Historical fiction is a hugely popular genre in Japan, with the likes of Shiba Ryо̄tarо̄ (author of Ryо̄ma! The Life of Sakamoto Ryо̄ma, tr. Paul McCarthy and Juliet Winters Carpenter)frequently making top-ten lists of “Most Popular Authors,” but these works often keep themselves to a fairly rote set of time periods and subjects—the illustrious and relatively peaceful Tokugawa period (1600-1865), which gave us much of Japan’s most globally recognizable cultural assets, including kabuki, samurai, wood-block print culture, geisha, and haiku. These works tend to embroil themselves in action-adventure struggles rather than the more elusive and amorphous theatre of the mind. Very few historical fiction writers would think to take up the tale of a ninth-century disinherited crown prince on religious pilgrimage as he approaches the end of his life. Yet this is, at least on the surface, the subject Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928-1987) engages with in Takaoka’s Travels, translated by David Boyd.
To say that Prince Takaoka is the subject of this novel, however, is a bit misleading. While we journey with him from Japan to Tang China and onward through much of southeast Asia, the novel is less concerned with Takaoka as a historical personage than it is with him as an oracle of the dream world and “a practitioner of exoticism, in the original sense of the word.” Indeed, while long passages of this book are filled with historical fact—reflecting that Shibusawa was primarily an essayist and scholar of eroticism throughout his life—the points of real interest are where the novel departs into the world of dreams, humor, mysticism, and occasional ribbing at the colonial powers of Western Europe and the US.
Take, for example, the moment when Prince Takaoka and his traveling party stumble across a talking great anteater in Nhật Nam (modern-day northern Vietnam):
“Miko, you know nothing! That’s why you can say such foolish things. At risk of anachronism, let me explain. The great anteater will be discovered roughly six hundred years from now, when Columbus arrives in what will then be called the New World. So how can we be staring at one here and now?”
[…]
“Wrong, wrong! It’s foolish to think that the existence of my kind hinges upon being ‘discovered,’ as you put it, by Columbus or by any other man. Don’t underestimate us! My kind has lived on this planet longer than yours. We can make our home wherever there are ants. To restrict us to the New World—doesn’t that smack of anthropocentrism?” (30)
Anthropocentrism indeed. These delightful jibes and musings on the nature of our contemporary, often-Eurocentric literary world bring freshness and enjoyment to a tale that could easily be bogged down by the minutia of historicity. Indeed, these details might lead to a frustrating reading experience for those not versed in the histories of east, southeast, and central Asia, but this too, feels like a pointed jab at the Western European academies of knowledge, which now usually dominate even in Japan. In Shibusawa’s pages, histories of Pliny the Elder and Alexander the Great come into conversation with Daoist tracts like the Huainanzi, Confucianist classics like The Book of Odes, and the Buddhist Dharma, and Shibusawa is not interested in holding the hands of readers unfamiliar with these works and histories. Instead, he continues ever onward, much like his title character, seeking for the promised and ultimate dream that will come when he and his Prince arrive in Hindustan, modern-day India, and he at last beholds the cradle of Buddhism.
These often dense passages are maintained in the English by Boyd, and it is clear he has devoted a great deal of time and thought to every aspect of Shibusawa’s odd and esoteric pastiche of a text. The Japanese moves from historical treatise to scenic overview to comical dialogue and back in a cycle, and Boyd goes to great pains to preserve this mishmash of styles in translation. We go from sentences like, “The Lolo are often made to represent the whole of the Wuman, but it is worth noting that the name Wuman refers to multiple groups of people,” to descriptions like “Approaching the auriform lake, the Prince directed his flying canoe just over the Cang Mountains and landed near the top of Mount Cock-Claw” to spiraling glimpses of the Prince’s inner world with:
He was too busy searching, looking for something. And what was that? What did he want? The Prince couldn’t be sure. Looking back on it now, he felt that his entire life had been one endless search. Where would it end? What could possibly provide him with final satisfaction? When the Prince considered this, he felt that he already knew exactly what it was he’d been seeking. (104-5)
Boyd and the Stone Bridge MONKEY imprint editorial team also make the smart choice to include the translator’s note at the end of the book rather than the beginning—given the contents of that note, it would almost certainly predetermine anyone’s reading of the work, and they would never get to experience the strangeness of this text in all its hodgepodge glory.
Shibusawa is certainly not everyone’s cup of tea. He shares an unfortunate habit of most Japanese male authors of his generation—namely using women as tools toward a male character’s self-realization, sketching female creatures (both literal and figurative) who are barely more than a few tired archetypes on the page, and the novel’s patchwork of style might frustrate some. This work is a strange one indeed, but the world of Japanese literature in translation is, I think, currently lacking in this manner of strangeness—a dreamy, erudite, and even alienating strangeness which refuses the cosmopolitan ease of writers like Haruki Murakami in favor of something that in turns jars, beguiles, enchants, and even besets you with man-eating tigers.
Shibusawa, Tatsuhiko. Takaoka’s Travels. Translated by David Boyd. Stone Bridge Press, 2024.
Laurel Taylor is a translator, poet, writer, and scholar. Her co-translation (with Hitomi Yoshio) of Kawakami Mieko’s Sisters in Yellow will publish in March 2026, and her translation of Maiko Seo’s A Blessing for a Wedding is forthcoming from Europa Editions. She has also translated works by Kaori Fujino, Aoko Matsuda, and Minae Mizumura, among others. Her debut poetry collection, Human Construct (Human kōzō, Shichigatsudo Press) published in November, 2024. Taylor is currently a professor of Japanese at the University of Denver.