Ian Mond Reviews Takaoka’s Travels by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa

Takaoka’s Travels, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (Stone Bridge/Monkey 979-8-98868-870-9, $18.95, 178pp, tp) May 2024.

In 865, at the age of 65, Imperial Japanese Prince Takaoka, the third son of Emperor Heizeil, a Bud­dhist monk who also went by the monastic name Shinyo, set forth from Canton with three aides to Hindustan (India). Sadly, Takaoka never com­pleted the journey, reportedly mauled and eaten by a tiger somewhere near the Malay peninsula. In 1986, dying of laryngeal cancer, art critic and French translator Shibusawa Tatsuo (who wrote under the pen name Tatsuhiko Shibusawa) began drafting Takaoka Shinnō Kōkai-ki, an episodic novel about Prince Takaoka’s fated journey to India. With its talking animals, harem of half-avian, half-human women, and dead monks trans­formed into honey, Shibusawa’s fanciful novel won the Yomiuri Prize in 1987. Sadly, Shibusawa never received the prize; like the Prince, he passed away. It says something about the publishing industry that it’s taken thirty-seven years for this colourful book to be published in English under the title Takaoka’s Travels. And for that, we can thank the publisher Monkey and the always peerless work of translator David Boyd.

There’s scant information online about Prince Takaoka or his journey to Hindustan. The one reference to the Prince on Wikipedia relates to the “Kusuko Incident,” a brief internecine struggle between Emperor Saga and ex-Emperor Heizei (Takaoka’s father) allegedly motivated by Heizei’s lover Fujiwara no Kusuko. Shibusawa, while not prepared to write “an exhaustive biography of the Prince’s life,” thankfully spends the early part of the novel contextualising his protagonist. Shibu­sawa tells us that Kusuko, his father’s paramour, inspired the young Prince to visit Hindustan, “the land where the Buddha was born.”

In Hindustan, there are fantastic animals in the fields, curious plants in the gardens, and celestial beings in the sky. And that’s not all. 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 their woman. In Hindustan, rivers run backward, and mountains sink deep into the earth like massive holes.

It’s only in his sixties that Takaoka obtains per­mission to leave Japan for Hindustan. He does so with his faithful monks, Anten and Engaku, and, at the very last minute, an enslaved boy seeking shelter from his master, whom the Prince names Akimaru. From the outset, the expedition encoun­ters wonders they “could never have imagined in Japan,” starting with a hat-wearing dugong that Akimaru trains to speak, and then a cranky, man-shaped anteater on the shores of Vietnam. That confrontation displays Shibusawa’s cheeky, self-aware sense of humour, with Engaku and the anteater having a Douglas Adams-esque ex­change about whether the anteater’s existence is an anachronism, as the species won’t be discovered for at least six centuries. The Prince’s pilgrimage gets weirder from there, leading to its inevitable historical conclusion (but with a touching twist).

In a fascinating and revealing Afterword, David Boyd provides biographical details about Shibusawa (like Prince Takaoka, he has a minimal presence online). I learnt that in 1959, Shibusawa and his publisher were charged with obscenity for a two-volume translation of the Marquis de Sade’s novel L’Histoire de Juliette ou les Prospérités du vice. Shibusawa was found guilty because, as Boyd explains, he took “Sade’s work into his own hands… making the obscene work even more obscene in translation.” The case made Shibusawa a literary and counterculture star in Japan, not just because he was dismissive of obscenity laws but because he exuded an anti-establishment ethos with his sunglasses and pipe. Shibusawa’s provocative French translations also extended to artists like Jean Cocteau (the avant-garde) and J.K. Huysmans (the decadent and sensual) who, along with the Marquis de Sade, informed Shibusawa’s sensibilities, sensibilities which are threaded through Takaoka’s Travels. He flirts with sexual taboos: as a child, Takaoka would regularly touch Kusuko’s breast while she cupped “his tes­ticles, rolling them around like a pair of Baoding balls.” And in one astonishing scene, involving the supernatural Baku, Shibusawa encapsulates Cocteau’s surrealism and Huysman’s hedonism. With no decent dreamers left in Panpan, a starv­ing Baku has been dropping foul-smelling dung. “The Hindu Kingdom” beseeches the Prince to sleep in their gardens, hoping the Baku will feast on Takaoka’s dreams. The Prince obliges, leading to a moment where the Governor’s daughter – the spitting image of Kusuko – masturbates and fel­lates the now satiated Baku, who, in turn, produces sweet-scented dung. I haven’t done this section justice, but it’s a genuine showstopper: provoca­tive, funny, absurd and, in its way, beautiful. All of it is cleverly juxtaposed against the Prince’s asceticism (whatever his desires, he never betrays his Buddhist faith).

Takaoka’s Travels is overflowing with scenes like this, though not all of them as explicit. Mo­ments of outrageous imagination that, as David Boyd aptly puts it, record a “lifelong obsession with all things strange and exotic.” While it’s a tragedy that Shibusawa died at the peak of his powers, I can only hope that interest in this won­derfully strange novel will lead to translations of his other novel-length works.

This review and more like it in the May 2024 issue of Locus.

While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, but WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT to continue quality coverage of the science fiction and fantasy field.

©Locus Magazine. Copyrighted material may not be republished without permission of LSFF.