Having examined the background of these five novelettes, a certain symmetry will be observed. The first and last stories are events of a generation earlier than the time of writing, and both occur in outlying provinces. The middle three stories treat events close to the time of writing and take as their setting the three major cities of Japan—Osaka, Kyoto, and Edo, this latter order itself reflecting the relative interests of an inhabitant of Osaka, as was Saikaku.
There is perhaps no profound meaning in these deductions, but they do reflect Saikaku’s strong feeling for the regionalism of Japan. And to the readers of his day, this element of changing local color added much to the interest of the stories, in somewhat the same manner as had that in his volume of Tales from the Provinces of the year before.30 It is not impossible that the whole idea of the work may have grown out of some such tales-from-the-provinces concept, i.e., the depiction of a famous love story from each of five varied locales. This would explain why Osaka, the life and scandals of which Saikaku knew best, was limited to one story, whereas semi-legendary talcs were introduced from such distant provinces as Harima and Satsuma.
Five Women Who Loved Love marks the first appearance in Japanese literature of the bourgeois woman as a dominant heroine—an innovation that was to have reverberations throughout later Edo literature. Hitherto in Japanese fiction it was largely the courtesan heroine who took an active role in love. From Saikaku’s lead, whole schools of the novel developed with ordinary townswomen as their love heroines.31
Certainly one of the notable features of Five Women Who Loved Love is Saikaku’s depiction of women as taking the decisive role in love affairs. This approach is particularly striking with the three maidens of fifteen, who see the man they want and immediately go about getting him. In none of these stories is the hero of any great stature: it is the girl who directs the action, and most often takes the tragic consequences. The two young wives, though not exactly beginning their adulterous affairs of their own accord, are nonetheless ready enough to accept the pleasures and horrors of their fate once the die is cast.
Even taking into account the young age of the three maidens,32 Saikaku’s view of woman’s predominant part in love affairs is certainly a valid one, though it may at first seem surprising in a feudal and strictly anti-feminist society. Saikaku’s women, though quite romantic, are still frank enough about the part that sex plays in their desire to meet their lovers.
To realize the uniqueness of Saikaku’s bold and sympathatic treatment, it is necessary to remember that each of these loves was a crime against feudal law. Even to write sympathetically about such was perilous; for although at this period the Edo government concerned itself little about pornography, anything that savored of anti-authoritarianism or lese majesty was an unpardonable crime. Ample grounds could have been found for stamping this volume criminal, simply on account of its sympathetic depiction of creatures who had violated the most sacred laws of feudalism.
The basis of the feudal system lay in the strict maintenance of hierarchy. Thus, there was no simple crime of seduction, abduction, elopement, rape, or murder: the criminality lay in the comparative rank of the doer and the victim. Legalized murder was, it is true, a privilege only of the samurai, and even for them, it was legitimate only toward persons of lower rank or class, and on at least technical provocation. The other acts of violence, however, might well have gone unpunished in a townsman employer toward an employee. When the ranks were reversed, the punishment was death.
Of all Saikaku’s works of fiction Five Women Who Loved Love features perhaps the greatest complexity of plot and character development. This doubtless reflects the influence of the earlier dramatic versions upon which he drew for material and incident. Saikaku’s forte was never plot, but style; and thus much of the interest of his stylistically greatest works must remain obscure to the Western reader. The present tales, however, may be enjoyed by all.
Footnotes
1 Kōshoku gonin onna. The title might also be rendered Love and Five Women, or Five Women Who Gave Themselves to Love.
2 A Mirror of the Beauties (Shoen ōkagami), 1684.
3 The following material is derived in part from my Saikaku: Novelist of the Japanese Renaissance, and several of my original translated excerpts from Saikaku have been retained. Since no translation can recreate this author’s remarkable style, these excerpts by a different hand may be of interest in indicating other possible renderings of the text. For information on the best texts and most recent studies of Five Women Who Loved Love, the reader is referred to my “Postwar Japanese Studies of the Novelist Saikaku,” in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies for 1955. For an earlier translation from the work and a general discussion of Saikaku, see my “Ihara Saikaku: Realistic Novelist of the Tokugawa Period,” in the Journal of Oriental Literature for 1948.
