Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900
Page 4
Haikai masters such as Matsunaga Teitoku (1571–1653), who were teachers and specialists in waka and renga, wrote commentaries on the classics to make them accessible to their students, who needed a fundamental knowledge of the classics to be able to compose haikai. Teitoku, for example, wrote influential commentaries on Essays in Idleness (Tsuzuregusa) and One Hundred Poets, One Hundred Poems (Hyakunin isshu), while his noted disciple Kitamura Kigin compiled commentaries on The Tale of Genji, the First Eight Imperial Waka Anthologies (Hachidaishū), Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing (Wakan rōeishū), and Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book. Knowledge of the Japanese classics, which had been socially restricted through the sixteenth century, now became the foundation for writing haikai and created a mass audience that could appreciate such complex and allusive writers as Saikaku and Bashō.
With the exception of some Buddhist sutras, Japanese literature before the seventeenth century existed only in the form of hand-copied manuscripts. Then, using the printing technology imported by Christian missionaries from Europe, a romanized version of Isoho monogatari, a Japanese translation of Aesop’s Fables, was printed in 1594. Inspired by this development, the first shōgun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, began printing important Confucian, military, and administrative texts in the early seventeenth century, using movable type. In Kyoto, Hon’ami Kōetsu (1558–1637), a court artist, with the help of a calligraphy disciple, Suminokura Sōan (1571–1632), who lived in Saga, printed luxury editions of thirteen different texts, including The Tales of Ise, an abridged version of The Tale of Genji, the Shinkokinshū, and Essays in Idleness. Although they represented a major step in the canonization process, these private editions (commonly referred to as the Saga, Kōetsu, or Suminokura texts) were not available to general readers.
In the 1630s, movable type, which could be used for kanji (Chinese characters) but not for the cursive kana (Japanese syllabic writing), was replaced with multiple-use woodblocks, which were more suitable for reproducing Japanese texts. At about the same time, commercial publishing houses opened, mainly in Kyoto. The result was that by the 1660s, major premodern Japanese texts, key Chinese texts, medical books, calendars, and dictionaries, along with the new vernacular fiction and haikai handbooks, were being published and sold in bookstores and publishing houses in the three largest cities. With the rise of the publishing industry—which had become fully developed by the time Ihara Saikaku published Life of a Sensuous Man in 1682—prose fiction acquired a fixed size and length. The commercialization of literature also meant that publication was based on an expected profit, for which the author was promised a certain amount of money. This development gave birth to the professional writer, who had to produce a certain number of pages within a set period of time and to write for a mass audience. As a result, this tended to lead—with the exception of works by a handful of writers and in special genres—to literature of low quality. In addition, the mass circulation of literature caused literary works to become the object of government censorship, which had a further negative effect on the range and quality. During each of the three major bakufu reforms—Kyōhō (1716–1736), Kansei (1787–1793), and Tenpō (1830–1844)—the bakufu issued orders to stop certain types of publications. Works that touched on the Tokugawa family and other sensitive matters or that contained erotic material were banned, and writers who violated these rules could be imprisoned.
WOMEN, READERSHIP, AND LITERATURE
Compared with the Heian period, in which there were many prominent women writers, the early modern period produced almost no women writers in the field of vernacular fiction. The only exception was Arakida Reijo (1732–1806), who wrote historical tales (monogatari) and Heian court romances between 1772 and 1781 and was a contemporary of Motoori Norinaga, Takebe Ayatari, and Ueda Akinari. The same is true in the field of drama. Legend has it that Ono no Otsū was the author of the Muromachi-period Tale of Prince Jōruri (Jōruri hime monogatari), considered to be the origin of jōruri narration, but there are no known women playwrights of jōruri (puppet plays) or kabuki. The only field in which women had some presence as writers was in poetry, particularly waka and haikai, and in literary diaries and travel literature, often by the same authors. Women did, however, play a major role as characters in drama and fiction and became an important audience for both drama and fiction, which had more readers than did waka and haikai.
