Five Women Who Loved Love

by Ihara Saikaku

  FIVE WOMEN WHO LOVED LOVE

  by Ihara Saikaku

  translated by Wm. Theodore de Bary

  with a background essay by

  RICHARD LANE

  and the 17th-century illustrations by

  YOSHIDA HAMBEI

  TUTTLE PUBLISHING

  Tokyo • Rutland, Vermont • Singapore

  Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.,

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  Copyright © 1956 by Charles E. Tuttle Publishing Co., Inc.

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  ISBN: 978-0-8048-0184-3

  ISBN: 9781462903009 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-4-8053-1012-0 (for sale in Japan only)

  First edition, 1956

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  TO

  FANNY

  Wm. Theodore de Bary received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, where he served as provost from 1971 to 1978. A former president of the Association for Asian Studies, De Bary has written numerous books on Asian history and thought, including Sources of Japanese Tradition and The Liberal Tradition in China. In 1986 he inaugurated the Edwin O. Reischauer Lectureship at Harvard University.

  Richard Lane, also a Columbia graduate, wrote his doctoral thesis on Saikaku. A longtime resident of Japan, Lane has done extensive research on the Japanese realistic novel and ukiyo-e paintings and prints.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction

  1 The Story of Seijuro in Himeji

  2 The Barrelmaker Brimful of Love

  3 What the Seasons Brought the Almanac Maker

  4 The Greengrocer’s Daughter with a Bundle of Love

  5 Gengobei, the Mountain of Love

  Saikaku’s “Five Women” by Richard Lane

  Illustrations

  The illustrations throughout the book are facsimile reproductions, reduced to about sixty percent of the original size, of the woodblock prints appearing in the original Japanese edition of Five Women Who Loved Love, dated 1686. The artist was Yoshida Hambei, the leading illustrator of the Kyoto-Osaka region in Saikaku’s day. Illustrations for the five stories will be found on the following pages

  Book One: 46–47, 52–53, 58–59, 64–65

  Book Two: 80–81, 89, 98–99, 104, 110–11

  Book Three: 120–21, 131, 138–39, 144–45

  Book Four: 164–65, 172–73, 177, 182, 186–87, 192

  Book Five: 200–1, 206, 216–17, 226, 228

  Foreword

  In translating Five Women Who Loved Love I have tried to preserve as much as possible of Saikaku’s rich poetry, exuberant wit, and economy of language. To do this is difficult in any case, difficult in much the same way as it would be to translate James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake into everyday English. Having bound Saikaku’s feet with such prose, I thought it a poor idea to encumber him further with extensive annotation. Brief notes are given where necessary to help the reader keep up with Saikaku, but not to sidetrack him on points of literary or historical interest, which are indeed plentiful.

  Since I first performed this pleasant experiment in translation in 1946, there has been a great revival of interest in Saikaku’s works among the Japanese. Compared with what went before, a vast amount of critical scholarship on Saikaku has been produced in the last several years. There is even a special periodical entitled Saikaku Studies being published in Tokyo, of which eight volumes have already appeared. Fortunately, this research is being supplemented by the efforts of Western students to make Saikaku better known outside his homeland. In particular I should like to mention the work of Mr. Richard Lane, who has kindly provided an essay on the background and historical sources of Saikaku’s Five Women for this edition; and also of Professor Howard Hibbett, of the University of California at Los Angeles. My own translation has not enjoyed the full fruits of this late harvest of scholarship, but several friends whose judgment in these matters counts for more than my own have persuaded me that its publication may still fill a need among the growing number of readers seeking a first acquaintance with Saikaku—a need heightened by recent scholarly interest, which confirms rather than abrogates the central position in Japanese literature of his greatest works.

