In an increasingly post-Western world, old identities and networks of cultural and commercial exchange are now being revived (and new ones created). In this context, many states, nations, and cultures in the non-West are looking to their own past, rather than to the West, for inspiration in conducting their own affairs. What is thus re-emerging in Asia, as the architecture of Western expansion either decays or is co-opted by new players, is a world characterized by the dynamics of ancient, premodern and medieval Asia, rather than modern Europe and North America.
It is timely, then, to encounter a novel set in precisely such an earlier era of Asian prominence, and which despite its appearances may help us appreciate the long history and cultural intricacies of Asia before the arrival of Europeans, broadening our perspectives and inspiring us to explore the rich heritage of Asian literature in the process. Published in 2024 as Takaoka’s Travels, David Boyd’s award-winning translation of Japanese countercultural icon Tatsuhiko Shibusawa’s 1987 novel, Takaoka Shinnō kōkaiki, is the author’s first novel-length work available in English, and hopefully not the last. Originally published shortly before Shibusawa’s death in 1987, the novel went on to win Japan’s prestigious Yomiuri Prize for Literature, and in less than two hundred pages simultaneously serves up a veiled spiritual memoir, a reflection on fate and mortality, a satire of medieval and modern European travel writing, and a catalogue of the rich cultural geography of the Indo-Pacific in the ninth century.
As the world grapples with shifting geopolitical dynamics caused by the centre of global economic gravity shifting eastwards (with the rise of non-Western economies), those reared on a Eurocentric and Atlanticist view of world affairs may perceive a calamitous end-of-world scenario. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be viewed that way. As British historian Peter Frankopan suggests in The New Silk Roads, his 2018 book about the economic and geopolitical rise of Asia in recent decades, such displacements are quite common in history. From the perspective of modern non-Western cultures in Asia (including West Asia and the Indo-Pacific), Africa, and South America, an earlier shift in economic and political power away from each region’s localized commercial and cultural networks—housing rich microcosms of cosmopolitan and cultural exchange for centuries—occurred roughly five centuries ago, with the arrival of European expansion, and was itself a great displacement that is only now beginning to be reversed.
While contact between the regions of Europe and Asia dates back to the sixth century BCE, European expeditions to Asia up until the late fifteenth century were largely focused on exploration, trade, and diplomacy. Within the final decade of the fifteenth century and the opening years of the sixteenth, the expeditions of the explorers Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and Pedro Álvares Cabral established European contact with North America (1492), Asia (1499), and South America (1500), respectively, in proto-imperial terms. Afonso de Albuquerque’s exploits in the early sixteenth century established his reputation as a fierce and skilled military commander, expanded Portuguese influence across the Indian Ocean, and set the template for further European expansionism in the Indo-Pacific. The Portuguese were subsequently followed into the Indian Ocean by the Dutch, the French, the British, and other European powers, whose active shaping of the military, commercial, and cultural architecture of the day heralded a great displacement of the established concert of civilisations in Asia, disrupting trade and migration routes as well as political, technological, commercial, and cultural patterns, and injecting new dynamism into a region that is no stranger to holding invaders captive.
Takaoka’s Travels opens with a clear statement of its own historical setting: “On the twenty-seventh day of the first month in the sixth year of the Xiantong era, Prince Takaoka set sail from Guangzhou on a ship bound for Hindustan. By the Japanese calendar the year was Jōgan 7, and the Prince was sixty-five.” This places us in 865 CE, during the Tang Dynasty in China, often considered the golden age of Chinese civilization and a time of extensive diplomatic, trade, and cultural ties across Asia.
When we first meet Takaoka, he is “well into his sixties but appeared at least ten years younger.”| [1] He is accompanied by two other Japanese monks—Anten, a “sharp-eyed, brawny man” and a skilled linguist serving as interpreter, and Engaku, “a polymath” with “encyclopedic knowledge” of “Daoist medicine and herbalism”—and a stowaway boy named Akimaru (later revealed to be a girl). By this time, he has spent almost four years traveling to Guangzhou from Japan, and about two and a half years of that time within the Tang Empire at Chang’an. Their travel unit resembles the small, multidiscipline expeditionary forces common in the European colonial era, recalling a time when Buddhist clerics were worldly voyagers and Buddhism was the dominant transnational culture of Asia before the advent of Islam and European Christianity. A passing reference is made to a wife with whom Takaoka fathered three children as a young prince years ago, but it’s clear he hasn’t seen them nor had sex in years, nor does he seem to be motivated by glory, wealth, or immediate carnal attraction. Rather, he is driven by some kind of amused fascination with the world, and a deep-seated yearning to visit “Hindustan.”
