unidentified Japanese folktale

[wfle...@gmail.com]

Dear PMJSers,

I have a puzzle (not directly related to my research) that recently sparked my curiosity. Maybe there is an obvious answer, in which case I apologize for revealing my ignorance to anyone.

A friend dropped by the other day and gave me two half-finished bottles of whiskey (he is heading off for a year-long sabbatical in Taiwan and decided to thin out his pantry). One of the bottles is a whiskey called "Kikori," the back label of which features the following text: "KIKORI is inspired by the Japanese folk tale of Visu, an ancient woodsman. Failing to find balance in his lifetime, Visu spends centuries wandering the forest seeking the harmony that had eluded him."

I was naturally amused by the name "Visu" and wondered where it could have come from. (For what it's worth, the whiskey is produced in Kumamoto but seems to be the brainchild of an American with no obvious connection to Japan.)

It didn't take long to trace the story and the name Visu to F. Hadland Davis's "Myths & Legends of Japan," published in 1912. Davis doesn't appear to have known any Japanese and relied heavily on Hearn, Chamberlain, Aston, Dickins, etc. Chapter 9, titled "Legends of Mount Fuji," includes a story (pp. 136-39) about a woodcutter named Visu who comes across two beautiful women (who turn out to be foxes) on Mount Fuji and watches transfixed as they play a game of go. When he comes to, he has a long beard, his axe has crumbled to dust, and he realizes that three hundred years have passed while he sat there.

No source is given for this story, but it obviously traces back to the older, very similar Chinese legend set on Mount Lanke 爛柯山. The woodcutter in that story (as told in the Shuyiji) is named Wang Zhi 王質, or Ō Shitsu in Japanese.

I suppose Visu could be a garbling of Wang Zhi/Ō Shitsu, but obviously there's more to it than that, since Davis is presenting a Japanese variant of the legend set on Mount Fuji, and it seems improbable that a woodcutter in a Japanese folktale would be named Ō Shitsu.

So, does anyone have any idea what Davis's source might have been? I spent a little while trying to track down possibilities but didn't turn up anything in Japanese sources other than retellings of the Lankeshan story.

Update: After writing the preceding, I noticed that the back side of the whiskey label, which is only visible through the inside of the bottle, contains Japanese text. It's a bit hard to read with the liquid still in there, but it is a synopsis in modern Japanese of part of the same legend (but only referring to the woodcutter as "kikori," not Visu). The prose is so bland and simplified that it's hard to tell if it's based on Davis (or the same source Davis used), or if it comes from another source.

All of this is just to satisfy my own curiosity, so I hope no one gets sucked too deep down any rabbit holes...

Thank you,

Will Fleming

UC Santa Barbara