The In-Between
women nature reality nonreality affect fantasy anxiety ecstasy the taste of twilight limit experiences boundaries
The Holy Man of Mount Koya is a fantastical tale that regales the audience with a complex portrayal of women, nature, and reality that reflects changing conceptions taking place in the transition from premodern to modern Japan. Kyoka melds innocence and beauty with grotesquery and cruelty, balancing on the tightrope between truth and fiction throughout. Despite its simple premise, The Holy Man of Mount Koya contains a dense and multifaceted narrative structure, and it is within this rich intertextual space that reflections about cultural anxieties can be felt from the story. Through his use of unconventional storytelling, Kyoka creates an atmospheric sense of “liminality”-- what he describes as tasogare no aji. Like the stories of many of his premodern predecessors, Kyoka plays at the boundaries of things— existing in the space that defines the what is from what isn’t, and the result is a highly stylized work that produces a unique kind of affective impression which keeps the reader on their toes. There are three areas in The Holy Man of Mount Koya in which Kyoka effectively skirts boundaries— thematically, he plays with contrasting affects; socially, he expresses the uncertain landscape of modernizing Japan; and finally, but perhaps most importantly, narratively, he straddles between fiction and reality.
The Holy Man of Mount Koya begins in the midst of the retelling of a young traveller’s journey from Tokyo to the mountainside– just enough context is provided to assume that the traveller is a kind of student. At a fateful stop in Nagoya, he encounters a Zen priest, and they take up each other’s company for the journey ahead. They stop off Tsuruga, bustling with traingoers and merchants, and stay at an inn at the recommendation of the priest. The student mentions his penchant for loneliness and sleeplessness, and asks the priest to tell him a story about his travels. The priest then launches into the story recounting his travel to the mountains between Hida and Shinshu, in which he starts off by prefacing, ““You must not always expect to hear religious stories from a priest,” he cautioned, “Nor sermons and platitudes either. Listen carefully, young man, to what I am about to tell you”’(p.5). The priest goes on to narrate his extraordinary tale of nature and fantasy, in which he traverses plains filled with snakes, forests filled with leeches, and most interestingly of all, a strange mountain woman and her husband living in isolation within the solitary mountains beyond them.
Kyoka’s structuring of the story as “text within text” creates a multilayered narrative. This dimensional structure generates two important points of discussion. First is the recognition and construction of the truth-fiction divide, and second, is how this created structure contributes to both the verisimilitude (or lack thereof) and liminal quality of the narrative. The first point is a question that concerns both the author, the story, as well as the audience. Kyoka is asking the reader to engage critically with what they think can be considered truth. In introducing complexity to believability, Kyoka asks his readers to interrogate the binary “truth/fiction” distinction, borne out of anxieties resulting from existence in the transitioning place between the premodern and emergence of modernity. The use of numerous points of narration, in addition to contributing to the problematization of “truth”, creates a stratified structure in which concurrent metanarratives exist within a discourse on the tale itself. It establishes the spatial, temporal, and epistemological space that the tale exists in, and in doing so, tentatively, but not explicitly, “assigns the analyst his position”. The student, the priest, and the reader all exist in the urban, modern world, temporally far from the characters in the story, distally far from the mountains (spatially). The young priest traverses a place where he must seek advice from locals (epistemologically), as he is unfamiliar with the history and landscape, situating the position of the student and the reader.
The second point comes into play when considering how a sense of credibility is given to the priest’s story through Kyoka’s inclusion of the student narrator. The distance from the reader to the priest’s account of Mount Koya seems as if it makes it easier to cognitively designate it as fiction— but the reader is never explicitly told what to believe. Rather, the reader is prompted to consider reality through a kind of “push-pull” mechanism. This dynamic absorbs the reader in the fantastic, the “Othered'' qualities of nature and women (whose flowery language takes the reader to the realm of fiction), but then abruptly takes them out of the fantastical world with the priest’s periodical grounding in the “in-between” world, which is contextualized with the student narrator in the beginning of the story— ““So, listen to what happened” (p.9), “ But listen to what happened next” (p.21), “Without thinking I blurted out, “What was she?” rudely interrupting the priest’s story” (p.30), so on and so forth. Kyoka constantly weaves in and out of the “in-between'' with the student narrator and the “fiction” being recounted by the priest. This puts the reader in the midst of the very same “in-between” space as the story itself— the audience is never quite certain what reality should be. The reader is at once pulled “forwards” and “backwards” through the different layers. This transversal and cycling of boundaries is what drives the story forward, and creates a compelling sense of “liminality” in the tale. The “in-between” narrative structure, and the resulting push-pull, undergirds the rest of the commentary throughout the story.
