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Ikkyu Sojun was a renegade monk of the Muromachi period who lived a crazy life.
Kinoshita Masateru’s “Gudou Ikkyu,” a direct take on the life of a man who sought to master the path of Zen, has finally been published.
This time, we are welcoming Makate Asai, a master of historical novels and a senior of ours at the Osaka School of Literature, for our first conversation in about ten years!
Enjoy the light-hearted conversation between the two in the Kansai dialect, including a “joint critique” – a tradition at Bunko – where they exchange creative theories.

Interviewer/editor: Masamitsu Hosoya Photography: Jun Kozai

Writing about Ikkyu Sojun

–First, I’d like to ask Mr. Kinoshita, why did you decide to write about Ikkyu?

KinoshitaPreviously, I wrote a novel for “Subaru Novels” called “Ekin, Painting the Darkness,” with the genius painter Ekin (Hirose Kinzo) as the main character. I thought it would be good to have an avant-garde, artistic character like Ekin for my next work, and I came up with Ikkyu. I think you could call his way of life that of an artist. So I said I wanted to write about Ikkyu, and that’s how it all began.
AsaiKinoshita-kun, were you originally interested in Ikkyu?
KinoshitaActually, not much. I had watched the anime “Ikkyu-san,” but all I knew was that in his later years, he had become close with a woman named Mori Shinjisha. I then looked into it, but it was quite hard to understand. There is a collection of Ikkyu’s Chinese poems called “Kyouunshu,” and it contains poems that are extremely obscene, like “erotic shigin,” and poems that use words that are not allowed on TV to completely denigrate Yoso (Ikkyu’s senior apprentice). I went to various places to do research, and one of the things I heard was that a curator in Sakai said that Ikkyu and Yoso are like comedians, like Nishikawa Kiyoshi and Yokoyama Yasushi.
Asai“It’s easy!”

KinoshitaYes, we don’t get along, but we both have the same goal of making people laugh.
AsaiThat’s a nice one.
KinoshitaZen at the time was corrupt, so both Ikkyu and Yosou tried to correct it somehow. They didn’t get along, but they were both aiming for the same path, so I thought it would be good to write about this as the core of my work.
AsaiI see. But I was surprised to learn that you started with Ikkyu’s artistic side.
KinoshitaPoetry was the easiest way to get to know Ikkyu. But I never really understood the meaning of his koans (problems given by the master for training). When you clap your hands together, they make a sound, but what kind of sound does it make with just one hand (‘Sekishu Onjo’)? I didn’t understand that at all. But isn’t it more interesting to use things you don’t understand as a subject? Why did this person do that?

AsaiAs you say, I don’t understand, so I want to approach it by writing. When I heard that Kinoshita was going to write about Ikkyu, I was surprised and thought, “Wow, he’s going to delve into something amazing.” But when I heard that he was approaching it from an artistic perspective, I understood. When I think of Ikkyu, the first thing that comes to mind is Rinzai Zen.
KinoshitaI see. At first, I didn’t really have the image of Ikkyu as a Zen believer.