Abstract:
Late in life the writer and scholar Ueda Akinari (1734-1809) suffered the loss of two individuals near to him, as well as his eyesight. He recounts his suffering in a distinctive manner, by creating an exchange of letters between himself and his deceased wife, Koren, generated in the context of a dream encounter with his recently departed caregiver. This essay examines Akinari's "Yomotsu fumi (よもつ文、Letter from the Nether Realm)", and analyses the content of the work, in particular the use of the Daoist classic Liezu (c. 4th century CE). The essay argues against a reading of Akinari's text as a passive record of a dream, even a highly vivid one, and rather proposes an interpretation of the text as a carefully crafted literary construct, complete with references to Chinese philosophical texts in addition to references from the Japanese classics. Through this analysis we arrive at a new interpretation of the writer Akinari in his later years as an engaged, committed writer, and not the emotionally depleted broken individual as often depicted.