The novel soon picks up pace with Takaoka and his companions encountering a series of fantastical and absurd situations. In Champa (central and southern Vietnam), a talking dugong reminds them of the shortness of life. A talking anteater debates postmodernism. They fight slavers in the Vietnamese jungle. In the Mekong Delta, they encounter a white ape guarding a harem of “monotreme” bird-women, who lay eggs instead of giving live birth, and who offer up their bodies for the satisfaction of select travelers. In Panpan (southern Thailand), they encounter beasts who feed on dreams. A princess performs oral sex on these creatures for everyone’s education. In Arakan (Myanmar), they meet a dog-headed man, born of the union between a woman and a dog, who can see hundreds of years into the future. An Arab merchant sends them on a quest to retrieve the preserved bodies of holy men for medicinal purposes. A trip, in a flying canoe, across “a scorched ocean of sand” studded with the preserved bodies of holy men and doomed travelers takes Takaoka to Yunnan (southwestern China), where he meets more egg-laying women impregnated by immaculate conception, and liberates a king from his madness.
On the high seas near Sinhala (Sri Lanka) they meet a Persian navigator using a cutting-edge navigation tool, encounter superhuman pearl divers, and observe bizarre suicidal behaviour from sailors as their ship is stuck in the doldrums, before it is boarded by ghostly “shadow-men” pirates “with hands as cold as ice water” and then tossed around in the Bay of Bengal by supernatural winds. In Srivijaya (Sumatra), they reconnect with an old acquaintance who introduces Takaoka to queens who are killed following childbirth and embalmed by a “monstrous flower,” before Takaoka is finally propelled in the direction of his fate. Each encounter serves not only as an entertaining or illuminating episode, but also as a vehicle for Shibusawa to explore the themes of cultural exchange, seductive danger, and the nature of reality itself. Sadly, the female figures in this novel are nearly all portrayed as conniving, helpless, or narrative devices, which sheds some light on Shibusawa’s outlook.
As a register of the key locations and cultures in the ninth-century Indosphere, the arc of Takaoka’s westward journey provides plenty of fodder for further research. The brief description we are given of Guangzhou alone, a major port city in China’s Pearl River Delta that was once a key terminus of the Silk Road, reveals the degree to which ancient civilizations were interacting with one another.
Guangzhou was one of the liveliest ports along the South Sea, rivaling even Jiazhou, or Lūqīn, as it was known to the Arabs. As far back as the Han dynasty … the port of Guangzhou traded in a great many precious goods: rhinoceros horn, elephant ivory, tortoiseshell, pearl, jade, silver, bronze, amber, aloeswood, cardamom, and more … moored cheek by jowl were ships from Hindustan [India], Arabia, Sinhala [Sri Lanka] and Persia - there were even Kunlun [Malay] boats from the Southern Lands [the Malay Archipelago]. The men of the port were no less exotic, with eyes and skin of all shades and colors. Suntanned sailors stripped to the waist bounded across the decks in a veritable showcase of the world’s races. Although it would still be four centuries before Marco Polo or Odoric would travel to this part of the globe, there were already white savages on some of the ships. Even for the spectacle of the strange people passing through, the port of Guangzhou was a wonder to behold.
The author’s clever references to various academic and encyclopedic works from different eras demonstrate the intellectual richness of pre-colonial Asia. Works like “the hundred-volume herbalist text” Formulae of the Daidō Era (composed in the early ninth century CE), The Gazetteer of Chenla (likely composed in the eighth century CE), Ge Hong’s The Master Who Embraces Simplicity (fourth century CE), and Liu An’s Huainanzi (second century CE), among others, are mentioned alongside more familiar texts like Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (first century CE). Quoting these particular texts serves to repudiate any persistent view that, prior to Western arrival, there was no real intellectual achievement worth considering in the non-West. Contrary to popular portrayals, ancient and medieval Asian cultures were intellectually curious and had developed a copious literary heritage, with a rich sense of history, literature, and identity, and were making advances in naturalism, geography, politics, philosophy, and other fields in an organized fashion.
