goes down to Kiushiu, where he has a number of surprising adventures. He becomes possessed of a wonderful crane, and an equally remarkable tame wolf. A strange hunter, who has neither bow nor shafts, but who brings down his prey by stones flung with marvellous precision to an incredible distance, attaches himself to his service. With him he proceeds to Loochoo, where, among other adventures, he falls over a cliff "several thousand feet" to the bottom. He is a little stunned, but walks home afterwards as if nothing had happened. He subsequently goes to Hachijō and other islands off the Bay of Yedo, and then again to Loochoo, where the principal events of the story take place.
Bakin's Seiyuki, or "Journey to the West" (1806), is not an original work, but an adaptation of the well-known Chinese romance Siyuki, in which a Buddhist ecclesiastic, attended by a magician-monkey and a semi-human hog, goes to India from China in order to procure Buddhist scriptures. It is full of supernatural occurrences from beginning to end,[1] and is wholly lacking in human interest.
He also translated the Shui-hsü-ch'uan (Sui-ko-den in Japanese), a much more amusing Chinese story, which fills over two thousand pages of small print in the modern Japanese edition. The influence of these and other Chinese romances is very noticeable in the works of Bakin and his school.
The Nanka no Yume (1807) is a story of fairyland in the Chinese manner.
The Shichiya no Kura ("Pawnbroker's Store"), 1810.—
- ↑ An episode of this story has been dramatised in Japan. A version of this in the Ingoldsby legend style is given in M'Clatchie's Japanese Plays Versified.
