The Hunt for Priceless Tears
What would you do if you tried to find something that is basically non-existent on the internet? What if you have searched the depths of the internet, wading through the old Geocities sites and Japan's National Diet Library's archive for a specific piece of work? When nothing came to fruition, would you lay down and say "There is nothing else that I can do."?
Many might've just stopped there and called it a day but, where there is a will, there is a way.
Context: Why I Started Looking
As an admin of the Bungō Stray Dogs Wiki, I try to make sure that all of our pages are up to standards. The pages for the Abilities for the series are there to give readers a better picture of what the characters can do and most importantly for myself, the origin of the work and how it represents the character in the series.
The Hunting Dogs were introduced in Chapter 60 of the manga introducing some rather obscure writers from Japan (in the western world at least) to a lot of new people. The four of them were:
Fukuchi Ōchi (福地桜痴, 1841 - 1906) an important figure who created Japan's first daily newspaper.
Suehiro Tetchō (末広鉄腸, 1849 - 1896) a politician who wrote political novels.
Ōkura Teruko (大倉燁子, 1886 - 1960) a detective novelist from the Shōwa era.
Jōno Saigiku (条野採菊, 1832 - 1902) a journalist who worked with Fukuchi with his newspaper.
The last figure was particularly interesting as his ability page was the only one with a severe lack of any information on their original work.
What can be clearly seen is a massive difference in the content for the three authors in comparison to Jōno. Perhaps this is because he was more known as a journalist rather than a writer for kabuki plays. Other than that, the other works exist on the online space under many different forms of media.
Mirror Lion was already a famous kabuki play with the script and summaries of the play online, the performance of the play was also on YouTube.
Gasp of the Soul's text has been uploaded to Aozora Bunko.
Plum Blossoms in Snow has an entire Wikipedia article along with a scan of the book being on Japan's National Diet Library.
Priceless Tears however, had nothing other than the information listed on Jōno's Wikipedia page.
For the sake of making the pages equal, I decided to look up any information on the plot for Priceless Tears so the pages follow to the Wiki's standards.
The Search Begins
A.K.A. How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Search
So I started looking first in kabuki21.com where the people can find summaries and information on many other kabuki plays.
This was where the wiki sourced its description for Fukuchi's Mirror Lion. As you can see the information about the play is quite thorough so it was my number one hope in finding something related to the play but alas, nothing regarding the play Priceless Tears or even anything on the author. My first reaction is just "Fine, it might be a pretty obscure play. Maybe it'd be on the Japanese internet."
Boy was I wrong.
Looking through the Japanese internet was equally arduous, looking up the name only lead to people asking about the ability from the series and wondering what it can do. Looking it up with the name of the writer did not help either, wading through the many articles there wasn't much. However, there was a slight salvation to the bad streak.
An fc2 blog page with some information on Meiji-era figures. The page listed the date that Priceless Tears was published. Meiji 22 (1889) in November. But this feels like it's not quote there yet in terms of enough information for what to look up.
I then decided to look up issues of the magazine it was published in, Kabuki Shinpō, specifically in the National Diet Library where many old books are are archived and digitized. However this did not yield any meaningful results since the edition that had Priceless Tears was not digitized yet.
Breakthrough
After clawing through websites, I somehow encountered an entry in the Kyushu University Library which immediately caught my eye. Not because it had a lot of interesting information but, because my friend goes to that university. Immediately I contacted him on Discord to check his university's library. A few days later we hopped on a call to talk about what I needed in particular for this.
This entire discovery was a complete coincidence, while my friend has mentioned the university library and hell we screwed around in Google Maps to see the thing but, really the thought has never crossed my mind that they would store Meiji-era books. This entire discovery kept me up at night and I could not handle what the future might bring at this point. It felt rather surprising to say the least because as far as I have seen, there are no digital copies of Priceless Tears, let alone the synopsis of the play.
A few days after the discussion, my friend hit me up and we decided to call through Discord to find the book. The first obstacle was unexpected however, it was the signal inside the library which is atrocious to put it lightly. At this point however, I was determined to get something out of this trip. At first we couldn't find the book at all until my friend found it in the shelves. Unfortunately, there were several volumes and not only that, these books were the original Meiji-era copy so they were fragile.
We then decided to talk to one of the librarians who gladly helped locate the book, after some amount of broken Japanese, we got through and we found the exact page where the story was located.
It felt like looking through a treasure trove but we came here for exactly one thing and that's when it was a little bit late when I realized that my friend had only took the picture of the synopsis. The other pages are those of other plays from the same edition of Kabuki Shinpō. Due to the book being fragile, we decided that it's better to leave things this way rather than risk the book being further damaged but, at the very least we had the synopsis which was better than zero.
At last, we have the synopsis. Again I forgot something very important at this stage and that is to look for a translator. A translator who understands the Kyūjitai kanji which was used during the Meiji-era. During this time I spent the time transcribing the text to preserve what we have at the very least. This was how it went for the next few months, the synopsis still in the back of my head and I couldn't do much about it.
A Little Help From My Friends
The Light Piercing Through the Shadows
Someone had pinged me on the Bungō Stray Dogs Wiki Discord that they were able to do translations, immediately the first thing I had in mind was to pull out the script for Priceless Tears. They were very kind and was very much happy to help which was a massive relief. After almost a solid year, we finally have a picture of what's going on.
It honestly still feels unreal and I am greatly shortening this entire search. I hope that one day the full script will be transcribed online so that it's easier to understand the greater picture.
Conclusion and thoughts
This entire search just made me feel so many emotions, I honestly am proud of the efforts and lengths my friends went through to help out with this silly little picture. At the same time this project reminded me about how important it is to archive archaic documents for future reference. Even if it's just something done for a manga series, I am still very happy that some glint of information exists now on the web about this play.
I really do hope this specific issue of the magazine will be uploaded to the NDL for easier viewing, if that ever happens then I'll be glad to update things on that front.
Special Thank You to
My friend Kevinoshita who helped track down the book to Kyushu University's library.
Other members of the SampleText Discord group.
Members of the Bungō Stray Dogs Wiki Discord.
Members of the Bungō to Alchemist Discord.
Pengumi from the Bungō to Alchemist Discord who helped with the transcription.
れぃ from the Bungō Stray Dogs Wiki Discord who helped with the final translation.