  The text for this translation of Koshoku gonin onna has come from the series Nihon bungaku taikei, Vol. IV, Ihara Saikaku shu (Works of Ihara Saikaku), edited by Sasakawa Shuro and published in Tokyo in 1925. Although originally printed with numerous expurgations, the copy used here had been rendered complete through reference to an unexpurgated text by the Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai, which forwarded it to the Japan Institute in New York before World War II. Doubtful points have been checked against a more recent version edited by Professor Teruoka Yasutaka (Koshoku gonin onna hyoshaku, Tokyo, 1953).

  The writing of this translation was suggested to me by Mr. Ryusaku Tsunoda, long a student of Saikaku, who has recently retired after many years of distinguished service as Curator of the Japanese Collection at Columbia University. Throughout my work Mr. Tsunoda was constantly helpful and encouraging. Mr. Lane has also put me heavily in his debt by reading the manuscript and making many helpful suggestions and corrections, particularly in regard to the first of these stories. I am grateful as well to Professors Donald L. Keene and Harold G. Henderson, Sir George Sansom, Mr. Robert S. Gerdy, Miss Anna Horton, and my wife, Fanny Brett de Bary, for the assistance each of them gave me in the project.

  W. T. DE B.

  Introduction

  Five Women Who Loved Love was written by a citizen of Osaka for the amusement of the townspeople in the new commercial centers of seventeenth-century Japan. From the few surviving records of Ihara Saikaku we know that he was not only a popular novelist but also a poet of wide reputation in his own day, a playwright and commentator on theatre life, and also something of a vagabond who had closely observed life as it was lived in parts of the country other than his own. Being so cosmopolitan, he was all the more truly a citizen of Osaka. The things that fascinated him in his native city he also found in others—back alleys and slums as well as gay theatres and teahouses; beggars, peddlers, and the lowliest prostitutes, along with merchant princes and famous courtesans. But in writing about them as he did, with such a rare combination of sympathy and detachment, Saikaku gave expression to a feeling of which the inhabitants of Osaka were probably more conscious than other townspeople: that they were citizens with a new importance to society and a new outlook on the world, one which showed the way to a richer and happier life than medieval Japan had known. This came to be known a
s the chonin-do, “the way of the townspeople,” in contrast to bushido, “‘the way of the warrior,” which has been so widely publicized in recent years that it has come to appear to many as the sole embodiment of Japanese tradition.

  If Saikaku, as spokesman for the new citizenry, did not compose a “Marseillaise” to inspire his fellow townsmen in a struggle against the old order, it is partly because fighting was one of the things they wished to free themselves from. They were engaged together, not in a class struggle, but in pursuit of individual happiness—something for which little allowance had been made in the stern and unsparing life of medieval fighting men. Indeed, this pursuit, so taken for granted in our part of the world today, was almost revolutionary in its implications for a society which had long lived as though in a graveyard, overcast by the seemingly endless tragedy of war, haunted in its literature and drama by specters of the dead, and steeped in the pessimistic view which traditional Buddhism took toward life in this world.

  We must understand, however, that this “new” outlook was not just a sudden effusion of the human spirit, responding to changed conditions of life and breaking clearly with its past. On the contrary, certain attitudes most characteristic of Osaka in Saikaku’s time quite plainly reflect its religious heritage as much as its new-found prosperity. Especially is this true of the theme treated in Saikaku’s first great novels: the search for happiness in love. What at first sight seems no more than the universal preoccupation of man is soon seen to have a special quality, an extraordinary intensity akin to religious feeling. These townspeople went about making love as if it were a way of life in itself, as if, amidst the uncertainties of the world, love alone would endure. “In Love We Trust” might well have been the inscription on their coins, just coming into general circulation at that time.

  There is here, no doubt, a defiant rejection of the traditional Buddhist view that all is dust and subject to corruption, that nothing escapes the universal law of change. But the protest bears a strong resemblance to one which had already come from within Buddhism itself, proclaiming salvation through loving faith in the Buddha Amida, whose abiding mercy and redemptive power alone could be relied upon to rescue men from the suffering of this world. Osaka itself had long been a stronghold of this new faith, and in the far more worldly atmosphere of the seventeenth century, as the people of that city looked increasingly to human love for happiness, it was still with the same sense of desperation and utter self-abandonment that was characteristic of Amida’s devotees. Thus, Saikaku’s heroines, forsaking the security of their homes and the “good things of life” to pursue some ill-fated affair, impress us less with their lusty relish for life than with their final unworldliness.