The audience for ukiyo-zōshi (books of the floating world), of which Ihara Saikaku’s writings are the most famous and that dominated vernacular fiction from the late seventeenth century until the middle of the eighteenth century, appears to have been overwhelmingly male. With the exception of works such as Women’s Water Margin (Onna suikoden, 1783) which was aimed at female readers, the late-eighteenth-century yomihon (reading books) in the Kyoto-Osaka region were targeted at male readers as well. However, in the nineteenth century, when the audience for fiction expanded, two major genres of fiction, gōkan (bound picture books) and ninjōbon (books of sentiment and romance), catered to a largely female audience, and Tamenaga Shunsui, the principal writer of ninjōbon, had an assistant writer who was a woman.
In the eighteenth century, literacy rates for women appear not to have been high, even for those who were economically well off, and even literate women lagged significantly behind men in their level of education. Japanese classics such as Hyakunin isshu, Kokinshū, The Tales of Ise, The Tale of Genji, and A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari) are said to have been the basic reading for women in the Edo period, but these works, particularly the longer ones, were generally read in digest form with pictures, such as Child Genji (Osana Genji, 1665), a popular kana-zōshi (kana booklet) by Nonoguchi Ryūho, and Women’s Genji, Lessons for Life (Onna Genji kyōkun kagami, 1713), which combined plot summaries of each chapter of The Tale of Genji with lessons from Record of Treasures for Women (Onna chōhōki), a woman’s guide to everyday life. Ethical textbooks such as Women’s Great Learning (Onna daigaku), which reinforced conservative Confucian values, were used in schools, while illustrated digests such as Lessons and Good Manners for Women (Onna kyōkun shitsukekata), which combined didactic tales with commentary on classical stories, were the most popular among women.
Of particular interest here is the fact that theater, kabuki, and jōruri, in which the difference in educational background was not so serious a handicap, were extremely popular among women in the Edo period. In contrast to kabuki, whose scripts were for internal consumption only, the texts for jōruri were published at the time of the first performance and were sometimes followed by illustrated, easy-to-read digests, thereby making jōruri an important form of popular literature. Jōruri chanting also became a popular practice among amateurs. Indeed, when the numbers of texts and performances, including kabuki performances of jōruri plays, are combined, jōruri may have had the widest audience of any artistic genre in the Edo period, and women accounted for a large percentage.
In his jōruri, Chikamatsu generally casts the female protagonist as a person who loves her husband and makes every sacrifice for him. A similar type appears in prose fiction. For example, in Ueda Akinari’s “Reed-Choked House,” from his Tales of Moonlight and Rain (Ugetsu monogatari), Miyagi waits faithfully for her husband and endures difficulties to the point of sacrificing her own life. Many eighteenth-century jōruri depict women who must suffer as a result of their husband’s infidelity or lack of concern, although the actions of these men are rarely punished. In eighteenth-century society, the position of a woman was inferior to that of her husband, who had the right to take her life for any transgression, thus making it difficult for her to protest. Women in jōruri rarely commit adultery, and when they do, as in Chikamatsu’s Drums of the Waves of Horikawa, the adultery is the result of accident and circumstance. But these female characters are not simply exemplaries of Confucian self-sacrifice and devotion; instead, they reveal the extremely difficult position of women. Significantly, Ueda Akinari portrays another type of woman in Tales of Moonlight and Rain, a type
introduced largely from Chinese vernacular fiction—the strong woman who, feeling betrayed by the man whom she has loved, takes revenge, as Isora does in “Caldron of Kibitsu.” This kind of angry, vengeful woman does not appear in eighteenth-century jōruri but marks a new development in Japanese fiction and emerges in such nineteenth-century kabuki and fiction as Oiwa in Tsuruya Nanboku’s Ghost Stories at Yotsuya.
