“One day the attackers opened fire on us with their muskets. This will be the day, people were saying; now the castle will fall. There was incredible panic throughout the castle. Then Father’s young retainer came to us.
“‘The enemy has withdrawn without a trace,’ he said. ‘Don’t panic; calm down.’ And at that instant a musket ball flew in and struck my little brother, who was fourteen; he crumpled in pain and died on the spot. Oh, I’ve seen some ghastly things.
“That same day an arrow with a letter tied to it landed in the sector of the castle that my father was defending. It said:
Inasmuch as you, Kyoreki, once served as teacher of writing to Lord Ieyasu, you will be permitted, should you so desire, to escape from the castle. Make your escape in whichever direction you please; you will meet with no hindrance en route. Orders to this effect have been issued to all units.
Sometime tomorrow they’ll attack, we thought, and then they’ll take the castle by storm. Everyone was weak with despair. I, too, was desolate, quite certain that I’d be killed the next day.
“My father came in secret to fetch us from the Keep. He told my mother and me where we were to go and put up a ladder at the far end of the northern ramparts; from there he lowered us with a rope into a tub, and we crossed to the other side of the moat.
“There were only the four of us, my two parents, me, and our young retainer. The other vassals remained behind. When we had gone about five or six chō from the castle, Mother felt a pain in her belly and gave birth to a daughter. Our young man, not wasting a moment, washed the baby in some water that lay in a rice field, then hoisted her up and wrapped her in a scrap of cloth. Father picked up Mother on his back, and we made our escape across Aonogahara. What a terrifying experience that was. Oh, those old days. . . . Praise be to Amida Buddha, Praise be to Amida Buddha.”
“Tell us another story of Hikone,” the children would say.
“My father’s stipend was 300 koku, but there were so many wars in those days that everything was in short supply. Of course, we all were careful to put by whatever we could, but most of the time we ate some sort of gruel, morning and night. Sometimes my elder brother would go hunting in the mountains with his musket. In those days we would cook up a batch of rice and greens in the morning, and that would last us through our midday meal. I got nothing to eat but rice and greens, so I was always pestering my brother to go shooting, and when he did I’d be beside myself with joy.
“We had nothing to wear, either. When I was thirteen I had one hand-stitched, unlined pink kimono and nothing else. I wore that one kimono until I was seventeen, by which time my legs were sticking out the bottom; it was dreadful. How I longed to have just one kimono that would at least cover my legs. That’s how hard up we were in the old days. And eating lunch was something we never even dreamed of, nor did we have anything to eat after nightfall.
“Young people nowadays—they waste all their time and spend all their money on whims of fashion, and they’re terribly fussy about what they’ll eat. It’s just outrageous.”
Over and over again she would tell them tales of Hikone and then scold them. Which is why, after a while, the children nicknamed her “Granny Hikone.” Even now, when people contrast times past with the way things are now, people call that a “Hikone.” The expression originated with this woman. That’s why people from other provinces don’t understand it. It’s a local expression.
[Zōhyō monogatari, Oan monogatari, translated by Thomas Harper]
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1. One’s boy favorite (wakashu) was a young boy who was a sexual partner for an adult male.
2. In a region now occupied by Tokyo, Saitama Prefecture, and part of Kanagawa Prefecture.
3. This poem differs from Kokinshū, no. 17, an anonymous poem in the first book of Spring, only in that the word “Musashino” replaces “Kasugano” (fields of Kasuga), in Yamato Province (Nara). In the Kokinshū poem, men are setting fire to the fields not out of malice but in order to clear away dead growth before the spring planting. Wakakusa no (tender grass) is a pillow word, or epithet, for tsuma (spouse).
4. “Asakusa” (literally, Shallow Grass), replacing wakakusa (tender young grasses) in The Tales of Ise poem, was used as an execution ground in Edo until the early 1650s. Koroberi, replacing komoreri (hidden), literally means “tumble down” or “fall to the ground,” an action used at the time to indicate a renunciation of Christianity.
5. The licensed quarter in Kyoto.
6. During the Obon Festival, or the Feast of Spirits, the living pay respects to the spirits of the dead, who were thought to return for the occasion.
7. The Tenbun era (1532–1555).
8. Ogihara is alluding to a love poem in the early-thirteenth-century imperial anthology, the Shinkokinshū. The poem was written by a woman to a man who had just begun courting her: “Though you firmly swear your love will last forever, I cannot be sure; would that this day together were the last day of my life” (no. 1149).