The true delights, though, are to be found in Shibusawa’s use of irreverently crude humour, anachronisms, and exoticism to inject wryness and absurdity into what would otherwise have been a dry historical travelogue—as well as in the use of dream sequences to create a nonlinear narrative that intimates dark undertones to Takaoka’s tale. The Prince breaks wind at inopportune moments, while another character happily gets addicted to the scent of dream-eater dung. A debate provoked by a talking anteater presages postcolonial exchanges about Eurocentrism, identity, and cultural primacy, elevating the novel to the level of satire while challenging readers’ expectations and assumptions about historical narratives and cultural encounters.
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? Can’t you see its very existence defies the laws of time and space? … Answer me this, or I shall have to consider your existence a flat-out falsehood. [2]
Later, a “portly Arab” merchant raves about the perils of uncontrollable ejaculation for a few paragraphs. The clairvoyant dog-man with “a bell dangling from his private parts”—intended to serve as a “chastity belt” to “nullify the reproductive capabilities of dog-headed men” and minimize the risk of “miscegenation” with human women (in a nod to twentieth-century race relations)—relates his visions of how “famous explorers with strange names like Marco Polo, Odoric, Carpini, and Hayton will come from Europe.” He goes on to say that “Ibn Battuta will come from Arabia,” repeating “snatches of rumor for the waiting ears of the world,” while “an audacious Englishman assuming the name of Mandeville will peddle similar tales without even setting foot outside Europe.”
The use of a dry factual style to chronicle absurd and impossible events, people, and situations is clearly intended to serve a fourfold purpose: to pay homage to the narratives of ancient, medieval and early modern travelogues that freely mixed fact and fabulism for audiences that expected to hear about “exotic” things in other cultures; to critique colonial-era cultural constructs and stereotyping of an “exotic” Orient; to provide comic relief through Shibusawa’s own brand of irreverence; and to immerse the reader in a premodern outlook by which magic could be found around every corner, and the fantastic regularly encountered.
As we head south, things will occur that we could never have imagined back in Japan. Perhaps the world itself will turn upside-down! But I mustn’t be alarmed. As we approach Hindustan, things will only become stranger and stranger. And isn’t that exactly what I wanted? Hindustan approaches! Rejoice! Soon it will be within my grasp.
India—referred to by its medieval name “Hindustan”—looms large in Takaoka’s imagination, but so too does another figure: Fujiwara no Kusuko, his father’s enigmatic concubine, who suffered a tragic fate of her own. Takaoka’s obsession with Hindustan is less informed by his Buddhist faith and his mentor, the late monk Kūkai (“an aesthete and a Hinduphile”), than by the deep and abiding influence of Kusuko, who introduced him to the idea of Hindustan, and who—despite being in her thirties—regularly fondled him while he was “a child, no older than five or six,” “cupping his testicles, rolling them around like a pair of Baoding balls.” Aside from the very obvious and troubling implications of this relationship, it’s clear that Kusuko was sexually imprinting herself on Takaoka like a Bene Gesserit operative, and responding to lethal palace intrigues by decoupling her destiny from Emperor Heizei’s to establish a secondary relationship with the Crown Prince. To a young Takaoka, “she didn’t seem to age,” “perfectly retained the radiant beauty of youth,” was “an expert in the art of lovemaking,” and “made use of secret arts to maintain her appearance”; he remains convinced that “there was not a hint of coquetry or debauchery” in what she did. Everything happened “as Kusuko willed.” At the same time Kusuko also seems to have stood in for a mother/sister figure in Takaoka’s life. She “didn’t need to endear herself to the boy. She easily won his heart, and the two settled into the sort of closeness often enjoyed by partners in crime … Lying next to him, Kusuko told him all kinds of stories, animating his young dreams.”
Everything in Hindustan is the opposite of what it is in the world we know. Our day is their night, our summer is their winter, our up is their down, our man is their woman. In Hindustan, rivers run backward, and mountains sink deep into the earth like massive holes.
As such, she comes to play the central figure in nearly all of the dream sequences that interpolate the story, revealing her abiding Oedipal impact as a key mother figure and love interest to Takaoka, and creating a lifelong association in his mind between his latent sexual desire and his quest for this idealized land of Hindustan. During the Kusuko Incident (810 CE), however—with the Emperor Heizei’s uprising against Emperor Saga thwarted—Kusuko takes her own life, “vanishing like a comet, and taking that sweet image of Hindustan with her,” while leaving “an image of Kusuko … burned into the Prince’s memory, like a figure in a shadow play.”
