【試し読み】Mimibukuro The Ear Bag vol. 1

Author's Preface

In the intervals of my service within Edo Castle, I have jotted down on the backs of discarded sheets of paper that lay at hand, and put away in a bag, whatever I heard that stayed in my memory and struck me as interesting, or seemed likely to serve as guidance for my descendants, whether in the tales old people told of former times or in casual conversation with visitors to my house. Before I knew it, they had piled up, like dust, into a mountain.

I would have regretted throwing them away without putting them in order. Wishing to pick out the essentials, cast off what was useless, and make a record, I have many times sat before my inkstone and tried to take up my brush. But in the gaps between my duties I have scarcely found the time, and even my revising has been neglected.

Among them are some that, though I tremble to say so, record the shogun's words. I did not write these to show to the world; I set them down just as I heard them. Even the trifling rumors of the town, even those that were mere jests, I have written down without omitting any. Among so many tales there may be falsehoods mixed in, but since I cannot see through the lies of those who told them, I have recorded them simply as I heard them.

That said, since I strictly forbid showing this to others, I have no intention of going out of my way to touch up and smooth over even the clumsiness of the prose. Wishing to remain true to this resolve I have held from the beginning, I have named it Mimibukuro.

Fujiwara no Morinobu of the Eastern Capital, in his own hand.


1. The Tale of the Kyōka That Humbled a Merchant Posing as a Zen Adept

In the Shiba district there lived a man named Yanagiya, a dealer in metalwares such as blades and cutlery. He was fond of Zen, and in the gaps between business he was said to devote himself to practice.

One day a Zen monk, on a pilgrimage of training from temple to temple, came into Yanagiya's shop.

He looked over the blades on display, picked up a pair of tweezers, and asked, "Can you eat these tweezers?"

Perhaps Yanagiya was angry, or perhaps he took his visitor for a fellow Zen man and wanted to show the understanding he had long cultivated. Either way, he answered, "Those tweezers are, in their original nature, empty (kū)."

The monk, true to his calling, replied at once with a kyōka:


If all things are empty,

these crimson tweezers cost me naught;

Yanagiya's shop, it seems,

lets customers take what they see.


And with the tweezers still in his hand, he walked out of the shop.


96 Short Stories Included