WARRIOR AND URBAN COMMONER ATTITUDES
Much of the thought and writing of the early modern period tends to be “this-worldly” in outlook, affirming life in this world and looking forward to future improvement, compared with the “other-worldly” attitudes of the medieval period. The “this-worldly” perspective was reflected in the literature of the period: in the focus on contemporary society and in the pursuit of hedonistic pleasures. Warrior attitudes were reinforced by Confucian ethics, with its emphasis on humaneness (jin) and rightness (gi), and so tended to be highly moralistic, self-sacrificing, and concerned with honor and obligation. Chōnin attitudes, formed from the new commercial and urban economy, were oriented toward the present and physical needs.
The ethical system that emerged and was supported by the bakufu was fundamentally Confucian, and at the base of the Confucian virtues were filial piety (toward parents) and loyalty (toward the master or ruler), which gave the bakufu an ethical basis for reinforcing both the status hierarchy and the hereditary system. From the bakufu’s perspective, the greatest threat to this morality and social structure was the notion of individual love or desire. The bakufu thus passed a law stating that “a person who falls in love with the daughter of the master of the house can, at the request of the master, be executed, exiled, or, at the very least, bodily removed.” Those youths who did not obey their parents and fell in love could be legally disowned. If the husband discovered his wife in an act of adultery, he had the right to kill her on the spot. If she ran away with a lover, the master could capture her, have her tied to a stake, and stabbed.
The attitudes of the warrior and of the urban commoner overlapped and influenced each other. Although samurai society was built on a lord-retainer relationship, with the disappearance of war and the need for income beyond the monthly stipend, particularly for lower-ranking samurai, traditional values and structures began to collapse. The pleasure seeking that marked wealthy chōnin life infiltrated samurai life, and the samurai became interested in the customs and culture of the urban commoners, such as pipe smoking, jōruri, kabuki, and kouta (popular songs), and in the licensed quarters, in ransoming prostitutes and committing double suicide. And with their finances falling apart, the samurai turned to wealthy chōnin for support as adopted sons.
Likewise, samurai values—for example, the notion of lord and vassal and the ideas of duty and loyalty—deeply infiltrated chōnin life: the relationship between the employer and the employee in a merchant business, or between master and apprentice in an artisan house, became infused with the notion of duty/obligation (giri) and service (hōkō). As commoners became wealthy and had more leisure time, they indulged in cultural activities that earlier had been the province of elite samurai—nō, tea, and ikebana (flower arranging)—and took Buddhist names (ingo), as samurai did. More important, the ideals of the samurai as they were transformed by Confucianism were reflected in the popular literature and drama of the period. Jōruri, or puppet theater, also was centered on the notions of duty as they became entangled and conflicted with love and human passion (ninjō). Much of kabuki as well as popular fiction took the form of samurai narratives, succession disputes in great samurai houses (oiesōdō), or vendettas (kataki-uchi), such as that found in Chūshingura: The Storehouse of Loyal Retainers, with the samurai spirit and values usually winning in the end. It was only toward the end of the early modern period, in the nineteenth century, that a more degenerate image of the samurai, no doubt reflecting their deteriorating financial condition, appeared on stage in kabuki plays such as Tsuruya Nanboku’s Ghost Stories at Yotsuya and Kawatake Mokuami’s Benten the Thief.
In the end, these two tendencies—the samurai emphasis on ethics, self-sacrifice, and concerns with political stability and social order, and that of urban commoners, with their focus on contemporary society, finances, and the play of human passions—mixed together in interesting and often creative ways. For example, genres such as jōruri, kabuki, and yomihon are always divided into two basic formats, that of the contemporary-life drama (sewamono) and that of the historical or period drama (jidaimono), with the former reflecting urban commoner interests and the latter more samurai values, at least on the surface. The playwright Chikamatsu is today known for his contemporary-life dramas, such as The Love Suicides at Amijima, but in his day, his historical plays like The Battles of Coxinga were of far greater importance and occupied the bulk of his repertoire. Even when jōruri and kabuki shifted to historical plays after the prohibition of love-suicide plays in the early eighteenth century, contemporary-life scenes were inserted into the larger historical drama so that “samurai” plays such as Chūshingura and Chronicle of the Battle of Ichinotani revolved around chōnin themes of money and love. In both these formats, the desires and passions (ninjō) of the individual conflicted with duty and responsibility (giri) and the pressures and restraints of society, a clash that reflected the larger social and political hierarchy of ruler and ruled, as well as the commingling of the chōnin and samurai cultures.