The thematic aspects of the story are directly linked to the social ones— both of these have the function of expressing contrasts and anxieties about each. Both deal with subject as desirable or subject as not-desirable— the primary subjects of inquiry in the story being that of women and nature. Thus, the discussion of both women and nature are somewhat conflated in a singular image of anxiety. This is not meant in a reductive sense, but rather that, both are Othered through Kyoka’s “text within text” narrative. This is pushed to its extreme when considering the nature of the priest’s positionality in relation not only to the narrative, but also as a character. As a traveling priest, he is firstly, moving further away from the familiarity of civilization, and secondly, must resist buckling in the face of the pleasurable or painful sensations of the worldly realm. If the reader is three layers removed from characters in the story, this sense of distance is only exaggerated by the priest’s own distanced relationships with the subjects.
Nature and women are at once the object of desire as they are an obstacle to the priest’s progress. The woman presents an “immoral” temptation, and nature presents a physical test of the priest’s fortitude. These sorts of anxieties are manifest in the imagery of the mountain woman as the unknown, desirable figure– but this is far from the sole interpretation of what the woman portrays. It is precisely this sort of contrast and infinite possibility that produces a compounded “liminal” affect (in conjunction) with the narrative structure, and reflects the strange feelings that must have arisen in the transition period during the beginnings of the modernization. The inability to define what to make of women and nature, parallels the inability of what to make of the introduction of the modern world. Is it desirable? Is it disgusting? All that is known is that it is unknown. The boundary between fiction and in between is where this paradox lives, and where Kyoka draws his affectively powerful language from.
Affect is produced immediately as soon as a reader engages with a text, but the text-in-text structure of The Holy Man of Mount Koya intensifies the production of what can be considered “liminal” affect in particular. What is critical is that both desire, disgust, and the unknown result in the distancing of the reader from the considered subject. This is yet another factor that places the natural landscape and character of the mountain woman in the “in-between” space. Both are presumably desirable things, associated with beauty— “Then, once again, I was able to enjoy the beauty of the world around me” (p.13), “She was very beautiful, slightly built, and her voice was pure and limpid as the mountain air”(p.14), and yet, each of these subjects reflects a sense of uncertainty– “In this empty, barren prairie I felt alone and a bit anxious. There was nothing familiar in the landscape to console me” (p.9). The reader, like the young priest, is unable to identify either of these figures as familiar or unfamiliar. The mountain woman is at once the subject of desire as she is one of the unknown— “For all I knew she might be some great, scaly serpent lurking in the depths of the house; a horrid creature speaking in a woman’s voice. I had heard tales of such things”, and yet, “She was very beautiful, slightly built, and her voice was pure and limpid as the mountain air” (p.14). She is initially characterized as potentially Other-disgust (snake), but this is quickly switched into Other-desire (beauty) as she comes out from hiding. Almost immediately from her introduction, the reader is on shaky ground as to what to make of this enigmatic figure. Her image is complicated further on in the story, when an air of eroticism is introduced around her character.
Throughout the story, Kyoka continually frisks between contrasting imagery. Much like the explorations of limit-experiences in premodern tales, Kyoka borrows this sensibility and appropriates it, resulting in the expression of liminality. The bulk of the analysis henceforth will come from the priest’s passage through the Amo Pass, subsequent entry into the mountains, and encounter with the mountain woman. This section of the story is where Kyoka’s worldbuilding shines through, and more elements begin to ramp up and include experimentation with limit-experience.
The traversal of the Amo Pass embodies several “in-betweens”— firstly, the in-between from civilization to the mountains, the in-between of the old and the new, as well as the priest’s ties between earthly manners and his oath to priesthood. To begin, the pass is introduced—“I had always heard that Amo Pass is a strange and disturbing place, where it rains even when there are no clouds in the sky, and according to people I had talked to, there had not been a woodcutter in these forests since the beginning of time, yet up to this point in my journey there had been very few trees” (p.11). The pass is described immediately as “strange and disturbing”, but more interestingly, is a place where it rains without clouds, betraying the reader’s presumably conventional “rational” conception of how rain operates in the world. “Raining without clouds” is an example of phrasing that contains a liminal quality— it takes subjects we know to be true (rain, clouds) and flips the reader’s existing understanding of how these subjects naturally relate to each other. Secondly, Kyoka is still situating the metanarrative discourse: “I had always heard”, “according to people I had talked to”— these all indicate to the reader that the priest is still referencing the realm of plausibility, as the very boundary of the threshold from “in-between” to “fiction”. This threshold is then crossed as he enters the forest.
