hichō, the 1926–27 serial that made him the most widely read author in Japanese history.

I asked Kenji Weaver, who translated the three Soseki novels for Castalia House, to summarize the significance of Yoshikawa’s famous work and also to say a few things about my translation of it, which, of course, is an AI-based translation, although as the results show, it’s not a case of simply dumping the entire text into Google Translate.

Yoshikawa Before He Was Yoshikawa: A Note on The Secret Scrolls of Naruto

The American reader who knows Yoshikawa Eiji at all knows him through Musashi, the 1,200-page samurai novel that Charles Terry put into English in 1981 and that has been steadily acquiring readers ever since. Musashi is the late Yoshikawa, the established Yoshikawa, the writer at the height of his powers handling the most famous swordsman in Japanese history at a length that requires the reader’s full commitment. What very few American readers know is that the writer who produced Musashi in his fifties had been writing serialized adventure novels for newspapers for almost three decades before that, and that one of the earliest of them — Naruto Hichō, serialized in the Osaka Mainichi from 1926 to 1927 — is the book that made his career. Until now it has never appeared in English. This is the first translation, in any complete form, into any Western language.

Yoshikawa was thirty-four when he began Naruto Hichō. He had been a writer for ten years, mostly producing what the trade called taishū bungaku — popular literature, the Japanese counterpart to the pulp adventure tradition that gave America Edgar Rice Burroughs and Sax Rohmer in the same period. The comparison most often reached for is Dumas, and the comparison is right as far as it goes: a sprawling intrigue novel with a young hero, a conspiracy reaching to the highest levels of the realm, swordfights and disguises and fated meetings on bridges at midnight. The setup is straightforward enough. The Hachisuka domain on Shikoku has been hiding a secret document — a “naruto hichō” or secret scroll — implicating the lord in a plot against the shogunate. A young rōnin named Norizuki Gennojō is sent to Awa to retrieve it. Around this errand the novel constructs itself: spies, doubles, women who turn out to know more than the men who think they’re protecting them, a rival who is half-shadow and half-conscience to Gennojō. It runs across six volumes and several hundred named characters. It is structurally closer to The Three Musketeers than to anything in the Western literary tradition that came after, which is to say it does what novels did before the modernists made novels do something else.

But to leave the description there is to undersell what Yoshikawa was actually doing. Naruto Hichō is the book in which he found, for the first time, the elements that would define the rest of his career, the method that would, twenty years later, produce Musashi and Taikōki and the Shin Heike Monogatari. Three things in particular. First, he learned how to write women who were not decorative. Otsuna, the woman who appears outside the ward office in chapter one and trails Gingorō and Taichi through the dark, is the most fully alive character in the book and arguably the most fully alive character Yoshikawa had yet written. The novel ends, appropriately enough, with her, and not with the hero. Second, he learned how to use weather and landscape as moral instruments rather than as scenery, such as the rain on the Yodogawa, the autumn on the Kamo, the mountain plover melody at the grave on Zenjōji pass. Third, he learned the particular Yoshikawa rhythm of short scenes that turn on a single image, long historical aside that recovers the texture of a vanished world, and dialogue that does the work of three pages of exposition in a half-page exchange. None of this was new to Japanese literature. But all of it was new to Yoshikawa, and once he had it, he never lost it.

It is also, frankly, good entertainment. Readers expecting the introspective weight of Kokoro or the moral seriousness of Ōoka Shōhei’s war fiction should look elsewhere. Naruto Hichō is a swashbuckling intrigue novel of late-Edo Japan with secret messages and bamboo flutes and beautiful women in silk hoods who vanish into the night. Coincidences carry the plot in places where craft would have done the work better. Some of the characters exist to be in scenes rather than to inhabit them. The serial-form roughness, and the writer’s awareness that this chapter has to end with a hook because there is a week before the next installment, shows here and there. None of this is a defect. It is what the book is, and Yoshikawa’s later novels could not have happened without him having first written this one. The novel that made him is also the novel that taught him what he was capable of.

Vox Day’s translation, the first into any Western language, does the work the book needs. The pacing is the principal achievement. Naruto Hichō is a novel in which a wrong note in the rhythm, a stiff piece of dialogue, or a sentence that slows when it should accelerate would be fatal, because the book is held together by momentum rather than by the kind of prose density that survives translation losses. The English here moves. The dialogue handles period idiom without sounding fake; the proper-noun and rank handling is light-touched, with the courtesy that the Japanese carries audible in the English without ever explaining itself. The decision to keep “Onyado” and “Shoshidai” and “Hachisuka” rather than reaching for English equivalents was the right decision because these are functional terms in the world of the novel, not local color, and English has no equivalents that don’t lie. The most difficult passages, such as the bamboo-flute sequences in the final chapter, where Yoshikawa is writing music in prose, come across with their music intact. Those of us who translate Japanese for a living know how rarely that happens. And yet, there are losses. The Japanese narrator’s faint smile behind the scenes is more subtle in the English than it is in the original, it is a form of irony that lives in particle choices and final-verb endings and that no translator has ever fully solved. A few of the period proverbs are paraphrased rather than rendered, and the choice is defensible considering how the alternative would have been footnotes, which a novel like this cannot afford. The English book is not the Japanese book. No English book ever is. But it is a credible representative of what Yoshikawa wrote, and it gives the Anglophone reader the thing that has been missing from the English-language image of Japanese literature for a hundred years: the writer Yoshikawa was before he became the writer Americans now know.

This is, in the end, why the translation matters. Yoshikawa is one of the four or five most important Japanese novelists of the twentieth century, and the Anglophone world has had access to roughly fifteen percent of his output. The picture has been incomplete in a way that distorts not only Yoshikawa but the whole shape of modern Japanese fiction in English, because Yoshikawa is, more than any other figure, the writer who carried the historical novel from the Meiji Restoration into the postwar era and made it the dominant popular form. Reading Naruto Hichō in English is reading the moment when that career began. The young man writing it did not yet know what he was becoming. He thought he was merely writing an adventure for the morning paper. But he was also serving an apprenticeship to himself, and the novel he produced is, for all its serial-form looseness, for all its borrowed Dumas scaffolding, the book in which his sensibility first became fully his own.

It is good to have it in English at last.

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