History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 8/10 · Translated from Japanese; English edition 1975

• Accuracy: Built on the real mission that brought the Chinese monk Jianzhen (Ganjin) to Japan in 753; the young monks’ inner lives are invented.
• Readability: Spare and restrained, covering long spans of time in few pages.
• Plot: Japanese monks travel to Tang China in 733 to study and to bring back a master who can ordain priests; the task takes twenty years.

In 733 an embassy sails from Japan to Tang China, and with it go several young monks. Their charge is to study and, if they can, persuade a master to come to Japan and establish proper ordination. Inoue follows them across two decades.

The monks respond in different ways. Fushō and Yōei are earnest and driven by the mission. Others drift into scholarship, into ordinary life, or simply vanish. One, Gyōgō, spends years copying sutras by hand, hoping to send the texts home.

The man they find is Jianzhen, known in Japan as Ganjin, an eminent teacher from Yangzhou. He agrees to go. Then come failed attempts: shipwreck, betrayal, official obstruction. He loses his sight along the way. The real Jianzhen reached Japan in 753 and founded Tōshōdai-ji in Nara, where his statue still sits.

Inoue writes with great detachment. Years pass in a sentence. Death and loss are recorded without melodrama. History seems seen from far off, with human lives as small as figures in a landscape scroll. The title refers to a roof-tile design brought back from China, a humble object carrying the weight of cultural transmission.

That restraint is the book’s power and its limit. Readers wanting vivid character or dramatic scenes may find it too cool, and the monks are defined more by their choices than by psychology.

The 8 reflects a beautiful, understated novel about devotion, failure and the long, unglamorous work by which one culture learns from another. It is also a fine way into Inoue’s historical fiction.