[Article] Addressing the Date and Setting of Nakajima Atsushi's Mojika

In 1942, the Japanese novelist Nakajima Atsushi published a short story titled Mojika (The Woes of Letters). The story is set in Nineveh, the capital city of the Assyrian Empire, immediately following the end of the revolt of Šamaš-šumu-ukīn, the brother of King Ashurbanipal. At the king's command, the scholar Nabû-aḫḫē-erība, who is also the protagonist of the story, seeks to better understand the art of writing letters and makes claims about their accursed and nonsensical nature. The protagonist's claim hurts Ashurbanipal, one of the most sophisticated rulers in the ancient world, and he responds bitterly. King Ashurbanipal orders Nabû-aḫḫē-erība to be confined to his home. For his revelations, Nabû-aḫḫē-erība inevitably dies by the retaliation from the letters. In this article, I first review recent studies and show the process behind Mojika's formation: from English and German classical (introductory) books of Ancient Near Eastern history to Nakajima's own notebooks and finally the story itself. Second, I explain why the story is dated to the twentieth year of Ashurbanipal's reign (the end of Šamaš-šumu-ukīn's revolt is generally dated to the twentyfirst year of Ashurbanipal's reign today). Some lines of Nakajima's "Notebook Six" reveal that he understood the first year of Ashurbanipal's reign as 667 BC (generally dated to 668 BC today) on the basis of the captions in the maps 2-3 of A. T. Olmstead's History of Assyria (drawn by George C. Hewes, Jr.)** and that the revolt ended in 648 BC (this dating is generally accepted even today). This led Nakajima to date the end of the revolt in the twentieth year of Ashurbanipal's reign, resulting in the one-year gap against the generally accepted date of the twenty-first year of his reign