The Straw Sandal

By Santō Kyōden, Translated by Carmen Blacker

Published by Global Oriental

The book launch of Santō Kyōden’s famous early nineteenth-century novel ‘The Straw Sandal, or The Scroll of the Hundred Crabs’ was a celebration of Carmen Blacker’s career as scholar and writer.

Carmen Blacker’s spirited translation of Santō Kyōden’s ‘Mukashibanashi Inazuma Hyoshi’, (from which the title ‘The Straw Sandal’ is taken), considered by Aston to be his masterpiece, reveals a multi-layered and fascinating tale of revenge – Japanese-style, thereby providing a classic example of a classic genre within Japanese literature.

Aston makes the point that the plot of this late-eighteenth-century novel, developed over twenty chapters or episodes, is so complicated that ‘it is impossible to give an adequate summary…’ But he goes on to promise several murders and homicides, a harakiri and other suicides, terrific combats, hairbreadth escapes, strange meetings and surprising recognitions. In addition, there are scenes of witchcraft and enchantment with dreams, magic terrors and ghosts who rove by night.

In her Collected Writings, Carmen Blacker describes both the first encounter with Aston’s History of Japanese Literature, and not long after, in 1945, at a meeting with Arthur Waley in his London house in Bloomsbury she saw a copy of Santō Kyōden’s ‘Mukashibanashi Inazuma Hyoshi’ on his bookshelves. For when she expressed pleasure in seeing it, Waley urged her to borrow it and ‘keep it as long as you like’; Carmen Blacker then recalls how as a young student studying Japanese she subsequently ‘and laboriously’ in her spare time read it all through and made a summary of each chapter.

These two moments took place over sixty years ago. Carmen Blacker’s own English translation of Santō Kyōden’s ‘masterpiece’ is at last complete, including annotations, – an event that will surely be widely welcomed both in the world of literature as well as that of Japanese Studies.

Carmen Blacker is widely known for her work on Fukuzawa Yukichi (‘The Japanese Enlightenment’, 1964), shamanistic practices in Japan (‘The Catalpa Bow’, 1975, republished in paperback 1999), and folklore and divinations (‘Ancient Cosmologies’, 1975, and ‘Divination and Oracles’ 1981 – both with Michael Loewe). In 1996, she published (with Edward Shils) ‘Cambridge Women’, and in 2000, her ‘Collected Writings’.

A Lecturer in Japanese Studies, Cambridge from 1955 to 1991 and a Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge since 1965, in 2004 Carmen Blacker received the OBE for services to Japanese studies and UK-Japan relations. She was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1989, was President of the Folklore Society of London 1982-4, and received Japan’s Order of the Precious Crown in 1988.

The book launch saw presentations by Professor Peter Kornicki on the historical and literary context of the writings of Santō Kyōden; Dr James McMullen, a former pupil and colleague of Carmen Blacker, on Carmen Blacker as scholar and writer; and Dr Michael Loewe on the story of the translation.

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