4 Sixteen by Japanese count; this was the normal age for marriage.
5 The description of the lovers is straightforward enough, but the inclusion of the woodcutter in this scene is clearly a lubricious intrusion, derived from one of the more common conventions of Japanese pornographic art—that of depicting a masturbating spectator on the side lines of an erotic scene.
6 The seaport where, according to Saikaku’s version, young Seijūrō sowed his wild oats. Situated about 15 miles west of Himeji, it was a major stopover point for the daimyō of West Japan on their way to Edo and was famous for its gay quarter.
7 Whatever ballads or dramas preceded the utazaimon have been lost. We have, however, an interesting record that they did exist, and within a few years after the actual events. Thus in the recently discovered Diary of Matsudaira, Lord of Yamato, written by a daimyō devotee of the popular theatre, we find the following notation for the Fourth Month of 1664: “The most popular song these days in Edo is the ‘Seijūrō Ballad.’ It has come into popularity since the time it was made into a play at the [Nakamura] Kanzaburō Theatre....” From this it is clear that the event, occurring in a distant western province, was already well known in the Edo Kabuki within three or four years after it took place. Even without this evidence, however, the great popularity which followed Saikaku’s revival of the story would indicate that it had been widely known in its own day and never quite forgotten during the subsequent two decades.
8 The codes, together with the other legal data included in the pre, sent study, are derived primarily from the following Edo-period sources: Genroku gohōshiki, Osadamegaki hyakkajō, Oshioki reiruishū Kajō ruiten, Genroku keiten, and Oshioki saikyochō.
9 A master’s younger sister, though not mentioned specifically, would presumably be treated similarly to his daughter.
10 Kadowakashi. Usually implying slaving, abduction, or kidnaping, this term included also the crime of “causing a girl to elope with one.”
11 Ten ryō in gold was worth about three hundred dollars.
12 Compare La Rochefoucauld’s dictum of about the same period (Maximes, 1665–78): “Women often think themselves to be in love when they are not. Their natural passion for being beloved, their unwillingness to give a denial, the excitement of mind produced by an affair of gallantry, all these make them imagine they are in love, when in fact they are only acting the coquette.”
13 “Pardon” often indicated that the offender could go without punishment if the plaintiff so requested. In other cases, offenders could sometimes be pardoned if they had relatives willing to guarantee their future conduct.
14 This last instance refers to servants who conveyed love letters or arranged the meeting of such lovers.
15 The frame of this chapter is doubtless derived from the “Critique of Women” scene in Book II of The Tale of Genji.
16 The technique of describing the passing crowd as a method of creating the atmosphere of a scene was apparently an innovation of Saikaku’s. It first occurs two years earlier in his Mirror of the Beauties (Book V, 5), wherein a group of young men examine critically the fair women passing by on their way to the Shitennō Temple in Osaka. (There, h
owever, it is only a sketch, the young men concluding that the only real beauties are the courtesans.) It is quite possible that Saikaku derived this technique from the genre scrolls and prints of the ukiyo-e school, of which he was himself a notable exponent.
17 On the subject of passionate widows, see my translation of Saikaku’s “The Umbrella Oracle,” in Anthology of Japanese Literature (New York, 1955; edited by Donald Keene); also, “The Widow and the Fortunate Gallant,” included in my “Saikaku and Boccaccio: The Novella in Japan and Italy,” to appear shortly in the Journal of World History.
18 The michiyuki sequence in this chapter, which describes the lovers’ journey in terms of the passing scenes they view, is an intrusion from the Jōruri drama. Though an excellent piece of writing in itself, for the modern reader it may tend to detract from the realism of the story. The concept of “realism” was, however, only now being developed by Saikaku, and such poetic elements were rather expected by his readers.
19 The official calendar maker held a position of some importance. Though a townsman, he was accorded the privilege of employing a surname and received a yearly stipend from the shōgun.
20 Saikaku calls the girl Rin throughout the second chapter of the novelette. Then, in the execution scene, he employs the name Tama. The latter was apparently the real name of the girl, which he let slip in inadvertently. (The change from Mohei to Moemon is similar to that from Chōemon to Chōzaemon in the Osen story.) Note that Chikamatsu in his famous dramatic version of the story, noted later, employs the actual names as they are given in the above source.
21 There is a free translation in A. Miyamori’s Masterpieces of Chikamatsu (London, 1926) under the title “The Almanac of Love.”
