Torikaebaya Monogatari

Book Synopsis

Torikaebaya monogatari is a twelfth-century Japanese tale like no other. As suggested by its title, which literally translates to "if only I could exchange them" (torikaebaya) "story" (monogatari), it follows the complications that arise when a nobleman has his two children swap genders--his son living as a woman, and his daughter living as a man. What unfolds is a tale of tragicomedy, familial love, and oblique social commentary as the two siblings embark on their secretly gender-crossed adult lives, subverting and satirizing literature of the period--most notably The Tale of Genji. In more recent times, the tale has sparked intellectual debate and creative inspiration in Japan, with its reception over time reflecting the ever-shifting views of gender and sexuality in that country. First published in English under the title The Changelings in 1983, this reissued edition of the translation by Rosette F. Willig, with an illuminating new introduction from Gustav Heldt, makes this enduring and inventive landmark of Japanese literature available to readers for the first time in decades.

Review Quotes

"A desire to change one's sex; a set of tactical protocols for doing so; an ambivalence about the new position one occupies after the change has occurred; a familial celebration when one retreats into the sex assigned one at birth: this plot, which plays out around us to life-crushing effect today, is treated with great subtlety and sympathy in Rosette Willig's 1983 translation of the medieval Japanese court romance Torikaebaya Monogatari. Never ignorant of the violence entailed by state-controlled techniques of sexuation, and remarkably sensitive to the 'changelings' as objects of desirous projection (not least to themselves), Willig's translation details the world-making and world-breaking force of transsexual 'inclinations, ' as she calls them. Warm and wise, yet cool and by turns melancholic, the Torikaebaya contributes a great deal to the emerging literary history of transition, its horizons and caesuras, at a moment when the histories of trans life are erased from the public sphere, and those bearing that life degraded with ever greater cruelty." --Grace Lavery, University of California, Berkeley

"It's fantastic to see this translation back in print! The tale combines every popular motif in Japanese court literature (notably: family needs, secret liaisons, and mistaken identity) with a shockingly modern exploration of the tension between who we are and who the world wants us to be. Meanwhile, Gustav Heldt's dazzling new introduction offers fresh insights on both that throughline and on the practical issue of how this tale survived the centuries when most court works simply vanished. The resulting volume gives us all plenty to think with for years to come." --Charo D'Etcheverry, University of Wisconsin-Madison

About the Author

Rosette F. Willig received her PhD in Japanese Language and Literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. She lives in New York City. Gustav Heldt is Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Navigating Narratives: Tsurayuki's Tosa Diary as History and Fiction (2024) and The Pursuit of Harmony: Poetry and Power in Early Heian Japan (2010), as well as translator of The Kojiki: An Account of Ancient Matters (2014).