  It is in this sense that we see a profound connection between the two seemingly disparate meanings of the word ukiyo—the Buddhists’ “world of sadness” and the “floating world” of fashion and pleasure inhabited by Saikaku and his friends. They knew well enough that this new world was no more lasting than the old. Still, Saikaku, who sensed most keenly the vanity and pathos of existence in the Floating World, had not less but rather still more lively an appreciation of its ephemeral attractions and the wealth of experience which this new age opened to all. Certainly the pleasures of these townsmen were richer and more varied than any known before to ordinary Japanese, for success in commerce gave them the means to develop some of their other talents and the leisure to enjoy them. The warrior class, with all its past exploits, had nothing to compare with the entertainments of the city, and the Floating World lay before their wondering eyes like Cleopatra on her barge, luxuriating in an infinite variety of goods from exotic places, an endless life of salad days, and an elusive but unchangeable charm.

  Wherever one found merchants and tradesmen in those times, there were sure to be signs of this new life described by Saikaku—busy markets, side lanes lined with little shops, the dignified establishments of money-changers, great warehouses, teahouses frequented by smartly dressed people, theatres, restaurants, bathhouses, brothels, and streets full of peddlers, panders, jugglers, freaks, and dancing shows. But in Saikaku’s time no city was the equal of his own as a paradise for townspeople. Kyoto was still too conscious of its splendid past to live as Osaka did—for the present alone. The imperial court remained, making feeble pretense at its ancient elegance, and with it an aristocracy that did much to give Kyoto society its style and tone, even if it had the power to do little else. Meanwhile the warriors of the nation were establishing a new capital at Edo, now Tokyo, a fast-growing city with a political as well as commercial future. But under the watchful eyes of the shogunate, with a large warrior population to accommodate and with much of its effort devoted to the building of a new city, the townsmen of Edo were not at first so free to go their own way, to create a new life and make the most of it.

  Osaka, perhaps, had less of a future in the political life of the country, but this fact served in part to stimulate its growth along independent lines. The city had once seemed to have such a future, and when the Tokugawas took away their hope in it, the men of Osaka had another cause for resentment against the established order. Osaka had long been a city of commercial importance and was, along with the country at large, enjoying unprecedented prosperity when Toyotomi Hideyoshi chose it as his personal seat. There in 1583 he built the most formidable and elaborate fortified castle Japan had ever seen and planned extensive improvements in the city to make it the military and political as well as the economic heart of the nation. This it was indeed for the remaining fifteen years of his life. Then, not long after Hideyoshi’s death, Tokugawa Ieyasu determined to erect his new capital at Edo, where he built a castle even more imposing than Hideyoshi’s and started work on a metropolis that in time was to rival, and then outdo, Kyoto and Osaka in importance.

  In the meantime Osaka remained a source of wealth and power to Hideyoshi’s heir, Hideyori, who strengthened himself there by recruiting thousands of warriors, the lordless ronin, dispossessed by Ieyasu after their defeat by him at Sekigahara. Then in 1615 Hideyori too was brought low by Ieyasu, after a year of savage fighting, which featured the new destructive power of Western firearms and laid waste much of the city. Still the men of Osaka had spirit and strength enough to undertake its reconstruction on a grander scale than before. They had the encouragement of Matsudaira Tadaaki, a hereditary vassal of the Tokugawas who was entrusted with the rule of this key domain after Hideyori’s fall. He reorganized its administrative structure, setting up local councils of elders drawn from the propertied and moneyed men of the city. Above them he placed another council, similarly chosen, which determined policy for the city as a whole and gave it a significant measure of self-rule.