9. Alludes to a poem written by Emperor Tenji (r. 668–671) while he was staying at a temporary palace in a rustic area far from the capital: “While way out here in this rough-hewn wooden palace in Asakura, I wonder who that lad is who gives his name as he passes by” (Shinkokinshū, no. 1687).
10. She is referring to the Onin War (1467–1477).
11. A Buddhist temple of the Zen (Rinzai) sect in eastern Kyoto.
12. According to Buddhist custom, the deceased receive a religious name.
13. A Buddhist temple of the Shingon sect in southern Kyoto.
14. The sutra copies offered at his grave are the product of ichi nichi tonsha (one-day hasty copying), the practice in which a group of people gather for a day to transcribe a sutra.
Chapter 3
IHARA SAIKAKU AND THE BOOKS OF THE FLOATING WORLD
The term ukiyo-zōshi (books of the floating world) refers toa vernacular fictional genre that originated in the Kyoto-Osaka area and spanned a hundred-year period from the publication in 1682 of Ihara Saikaku’s Life of a Sensuous Man (Kōshoku ichidai otoko) to the late eighteenth century. Although originally synonymous with kōshokubon (books on love or sexual pleasures), ukiyo-zōshi covered a much wider range of subjects, and in accordance with the restrictions imposed by the Kyōhō Reforms (1716–1736), this term replaced kōshokubon. The genre now includes both long and short works as well as essays. Likewise, in modern literary histories, the word ukiyo (floating world), which originally referred to the world of sexual pleasures (kōshoku), has been expanded to include the contemporary world.
In the 1640s and 1650s, courtesan critiques (yūjo hyōbanki) became popular (more than sixty-nine survive), beginning with Tale of the East (Azuma monogatari), a critique of Edo’s Yoshiwara district, published in 1641, and leading up to the publication of Life of a Sensuous Man in 1682. Yūjo hyōbanki were guides to the pleasure quarters (Shimabara in Kyoto, Yoshiwara in Edo, Shinmachi in Osaka), which had become, as noted earlier, a cultural place for aesthetic pursuits. The guides to the pleasure quarters also provided entertaining reading, with their emphasis on both hedonism and reality that the other forms of vernacular writing could not provide. As titles such as Tales of Osaka (Naniwa monogatari, 1656) and Tales of Kyoto (Miyako monogatari, 1656) suggest, these guides took the form of fictional tales (monogatari). The eventual result was the birth of a new urban commoner literature. Saikaku’s ukiyo-zōshi, particularly his tales of love (kōshoku mono), beginning with Life of a Sensuous Man, represent both an extension of and a departure from the pleasure quarter guides. Here Saikaku borrowed the subject matter of the courtesan guides, drew on a long tradition of love literature (stretching from The Tale of Genji and The Tales of Ise to seventeenth-century kana-zōshi), and employed an experimental, dramatic form of haibun, or haikai prose, for which there was no precedent in the prose literature of his time.
IHARA SAIKAKU
Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693), born into a well-to-do merchant family
in Osaka, also became a merchant, running a mid-size business with four or five full-time assistant managers. But he eventually abandoned his family business to become a haikai master and then a writer of vernacular fiction. Saikaku started composing haikai (linked verse) when he was fifteen and became a haikai master in 1662, at the age of twenty. Using the pen name Ihara Kakuei, Saikaku became a member of the Teimon circle of haikai, which was in fashion at the time and was known for its wordplay and links by phonic and lexical associations. Around 1670, Saikaku became one of the leading disciples of Nishiyama Sōin, a renga (classical linked verse) master in Osaka who established the Danrin style, which used more colloquial language, looser rules, and earthy humor, deliberately parodying the classical poetic tradition and actively depicting contemporary commoner life. In 1673, Saikaku established himself as a publicly recognized haikai master with his own distinctive style (derisively labeled by his former Teimon companions the “Dutch style,” or heretical style) and led a large group of poets in composing ten thousand haikai in twelve days at the Ikudama Shrine in Osaka. In the same year, Saikaku changed his haikai name from Kakuei to Saikaku (the sai, or “west,” being the Sino-Japanese reading for nishi in Nishiyama), thereby signifying his affiliation with Nishiyama Sōin and the Danrin school.
In 1675, Saikaku’s wife, whom he loved dearly, died of a fever at only twenty-five, leaving behind three very young children (one of whom was blind). Five days later, Saikaku composed an impromptu but passionate thousand-verse haikai requiem in about twelve hours (averaging about forty seconds per verse), which he published as Haikai Single-Day Thousand Verses (Haikai dokugin ichinichi senku). It was Saikaku’s first long work, and in it he merged his narrative and lyric interests. Soon afterward, he shaved his head in mourning and became a lay monk, apparently turning over his domestic affairs to his assistants. From this time on, Saikaku dedicated himself to writing and remained a haikai master until his death.