Of course, some prefer the more sober view that the Kusuko Incident represented the beginning of the Prince’s increasing frustration with the political world, and this frustration drove him to pursue Buddhism … Yet this banal interpretation cannot adequately account for the … unconventional Buddhist views that the Prince held throughout his life. For him, the entirety of Buddhism converged on a single point—namely, Hindustan. There can be no doubt that the prince was a practitioner of exoticism … That is, he had a deep interest in all things foreign. As an import from the continent, Buddhism had been valued, even vaunted, in Japan since the Asuka period. A great many Buddhists were drawn to the exotic aura of the practice, but for the Prince, Buddhism was this and this alone. It was like an onion—layer after layer of the exotic, with Hindustan at its core.
Takaoka romanticizes “Hindustan” as an escape from the exogenous restrictions placed on his life, unwilling to accept that his youth and his life have passed him by, and that there may not be many new discoveries left. The novel thus suggests that his desire to visit Hindustan is tied to his desire—in his old age, conscious of his mortality—to break free of the constraints of his life, escape his past, and be reunited with Kusuko, producing some beautiful scenes of doomed love and forlorn affection that haunt and animate the tale. As the dream sequences unfold, however, it becomes clear that perhaps Takaoka has been wilfully blind to a sinister side of Kusuko in order to keep alive his idealizations of her.
We also know that, at the time, the word “kusuko” was used as a common noun to refer to poison-tasters. That this word would become Kusuko’s name tells us much about her character.
While some of the dream sequences—almost all featuring a version or facet of Kusuko as Takaoka remembers her—are highly surreal, others suggest that certain scenes presented either as dreams or as hallucinations superimposed on reality might actually be repressed memories. After all, “for the Prince, his dreams were memory itself.” One particular example is of the night he may have glimpsed Kusuko poisoning his father with an herbal remedy:
The woman now dancing before his father eluded his understanding. He thought he could detect a sinister half-smile on her face … Kusuko sang in a voice that was light and easy, but for some reason it had the opposite effect on the young Prince … In that moment, the Prince’s eyes, hidden in the half-light … met Kusuko’s. Maybe it was nothing, but the Prince thought he saw a cruel twinkle of light … and he shouted out as if he were on fire … Kusuko’s reply was so cold that, even when he remembered it now, his heart froze. He could only think that Kusuko harbored some secret malice, that she was pretending to mishear what he had said.
Perhaps what explains Takaoka’s childlike curiosity and naiveté towards the world, his tendency to be manipulated, and his eagerness to engage with danger rather than avoid it, is his refusal to grow up, and the tension between his repressed memories of Kusuko and his desire to retain her memory as a muse, all rooted in an underlying death wish. It’s worth noting that the theme of beauty masking danger is a recurring motif, and perhaps originates in Kusuko’s impact on his life. Takaoka is constantly drawn to the beauty he encounters, whether in the form of a perfectly shaped pearl, giant blood-red (and deadly) flower, or a beautiful woman; but such beauty is often cloaked in seduction and mystery to mask its lethality, placing him at the centre of a tale of peril and temptation, as much as it also sets him up for comic encounters.
Numerous sexualized references punctuate the narrative. From Takaoka’s companion Akimaru’s budding puberty to the absurdity of the dog-headed man’s genital decorations, the fellatio scene, the sexualized bird-women, and the Arab merchant’s openly expressed sexual imagination, the Prince appears to be driven by a latent sexuality. Takaoka’s motivations—escape and fulfillment, a search for a destiny within his control, a death wish to reunite with Kusuko, unfulfilled sexual longings, suppressed passions—all indicate that he’s at best a flawed saint, and very much human. In crafting such a transparently flawed foil to the historical Takaoka (a revered Buddhist figure), Shibusawa is perhaps trying to suggest not only that religious figures are all too human, but that enforced sexual repression is unnatural, and that perhaps true sainthood is an impossible ideal. For saints to be saints, they either have to fail at something that can be airbrushed out of their hagiographies, and/or be supported by a coterie of loyal followers willing and able to toil and sacrifice on their behalf.
