The Spirit Drum by Kyūsaku Yumeno

The Spirit Drum Reviews

• 
  lavenderews

  Nie spodziewałam się, że ta krótka książka może mnie tak bardzo w pewien sposób poruszyć.
• 
  Marie-Therese

  Surprisingly complex for such a brief work, this is eerie, atmospheric, and rather sad. The translator,
  J. D. Wisgo, kindly offers an introduction explaining the significance of Noh theater to the story, which helps illuminate the importance of the drums in the tale and in Japanese culture.
  
  While I don't think this can (or should) be classified as horror or a ghost story per se, there are supernatural elements to the tale as well as a decadent atmosphere that gives the work a distinctly eerie and slightly fantastic character. I think anyone who enjoys the work of
  Kyōka Izumi or
  Hyakken Uchida will like this very much. I sincerely hope that more work by Yumeno is translated soon (perhaps by Mr. Wisgo?).
• 
  M.H Ansari

  داستان گنگ و تاریک بود ، جذابیت متوسطی هم داشت .
• 
  Cat

  Un libro de misterio con componentes sobrenaturales y psicológicos. Me gustó que aunque es un libro corto, no deja ningún cabo suelto y la lectura es cautivadora. También me gustaron las referencias al teatro Noh y al folclor japonés, que siempre me ha interesado.
• 
  TT

  داستان به شدت جذاب بود
  ولی آخرشو نفهمیدم 😅 احیانا اگر کسی فهمیده به منم بگه
• 
  Andrew James

  A great story and a great translation! This story itself was an interesting and entertaining look into Japanese superstitions and supernatural beliefs.
  
  The translation was very readable and kept the story flowing nicely. I easily connected with the characters and was quickly swept into the events taking place.
  
  
  
• 
  Khaled

  Very twisty
  
  This story really kept me on my toes, I never knew what would happen next! I also enjoyed the prose.
• 
  Laura

  A cursed object dooming multiple generations? Right up my street. And I liked the matter-of-fact first person narrative which somehow made the tale spookier. Would love to read more translations by J.D. Wisgo of this author’s work.
• 
  Jim

  This is an odd book from a man who became an odd writer. It was entered into a competition looking for a work of detective fiction. This was in 1926, the same year Agatha Christie published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, her third featuring Hercule Poirot. The epistolary novella Ayakashi no tsuzumi (translated variously as The Demonic Hand Drum, The Apparitional Hand Drum, The Eerie Hand Drum or, in the translation I read, The Spirit Drum) came in joint second; there was no first prize awarded. The comments by the judges were, to say the least, mixed.
  
  Nowadays we’re familiar with a swath of sub-genres from cozy mysteries through police procedurals right down to hard-boiled literature. Japanese detective fiction also developed its own sub-genres as it moved away from mimicking the loose English translations that reached them at the end of the 19th century:

  Generally, the prewar debates were divided into two camps. One side asserted the Golden Age puzzle formula of “whodunit” was the authentic (honkaku; 本格), healthy (kenzen; 健全), and modern/progressive format, as opposed to the allegedly inauthentic (henkaku; 変格) form of writing which was characterized by its grotesque taste, lack of scientificity/logic, and “backward” premodern references. The other side argued that detective fiction should be understood as artistic fiction with detective tastes (tantei shumi 探偵趣味) rather than scientific fiction with rigid rules. They stated that it is the fictional element, not the detective element, that is central to a detective story. –
  Historical Overview: Japanese Detective Fiction, All About Rampo
  
  (This is a very brief summary of information gleaned from Satomi Saito’s thesis
  ‘Culture and authenticity: the discursive space of Japanese detective fiction and the formation of the national imaginary’ pages 71-80.)

  Understandably there was a cultural war going on, and not simply in literature, between a modern West and a premodern Japan. I think it’s fair to say that Japan has had a harder time than most letting go of its heritage than, say, the United States which hardly had one to begin with. (To be fair the States had its own problems at this time when it came to producing authentic American classical music.)
  
  The Spirit Drum, as I said, divided the judges. The overall consensus was that it was a work of henkaku which employs some elements of detective fiction but its main focus is more or less sensationalism (eroticism and the grotesque) related to criminal investigation. The hen in hentai (変態) and henkaku is the same character, which made the semantic connection between the two a natural one but bear in mind when this was written; this is about a far from tentacle porn as you could get and what was considered erotic or grotesque in the 1920s is exceedingly tame these days.
  
  I didn’t even read this as a detective novel. I thought it was a work of gothic fiction. Indeed it has something of the “antiquarian ghost story” about it, the kind of thing M.R. James might’ve dashed off. Rampo, who was the biggest name in Japanese detective fiction at the time, was probably the harshest of the judges. He just did not like the piece:

  I simply was not favourably impressed by this story. I found it somewhat odd to hear that others considered this an excellent work and recommended it for first place. Just in case, I read it a second time, but sure enough, my efforts were in vain. I do not see the goodness (yosa) of this work.

