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Literature Perusal: The Mummy (Miira)

Introduction

By Masatoshi Iguchi

As mentioned in the Introduction to Mojika (文字禍, The Calamity of Letters), this novel was published in 1942 as one of the Old Tales (古譚, Kotan), included in the book, entitled “Hikari to Kaze to Yume (光と風と夢, Light, Wind and Dreams)”, published from Chikuma Shobo Publishing [1], in 15 July 1942.

Yasushi Inoue (井上靖, 1907-91), a distinguished writer of the Show Era, wrote as below in the beginning of his essay, entitled “Praising ‘The Mummy’”, contributed in 1976 to the Leaflet for The Collected Volume of Atsushi Nakajima’s Works. [2]. “Among Atsushi Nakajima’s work is a novel entitled Miira (木乃伊, Mummy). Although the level of completion is not as high as that of Riryou (李陵), it manifests, or suggests his extraordinary talent as a writer, and to me it is rather more interesting than Riryou and Meigetsuki (明月記, The Moon Over the Mountain). It is a typical short novel of twelve or thirteen pages (20x20 Japanese characters/page).”

The story starts as follows. “When the king of Persia, Cambyses, the son of Cyrus the Great and Cassandane, invaded Egypt, among his subordinate military officer was a man called Pariscas. His ancestors seem to have come from the eastern district around Bactria, so that he was a gloomy country fellow who did not adapt himself to the air of the city. Since he had some dreamy disposition, he was always ridiculed by people, despite being in a good high position.” Above description tells the readers about the historical background as well as the character of the protagonist. The Persian invasion of Egypt, or the Siege of Memphis, was an event in 525 BC, that was about two thousand and five hundred years ago. The protagonist, Pariscas is apparently a fictional person created by the author. [3] After these introductory remarks, the readers are guided towards the core of the story.

 “Around the time when the Persian army entered the land of Egypt, Pariscas became introvert and irritated, trying to remember something in vain. He felt as if he could understand the words which an Egyptian prisoner spoke. When they arrived at Memphis, he read hieroglyphs inscribed on the obelisk.”

“From that time on, King Cambyses seemed to have begun to be suffered from insanity. He killed the Egyptian King Psammenitus in a cruel manner. As that wasn't enough, he wanted to humiliate the corpse of the former King Amasis, who had once cheated him, and ordered his men to find the graveyard of Amasis, dug out the corpse and bring it before him. Probably because this was anticipated the whereabouts of King Amasis's graveyard had been skilfully camouflaged, so that Persian officers had to inspect numerous cemeteries in and outside of the city of Sais one by one.”

“Pariscas was in the graveyard search team. Whilst others were engrossed in blundering treasures in the tombs of Egyptian nobles, Pariscas alone was earnestly walking around from grave to grave. One afternoon, he found himself standing in a very old underground tomb chamber. Pariscas unconsciously proceeded several steps and stumbled at a mummy lying at his feet. When he stared at the mummy’s face, he felt something that was neither cold nor hot ran down his spine. Then, he realised what had made him concerned ever since he entered in Egypt was. He instinctively said aloud. “I was originally this mummy.”

“Thus, the soul that had exited from the mummy was facing to the remnant of the body in which it had once dwelled. Now the soul of Pariscas was united with the mummy. As a matter of course, the protagonist was no longer Pariscas but the man that had turned to the mummy. All sort of scenes of the distant past revived at once and, in the depth of his memory, an instance in which he himself in the previous life was facing with a mummy, in a dimly-lit room was recalled.”

“The next day, when Persian soldiers from another unit discovered Pariscas, he was lying in the basement of the old grave, firmly holding a mummy. He came to life after being cared for but showed obvious signs of madness and began to speak out queer delirious words. The words were Egyptian, not Persian.”

About the climax of this novel, Yasushi Inoue wrote in his review as follows. “Ancient Egyptians believed that the soul of a man leaves his body when he dies but one day the soul will return to the body. For the day to come, they tried to preserve a man’s body as it was. That is what the mummy was for. Atsushi Nakajima had aimed at writing about the moment of the soul’s return.”

The time when Atsushi Nakajima had drafted this novel is uncertain but it is written a literature [4] that, during his service at Yokohama-Gakuen Girl’s High School, he read a number of books about ancient Assyria and Egypt, stimulated by Plato. Having studied this novel, the present writer suppose the author have had read a number of books, such as,

(1) History of Herodotus Vol. II, .by George Rawlinson, 1862, [5]

(2) Plutarch's Lives. Third Ed, Vol. VI, John Langhorne and William Langhorne (trans), 1819, [6]

(3) The Tomb of Thoutmosis IV, by Howard Carter and Percy E. Newberry, 1904,[7]

(4) The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen, by Howard Carter, 1922. [8]

It is a present author’s conjecture that the author have had apparently referred to the History of Herodotus for the introductory paragraphs that told of the Siege of Memphis and Sais (in the Lower Egypt), but probably obtained the images of the underground tomb chamber from the text and illustrations in The Tomb of Thoutmosis IV and The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen, which both, at Thebe in the Upper Egypt, had remained intact until the modern time.

Several academic papers about The Mummy written by Japanese researchers [9] have been found but, to the disappointment of the present writer, those papers had referred only to books and articles that had been written in or translated into Japanese language, whilst the author of the novel, Atsushi Nakajima, had presumably acquired knowledge from those foreign books listed above. Nevertheless, worth mentioning is a paper [10] in which the author has considered that the transfer of the soul of Pariscas was a phase of samsara (the perpetual cycle of death and rebirth), although the Ancient Egyptians view of life and death, interpreted as above by Yasushi Inoue, seems to be more acceptable. In fact the profound thought of the genius writer, Nakajima is hard to be understood, especially in this case, unless otherwise his soul revived and explained to us.

As for the English translation of “The Mummy (Miira)”, I have found just after writing up my own draft that a work by an expert was included in a book, "Seven Stories of Modern Japan", edited by Leith Morton, 1991 [11], and ordered a used-copy from the abebooks.com. The translator was Prof. Sakuko Matsui, Department of Asian Studies at the University of Sydney, originally a Japanese native who went to Australia in 1961 to teach Japanese literature and was also active in the translation of the works by Junichiro Tanizaki and other authors. I was strongly impressed by The Mummy that had been translated with full understanding of the original text. The translation by me (Masatoshi Iguchi) to be uploaded in this website owes much to her translation, as a number of words and phrases have been adopted from the latter at the stage of finishing the manuscript.

May 2022

Masatoshi Iguchi.

References