Ueda Akinari

Portrait of Akinaris by Kōga Bunrei , around 1800

Ueda Akinari ( Japanese 上 田 秋成 , Wayaku Tarō , Senshi Kijin , Ueda Muchō ; born July 25, 1734 in Osaka , † August 8, 1809 in Kyoto ) was a Japanese writer and philologist.

Life

Born the son of a prostitute, Ueda was adopted by the merchant Ueda Mosuke in 1737 . The next year he contracted smallpox, which resulted in crippled hands and poor health for life. He began studying literature at the Kaitokudō School in Osaka and he began to write haiku . After his stepfather's death in 1761, he took over his paper shop, which he lost to a fire two years later.

Now penniless, he went to Kashima-mura with his wife and adopted daughter and studied medicine there. He opened a medical practice, but it never flourished because of his own health problems, so he finally gave it up in 1788. In 1793 he went to Kyoto, where his wife died in 1797 while going blind.

Ueda became famous through Ugetsu monogatari ( 雨 月 物語 ), dated 1768, published in German in 1990 in a translation by Oscar Benl under the title Unter dem Regenmond. Fantastic stories. a collection of ghost and crime stories which earned him the reputation of a Japanese Edgar Allan Poe in the West and which was continued by the posthumously published Harusame-monogatari ( ene 物語 ) collection . As an essayist, he was known for his sharp-tongued arguments a. a. known with Motoori Norinaga . In old age he published two collections of his treatises and essays under the titles Kinsa (1804) and Tandai shōshin roku (1808).

Works

• Secular apes with ears for all kinds of arts; printed 1766
• Characters of Secular Ladies, 1767
• Essay on a haiku problem, with a foreword by Yosano Buson (then well-known author) 1774
• Under the Rain Moon (Ugetsu-Monogatari), 1776
• Tales of the Spring Rain (Harusame-Monogatari), 1807
  • German stories about the spring rain , from the Japanese by Wolfgang E. Schlecht. Insel 1994. ISBN 3458166289

swell

• Viktoria Eschbach-Szabo: People and names in Japanese: Changes in modernization and globalization. LIT Verlag, Münster 2009, ISBN 978-3-8258-8758-2 , pp. 242-43.
• Bruno Lewin : Small encyclopedia of Japanology: on the cultural history of Japan. 3. Edition. Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden 1995, ISBN 3-447-03668-0 , p. 521.
• eNotes - Ueda Akinari

Web links

• "Ueda Akinari and the spirit of Osaka" Lecture by Prof. Dr. Judith Árokay

Remarks

1. ↑ Under the rain moon. Fantastic stories. dtv, 1990, ISBN 3-423-11295-6
2. ↑ according to information from Oscar Benl, in: Ueda Akinari: Unter dem Regenmond, dtv / Klett-Cotta, No. 11205

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . So Ueda is the family name, Akinari the first name.