Through Shibusawa’s eyes, Takaoka, the religious renunciate, also emerges as a kind of hypocrite: He seems far too easily drawn to sexuality, sensuality, and his memories of Kusuko than he wishes to admit, and certainly more readily than he practices Buddhist restraint and detachment. In addition, he has used his Buddhist heritage and authority to justify a longshot voyage at a ripe old age to pursue unfulfilled youthful longings, placing his traveling companions in danger. By thus presenting him as a character rooted in contradiction, caught between personal desire and social expectations, the novel additionally seems to suggest that perhaps sexuality and spirituality are not antagonistic, but complementary aspects of the human experience that have to be reconciled at the intersection of individual ambition and social responsibility.
Maritime maps and navigational aids of a kind would have been available in Tang-era China, but the fictional Takaoka seems to be content to follow the whims of fate rather than accept professional nautical expertise. Perhaps, after a lifetime of enforced seclusion and rigor, Takaoka seeks to rediscover the world anew in a personal fashion, and perhaps the best way to do so is by throwing away the map. The impulse to journey to a fabled Hindustan by any means necessary—an idealization of his desire for self-determination and self-realization—becomes his overriding mission, leading him to fall prey to the dubious philosophical speculations of a seemingly friendly princess—one with a “glint of wickedness,” a “beautiful face” that “revealed a certain cruelty only for an instant,” and “a familiar hint of cruelty in her smile”—who manipulates him into accepting a tragic quest that seals his fate … but which also allows him to fulfill his life’s mission in a rather roundabout way.
Key to this outcome is his acceptance of death. As his journey progresses, Takaoka’s competing spiritual and sexual yearnings eventually give way to an inner reconciliation that douses his passion, allowing him to experience peace and clarity.
… he felt that he had confronted impurity on the highest level … he now felt much closer to nirvana … 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. He had the sense that nothing would surprise him now, not one bit. Whatever he found at the end of his journey would only inspire him to say: “Of course—just as I’d imagined …”
Takaoka’s inner transformation, and the recognition of his mortality, yield to an acceptance of fate—and by the end of the novel he has attained the steadiness of mind, characterized by unruffled stillness, that is the ideal of Hinduism-Buddhism. Accepting his lovelorn yearnings and recognizing his mortality, he finds peace, finally understanding the detachment taught by the Buddhism he has spent his whole life serving, and embraces death as a release.
The novel’s nonlinear plot, irreverent prose, and the puerile situations into it which it places its literary Takaoka make sense given the life and character of the author. Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928-1987) first emerged as a translator of French literature in the 1950s, but became famous for his conduct in the infamous “Sade Trial” in 1959, when he and his publisher were taken to court for their published translation of Juliette, the Marquis de Sade’s notorious 1797 novel of sexual adventurism. Accused, in translator David Boyd’s words, of making the “obscene work even more obscene in translation” (by having “trimmed away the more soporific passages”), his notoriety was heightened by his irreverence towards the court, his sporting of sunglasses and smoking a pipe whenever he decided to show up at all, and his choice to use his publicity to ridicule his accusers.
All of this won him the admiration of both the public and Japanese literary circles. He continued to establish his reputation as one of postwar Japan’s “most shocking and powerful voices” by publishing essays on family-friendly subjects as varied as art, black magic, demonology, torture, and eroticism, and was described by his peers as an “insect boy” (konchū shōnen)—a writer “who used the essay form as a literary specimen case.” Thus, Takaoka’s Travels is better interpreted less as a story and more as a “cabinet of curiosities”: a vessel reflecting the author’s “lifelong obsession with all things strange and exotic” that is given shape and purpose by being embedded in a travel tale loosely inspired by the life of a real historical figure—and fueled by his rebelliousness and irreverence for traditional authority and the culture of the Shōwa era (1926 to 1989). Like Takaoka, Shibusawa’s passion for “exoticism … a deep interest in all things foreign” was tested by the structures and limits of power and authority, and this novel can be viewed as an attempt by the author to reconcile with the themes of his own life. Takaoka turns his back on the political world to embrace Buddhism, just as Shibusawa turned his back on politics (he was briefly a supporter of the Communist Party) to seek refuge in literature and the occult. His irreverence towards authority, and fascination with the strange and exotic, are evident throughout the novel.