22 It was common for a young samurai to have an older samurai as protector and lover. Kichisaburō, as a rōnin, i.e., an unemployed samurai, was all the more indebted to his guardian. Kichisaburō’s love was thus itself a breach of the ethics of samurai pederasty, though he was perhaps too young to realize the fact. (This development may also have been planned to lead into the pederastic events of Book Five.)
23 It was the Bakufu government’s morbid fear of disorder and social unrest that made the penalties for arson so severe. Whin we recall the extremely incendiary nature of Japanese cities, and the fact that Edo had already once been completely destroyed in the Great Fire of 1657, the severity of the laws will be more readily understood.
24 This “return from the dead to meet a loved one” is a venerable theme in Japanese literature, appearing first perhaps as a tale in the eleventh-century Konjaku monogatari (Book XXVII, 24). Again in Asai Ryōi’s Otogi-bōko (1666), Book VI, 3, a similar tale is found, this being an adaptation from Book III of the Chinese collection Chien-teng hsin-hua. Both of these sources were doubtless combined by Ueda Akinari when he wrote in his Ugetsu monogatari (1768) the story called “Asaji ga yado,” utilized effectively in the recent Japanese film Ugetsu. All of these stories, however, concern a deceased wife, whose affectionate spirit reappears briefly to greet her husband’s homecoming.
25 Oman’s masquerade was not so bizarre as it may appear to the modern reader. The actresses in the earlier Women’s Kabuki had often played men’s parts; and after women were banned from the stage, fair boys took the roles of women. In Saikaku’s time there was a special class of harlots who dressed as young men and plied their trade among Buddhist priests—who preferred not be seen with women!
26 As noted above, the anti-novelistic michiyuki sequence in Book III, 3, is itself a theatrical intrusion.
27 This type of arrangement is also reminiscent of the methods employed in the linked-verse composition of the period, where the final verse aimed at making manifest the camaraderie of the group of poets. This final verse (called the ageku) always took Spring for its theme whatever the season employed in the preceding verses. When successful, it vibrantly concluded and bound together the series.
28 Saikaku treats of love-suicide but once in all his works, in A Mirror of the Beauties (1684). There he makes his disapproval of the practice clear. To him it was neither a sign of great love, nor even of repentance for past sins, but rather an indication of weakness and defeat.
29 The Kambun period dates from 1661 to 1673.
30 This geographical element is reflected also in the covers of the five slim volumes which comprise Five Women Who Loved Love, each of which, at the top of the titleslip, gives the name of the locale, together with the profession involved—cooper, almanac maker, greengrocer—or some other distinguishing feature.
31 See particularly the Yomihon genre of the mid-eighteenth century and following. Plebeian heroines had occasionally appeared prior to Saikaku, as in the atypical Zeraku monogatari (ca. 1659) and in prefeudal romances such as The Tale of Genji; but none of these women played an active role in the story development. From the 1660’s on, courtesans came to take an increasingly dominant place in fiction, but these women formed a class in themselves, quite separate from the bourgeoisie.
32 As in Renaissance Europe, the age of fifteen or sixteen was considered fully mature for a girl, and marriages were often effected earlier. Shakespeare’s Juliet was fourteen; Boccaccio’s “Patient Griselda,” twelve.
Bibliographical Note
Kōshoku gonin onna was published in Osaka in the Second Month of 1686, in five slim quarto volumes. The illustrations were by Yoshida Hambei, the leading illustrator of the Kyoto-Osaka region. The first edition comprises two printings, the first Osaka, the second combined Osaka and Edo. In the mid-eighteenth century the work was republished under the title Tōsei onna katagi (Types of Modern Women), and enjoyed considerable popularity, being twice reprinted. Facsimile editions are available in full size (5 vols., Tokyo, 1929), and in reduced offset (1 vol., Tokyo, 1946), and the retitled edition in a mimeographed reproduction (Tokyo, 1922). First editions will be found in the collections of Tenri University, Kyoto University, Ueno Library, Waseda University, British Museum, Bibliothèque Nationale, Edogawa Rampo, and the present writer. Kyoto University, Tōyō Bunko, Okada Shin, and Yokoyama Shigeru possess copies of the retitled edition. Modern reprints are available in at least a dozen different editions; particularly to be recommended as unexpurgated and most accurate is the text in Volume II of the Teihon Saikaku zenshū (Complete Works of Saikaku: Standard Edition), published at Tokyo in 1949.
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