  I can see his problem and it’s a problem writers throughout the land were struggling with at the time: What makes a work of detective fiction a work of Japanese detective fiction? To start answering that consider what makes a work like Koji Suzuki's Ring different to, say, Stephen King’s Christine.
  
  In Ring we have a cursed video tape; in The Spirit Drum a cursed hand drum. Cursed objects are a recurring and popular trope—the One Ring from The Lord of the Rings, the puzzle box in Hellraiser and the eponymous monkey’s paw from the short story by W.W. Jacobs—so it’s familiar ground to modern readers. It’s a Shinto belief that everything has a spirit, so in Japanese folklore it’s possible for inanimate objects to become sentient. Hence we have the Tsukumogami (付喪神) which is the collective name given to a type of yōkai (Japanese spirits or monsters) which are haunted household objects. It would take very little stretch then to imagine a cursed hand drum. Plus you have to keep in mind Kyūsaku was a lifelong devotee of noh and, at age twenty-nine, became a noh instructor. That the cursed object in this book is a tsuzumi (handheld drum used in noh theatre) is given added significance only if you understand the history which, sadly, virtually no Western reader will do. The translator’s ‘A Brief Introduction to Noh Theatre’ only serves to let you know in advance how much out of your depth you’re going to be.
  
  My advice to any reader thinking about giving this a go is to accept you’re going to miss all the subtleties and to let them go whoosh! over your head. If you’re keen enough afterwards then read Satomi Saito’s thesis (or as much of it as interests you) or Nathen Clerici’s thesis:
  Dreams from Below: Yumeno Kyūsaku and Subculture Literature in Japan which covers similar ground. Junko Ikezu Williams’s
  Visions and narratives : modernism in the prose works of Yoshiyuki Eisuke, Murayama Tomoyoshi, Yumeno Kyūsaku, and Okamoto Kanoko is also worth a read.
  
  Bottom line then? Well it wasn’t really my sort of thing. As you can see, what salvaged things for me was learning about the author and the history of the piece as opposed to the work itself which felt derivative although at the time I’m sure it was quite the cutting edge work. Well, so was Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony back in the day.
  
  Detective novels tend to go in for facts, details, accuracies whereas this book muddies the waters. Things aren’t investigated. Questions aren’t asked and, most importantly, we don’t see the culprit get his—by “his” I mean its—comeuppance. I’ve certainly never read a detective novel like it although to be fair I’ve never read a horror novel like it either. It isn’t a bad read but it does seem Kyūsaku went on to better things. His, from what I can gather, masterwork, the Kafkaesque (not an adjective I throw around casually) Dogra Magra certainly sounds more my cup of tea if it ever gets translated into English.
• 
  Gabriela

  Siento que la literatura japonesa no es lo mío 😂
  
  Fue bastante rápido de leer, si hubo un momento que me mantuvo un poco intrigada, pero en general no me gustó.
  
  Al ser tan corto, casi no hubo desarrollo de personajes, pero me gustó un poco la viuda por lo loca que estaba (y esa fue la única parte del libro que me gustó).
• 
  Sanaecozy

  To było świetne, super się bawiłam. Krótkie, ale mega wciągające i klimatyczne, zakończenie w pełni mnie usatysfakcjonowało. Taka trochę groza, niezwykłość, fantastyka, ale i lekki humor! Naprawdę ta historia czerpie z tego co najlepsze, fajnie autor to rozplanował, bardzo mi się podobało i polecam! Uwielbiam serię yume! Ode mnie 7.5/10
• 
  Emil

  The tale of a cursed drum and it’s effect on its owners. It’s just a semi-interesting story with no particular sparkles.
  
  داستان طبلی نفرین شده و اثرات آن برای روی دارندگانش. داستانی نیمه جذاب ولی بدون پیغام درخشان.
• 
  Zar

  متفاوت، عجیب، و بسیار کوتاه. برای داستانی با این همه جزئیات و پیچ و خم، کمی زیادی کوتاه بود.
  (کتابی که الان موجود هست، چاپ اوله. امیدوارم در چاپ‌های بعدی یک سری ایرادات رفع بشه تا خوندنِ روان‌تر میسّر بشه.)
• 
  Diana Lorena Sepulveda

  Un cuento de terror japonés con temas un poco extraños.
• 
  Zaczytana.W.Azji

  4.25 ☆
• 
  Kinga

  Baśń dla dorosłych. Piękna i wciągająca.
• 
  Booksreview96

  بهار ۱۴۰۱
  
  کتاب خیلی جذابی نبود که البته فکر میکنم بخش اعظم این بد بودن بخاطر سانسوره چون به شکل گسترده ای به نظر می رسید بخشهای جنسی حذف شدن.
  به هرحال من همیشه از ادبیات ژاپن لذت می برم