While on its surface Takaoka’s Travels might appear to be a fabulist tale, a deeper reading uncovers a tale of love, loss, and longing suggesting darker themes of sexual exploitation and lethal politics, and spotlights a spiritual odyssey raising questions about fate and character. It reconfirms that the best tales of travel and transformation are often about finding oneself at the end of a long journey, and that a lifetime of seclusion may not bring forth enlightenment as much as a short period of traveling, thus paying homage to the wonders of travel which—to paraphrase Ibn Battuta—leave a person speechless and then turn them into a storyteller.
The interspersing of a linear travel itinerary with flashbacks and dream sequences that muddle the reality of what is being described, blurring the lines between fact, fiction, and fabulism, adds to the overall surreal and escapist quality of the story, while the lush descriptions of the landscapes and cultures Takaoka encounters allow the novel to be read as an almanac for the culture and psychology of the ninth-century Indo-Pacific, offering insights into its dynamics today.
This book reminds us that before Europe’s age of exploration and conquest, there was a time when Asian powers and personalities explored the world and set the rules. The ninth-century Indo-Pacific world of commerce, conquest, and culture serves as a rich backdrop to the story of Takaoka’s Travels, which is set centuries before the first medieval European set foot in it. The novel is filled with names that were once the stuff of myth and mystery, while foregrounding a fantastical retelling of an historical journey that recalls the imagination of Italo Calvino, the absurdity of John Mandeville, the exploits of Marco Polo and Zhenge He, the sweep of Homer’s Odyssey, and the whimsical and mildly unsettling satire of Gulliver’s Travels. Just as Jonathan Swift was skilful at mocking the religious, political, and social ideologues of his day, Shibusawa succeeds as well, presenting us with a fantasy-fabulist tale with an Asian twist that is uniquely satisfying.
Ultimately, the novel examines timeless questions about fate and identity, and explores whether living an authentic life on one’s own terms, even if it means abandoning tradition and responsibility, can be more fulfilling than burying oneself in worldly duties at the expense of one’s dreams and hopes. In other words, it plumbs the tension between what a person wants, and what is expected of them. Takaoka’s journey from a life of enforced seclusion and rigor to one of sensual discovery and spiritual awakening serves as a metaphor for the human quest for meaning and self-realization. A meditation on the nature of reality, desire, and spiritual enlightenment wrapped in a satirical critique of colonial narratives and travel writing, Shibusawa’s novel challenges readers to reconsider their assumptions about history, culture, and the self, offering a unique perspective on the rich tapestry of Asian civilization before European dominance. As we navigate our own era of global shifts and cultural reawakening, Takaoka’s Travels provides both entertainment and food for thought, reminding us of the cyclical nature of history, and the enduring power of the human spirit to seek meaning in the face of mortality and change. The themes of exile, myth, memory, love, loss, and longing explored within should resonate with anyone who has lived and traveled—and serve as a reminder that beyond the Western-centric world we live in, there were other worlds that existed that were at least as copious and rich and distinct in their own ways. What we consider to be the bygone past may one day come to shape and define our future yet again.
Endnotes
[1] The historical Prince Takaoka was the son of Emperor Heizei, who ruled Japan from 806-809 CE during the early Heian period, a classical golden age noted for its cultural achievements and development of Buddhism, before abdicating the throne in favour of his brother Emperor Saga. Following a failed coup attempt by his father (the Kusuko Incident of 810 CE), Takaoka, as “the son of the instigator,” was exiled to a distant monastery and forced to become a monk. Takaoka, with his “tendency to turn inward and reflect,” was thus born into a complex world of absolute wealth and power, courtly intrigues and political subterfuge, which makes his arc as the son of a fallen emperor, exiled monk, and traveler all the more poignant. The historical Prince Takaoka did indeed set off on a pilgrimage to Hindustan (India) from the port city of Guangzhou, but little is known of his actual travels, and he is presumed to have died somewhere near Singapore (allegedly at the paws of a tiger). “The Prince was nonetheless the first Japanese person of his time to venture so far to the west,” writes translator David Boyd in his afterword, but it soon becomes clear that Shibusawa’s retelling of this historical pilgrimage is more fiction than fact, offering a comically absurd tale set in ninth-century maritime Asia that intertwines the ribald with the spiritual. [return]
[2] The anteater, to its credit, points out that “it’s foolish to think that the existence of my kind hinges upon being ‘discovered,’ as you put it, by Columbus or by any kind of man. Don’t underestimate us! My kind has lived on this planet longer than yours … To restrict us to the New World—doesn’t that smack of anthropocentrism?” [return]