The eerie tone of the forest is set from the very start,““Entering the dark and shadowy forest, my feet grew cold with .. fear”, “trees unfamiliar to me creaked and groaned” (p.11); “dark and dismal place”—harsh words like creaking and groaning are sounds that are evocative of age, of old joints in need of grease, the sound of collapsing— something that is, in classic Kyoka style, at once familiar and yet unfamiliar at the same time. When the priest notices the first leech, he describes it as “horrid creature… [that] clung to the tips of my fingers and just dangled there”, producing “beautiful, bright, red blood” (p.12) from the area it had attached to his skin. Words like “clung” and “dangled” evoke the feeling of “unwantedness”, in combination with “horrid”, the priest’s words convey a sticky, repulsive atmosphere. This unpleasant tone is escalated– “I blanched with horror only to find that there were more of them on my shoulders… Crazed with terror I plucked frantically at the leeches wherever I could find them” (p.12). “Crazed” and “frantic” summon “anxious” associations, conjuring the sense-experiences of fluttering heartbeats and utter confusion. This next passage speaks for itself, and conveys what almost cannot be spoken in words–“[the] whole surface of the tree was a squirming mass of leeches. I shouted out in terror as I saw the ravenous, black, slimy things dropping down from the tree like rain…The whole living mass was throbbing and pulsing as they sucked blood from my foot” (p.12). Squirming, ravenous, living mass, throbbing and pulsing– each of these words are wrapped up in revulsion, yet, this choice of words is specifically interesting in that they also have a sensuous, almost-perverted-but-not-quite, erotic undertone. Thus, a sense of horror is produced through the use of grotesque imagery, but these words still tread near the boundaries of pleasure, once again emphasizing contrasts.
Almost as soon as this ordeal is over, a few scenes removed from the “dark, dismal” forest, the priest encounters a crippled man at a lone hut in the mountains. This man is described as a “creature” and “spectacle” (p.14), and not shortly after, the mountain woman appears as a “beautiful” and “gentle”(p.14) figure. The relationship between them is described in a manner of unease– “I felt so sorry for the woman that I averted my eyes and pretended not to notice the intimacy and affection that passed between them” (p.16). Already, in establishing the new scene, Kyoka is emphasizing yet another contrast, this time between beauty and ugliness. From this point in the story, the priest’s recount of the events is totally wrapped up in the enigmatic attraction of the mountain woman– “Her rich, beautiful hair was tied up in a bun… All I can say is that she had a beautiful figure”(p.16), “Her white thighs, luminous in the gathering dusk..”(p.17), “In the moonlight I could see her well-formed nose and mouth as she gazed up at the mountain peaks with a glint of ecstasy in her eyes” (p.18), “Her soft hands caressed my shoulders” (p.19), and finally, “The warm, pliant body of this woman pressed to my back made me feel as though I was in the embrace of some lovely and exotic flower” (p.19). Needless to say, these elaborate, erotic, desirous descriptions of the mountain woman, presented after the grim environment and horrors of the forest, produce an entirely different, ethereal-like atmosphere. In the same way that extreme language is used to describe the encounter with the leeches, the extreme language here used to describe the mountain woman “Others” her– she seems “too good to be true”.
By placing highly affective words together, the liminal affect that is produced by the contrasts becomes clearer. If these words are viewed outside of the context of the story, it becomes more apparent that the reader is forced to play “in-between” contrasting affective sketches throughout the entire story. It is no wonder that the reader is left feeling a sense of “strangeness”.
The narrative tension within The Holy Mount of Koya can be summed up in part by this short passage: “If it were fiction [kuso] from the start, people would accept it as fiction. Seeing that they depict truth-in-reality [shinjitsu] and not fiction, it turns out that they must, in short, compete with factual reality [jijitsu]”. This conflict is the source of what makes the story itself caught in the “in-between”. It is through playing at this boundary that Kyoka creates a compelling, unique world that, at times, is able to abandon the preoccupation with truth, to fully immerse the reader in a time and place not of their own. In turn, it is this distance from the reader to the context of the story that pushes the portrayal of nature and women further away from the Self, rendering them as Other, as fantastical. The disorientation between the familiar and unfamiliar captures the moment of anxiety that Kyoka writes for, and as a result, readers get to enjoy a rich, atmospheric literary beauty borne out of the instance of uncertainty.