POPULAR AND ELITE LITERATURES
In the early modern period, there were two distinct genealogies of literature: popular (zoku) literature and elegant or refined (ga) literature. Popular literature consisted of the new genres, generally used kana-based vernacular language, tended to focus on the urban chōnin society, and reflected the ebullient, erotic, comic, and violent side of contemporary culture. In poetry, the popular genres were haikai, senryū (satiric haiku), kyōka (wild poetry), and kyōshi (wild Chinese poetry); in drama, they were jōruri and kabuki—in contrast to nō, which became the refined or classical form of drama in the Edo period—and in prose fiction, they included kana-zōshi (kana booklets), ukiyo-zōshi (books of the floating world), kibyōshi (satiric and didactic picture books), sharebon (books of wit and fashion), gōkan (bound illustrated books), yomihon (reading books), and kokkeibon (comic fiction). The refined literature, by contrast, consisted of the long-standing, authoritative genres such as Chinese poetry (kanshi), Chinese prose (kanbun), classical poetry (thirty-one-syllable waka), and gikobun (neoclassical prose). These more elegant genres, which had a long tradition going back to the ancient period and tended to stress more aristocratic topics (such as nature, the four seasons, and love), relied heavily on classical Chinese or classical Japanese.
The distinction between elite and popular literature was underscored by the close association of popular literature with humor, vulgar topics, and the two “bad places” (akusho), the theater and the licensed pleasure quarters, both of which became major sources of popular culture and literature. Kabuki, reflecting urban commoner interests, began as a drama of prostitute buying (keiseikai), and its music and dialogue were heavily erotic. The ukiyo-zōshi, the first major vernacular fictional genre, likewise were based largely on the courtesan critiques (yūjo hyōbanki) and guides to the licensed quarters. The ukiyo-e, an art form also reflecting urban commoner interests, similarly focused on actors and courtesans.
Popular genres such as kyōka, senryū, and kyōshi had a strong tendency to parody their classical counterparts—waka and kanshi—even as they focused on and satirized the immediate, contemporary world. Indeed, one of the principal characteristics of seventeenth-century literature was the tendency of popular literature to transform the past into the present, the high into the low, and the sacred into the profane, or to move in the opposite direction, as Matsuo Bashō did, by seeking the high or spiritual in the low and everyday.
Chinese studies (kangaku) and Japanese nativist studies (kokugaku) were an integral part of “refined” literary studies and were closely associated with kans
hi and waka, respectively. The early modern period was a great age of Chinese learning that was without precedent and never matched again. Chinese studies in the seventeenth century concentrated on the study of Confucianism, particularly that branch influenced by the Song-period Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi (1130–1200) and his followers. Two major Confucian scholars who opposed this school of Song Confucianism were Itō Jinsai (1627–1705) and Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728), who tried to return directly to the Confucian classics through a systematic philological and historical study of ancient Chinese texts and who are today referred to as members of the Ancient Studies (kogaku) school. Kokugaku, which came to the fore in the late seventeenth century, was similar to Ancient Studies in its attempt at a systematic philological and historical study of ancient texts. In contrast to Jinsai and Sorai, however, the kokugaku scholars examined ancient and classical Japanese texts and were crucial to the excavation of such ancient texts as the Man‘yōshū (Anthology of Ten Thousand Leaves) and the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters). During the eighteenth century, nativist learning—led by scholars such as Kada no Arimaro (1706–1751), Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769), and Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801)—gradually began to take philosophical and ideological positions opposed to those found in Chinese studies, stressing a “Japanese,” or nativist, cultural identity and closely associating Japanese texts with Shinto (the way of the Japanese gods).