  A prominent member of this city council was Yasui Doton, who through his success in business and service to the city became a model of those virtues on which the leading citizens of Osaka prided themselves. As chairman of the committee on public improvements, he did much toward the planning of the new city; the construction of streets, bridges, and canals, which promoted business; and the building of theatres, which brought entertainment to his fellow citizens on a scale unknown before. Yasui and other wealthy men contributed heavily to these projects. Some contribution was even made by the Tokugawa Shogunate: Iemitsu exempted the city from land taxes for one year and donated over four hundred pounds of silver to finance the work of bridgebuilding. But this was a small investment beside that which the shogunate was putting into Edo, and to the citizens of Osaka must go most of the credit for the improvements made in their own city. Of the bridges alone more than thirty were built with funds raised by local subscription; eleven were built with the assistance of their military masters. We will find Saikaku speaking of the Dotom-bori, a canal named after Yasui Doton, who financed its construction, and of the Yodoya-bashi, a bridge named for the same reason after the wealthiest man of the day.

  This Yodoya, a rice merchant, was as much a symbol of his time as Yasui. His fortune is said to have included 21
solid-gold hens, with 10 chickens; 14 solid-gold macaws; 15 solid-gold sparrows; 51 solid-gold-and-silver doves; innumerable precious stones; 150 pounds of quicksilver; more than 700 swords; over 17,000 rolls of velvet, silk, and brocade; 480 carpets; 50 pairs of gold screens; 96 crystal sliding doors; a solid-gold checkerboard three inches thick; 3,500,000 ryo in gold coin (roughly 146,000 pounds troy); 14,000,000 ryo in silver (roughly 583,000 pounds troy); 550,000 copper coins; about 750 Chinese paintings; 540 mansions, houses, and warehouses; and 250 farms and fields. Most of this wealth had been accumulated by two generations of Yodoyas, after the family residence had been converted into an open market where feudal lords could exchange their rice for money, then just coming into general use. Thus the fortune was made at the expense of the lords themselves, who had little talent for business. From this we may judge that it was not in the interests of economy alone that the shogun censured Yodoya for his extravagant ways, and finally confiscated his wealth entirely. Yodoya was dangerous, not just as a bad example for the shogun’s subjects, but also as a rival potentate, an upstart who bled his betters in order to create a strange new empire.

  From the account of a Dutch emissary, Engelbert Kaempfer, who visited Osaka in 1692, we may see what sort of city was created by men like Yodoya and Yasui. “Osacca,” he wrote in his History of Japan, “is extremely populous, and if we believe what the boasting Japanese tell us, can raise an army of 80,000 men, only from among its inhabitants. It is the best trading town in Japan, being extraordinarily well-situated for carrying on commerce both by land and water. This is the reason why it is well-inhabited by rich merchants, artificers and manufacturers. Victuals are cheap at Osacca, notwithstanding the city is so well-peopled. Even what tends to promote luxury, and to gratify all sensual pleasures, may be had at as easy a rate as anywhere. For this reason the Japanese call Osacca the universal theatre of pleasures and diversions. Plays are to be seen daily both in public and private houses. Mountebanks, juglers who can show some artful tricks, and all rary-shew people, who have either some uncommon or monstrous animal to show, or animals taught to play tricks, resort thither from all parts of the Empire, being sure to get a better penny here than anywhere else. Of this one instance will suffice. Some years ago, our East India Company sent over from Batavia a Casuar (a large East India bird who would swallow stones and hot coals) as a present to the Emperor. This bird having had the ill-luck not to please our rigid censors, the Governors of Nagasaki, to whom it belongs to determine what presents might be acceptable to the Emperor, and we having been thereupon ordered to send him back to Batavia, a rich Japanese and lover of these curiosities assured us, that if he could have obtained leave to buy him, he would have willingly given a thousand thails for him, as being sure within a year’s time to get double that money only by shewing him in Osacca.”