The success of Haikai Single-Day Thousand Verses led Saikaku in 1677 to compose another single-day solo speed sequence (in hundred-link units) of sixteen hundred linked haikai, which was published as Many Verses (Ōku kazu), and on a single day in 1680 he wrote a four-thousand-verse sequence entitled Saikaku Many Verses (Saikaku ōyakazu). He was able to write these sequences so quickly because a particular topic could be developed over a number of links, thus creating a kind of panoramic prose poem, in 5–7–5 and 7–7 alternating verse. It was a short step from this kind of speed haikai to vernacular haikai fiction, to which Saikaku turned next, in his Life of a Sensuous Man. Saikaku here employed a form of haibun characterized by its elliptical quality, use of colloquial language, rapid descriptive movement, and interest in everyday, commoner life.
Two years later Saikaku wrote Great Mirror of Female Beauty (Shoen ōkagami, 1684), a book on the licensed quarters and its performing women and customers, which functioned as a sequel to Life of a Sensuous Man. This was followed by books such as Five Sensuous Women (Kōshoku gonin onna, 1686) and Life of a Sensuous Woman (Kōshoku ichidai onna, 1686). Until this time, Saikaku had been a local author whose works were published exclusively in Osaka, but after the appearance of Life of a Sensuous Woman, he became a national author whose books were published and read in the three major cities. Interestingly, Great Mirror of Male Love (Nanshoku ōkagami), published in 1687 in Osaka and Kyoto, purports to have been written in Edo. Tsunayoshi, who became the fifth shōgun in 1680, had a fondness for beautiful boys who were talented in nō drama and gathered them in Edo Castle. A number of domain lords followed suit, keeping young boys as lovers and making Edo the place for male-male love among samurai. Hoping, therefore, to extend his audience from the Kyoto-Osaka region to Edo, Saikaku pretended that he had written the book in Edo. Twenty Unfilial Children in Japan (Honchō nijūfukō, 1687), written in the same year, was published in both Osaka and Edo, as were all his subsequent works.
As he gained a national audience, Saikaku was pressured to write on demand and in great volume. At first he produced only one or two works a year, but in the two years from 1687 to 1688 he published twelve books, for a total of sixty-two volumes. Saikaku’s style and approach also changed at this point. Until 1686, he had written mainly extended, fictional narratives—Life of a Sensuous Man, Five Sensuous Women, and Life of a Sensuous Woman—which were unified by the life of a single protagonist or a group of protagonists and in which the use of classical literature, haikai-esque allusion, parody, and rhetorical devices was conspicuous. After 1686, however, Saikaku turned for his material to a medieval genre, collections of setsuwa (recorded folktales), which enabled him to make use of his talents as a short-story writer and rework existing stories that he had heard or read about.
These later works, which had shifted stylistically away from the emphasis on classical parody and rhetoric, are collections of autonomous short stories unified by a particular theme or format. They include Great Mirror of Male Love, Japan’s Eternal Storehouse (Nippon eitaigura, 1688), Tales of Samurai Duty (Bukegiri monogatari, 1688), and Worldly Mental Calculations (Seken munezan’yo, 1692). In these collections, different tales are linked by a single theme, a single time, a single social class, or a single form of sexual or economic desire.
This tendency toward collecting parallel short tales existed also in Saikaku’s earlier longer fiction. Even Life of a Sensuous Woman, his longest and most unified work, is not a novel in the modern sense so much as it is a collection of interconnected short stories about different women. The short-story format may, in fact, have been more suitable or natural for Saikaku, who spent twenty years of his life as a haikai poet, linking together in sequences fragmentary, momentary slices of life. At the same time, by using only a single theme in each collection, Saikaku was able to approach the same subject from a variety of perspectives, a technique resembling the poetic practice of composing on established topics.
Saikaku’s prose works were not regarded as high literature by the literary establishment of the time, although they enjoyed a wide readership. Then in the late eighteenth century, there was a Saikaku revival in Edo, inspiring Santō Kyōden and other fiction writers. Saikaku is now generally considered the greatest fiction writer of the Edo period, and his works have influenced many modern Japanese writers, from social realists to humorists to romantic sensualists.
LIFE OF A SENSUOUS MAN (KŌSHOKU ICHIDAI OTOKO, 1682)
Life of a Sensuous Man, which Saikaku published in Osaka in 1682, initiated what came to be called books of the floating world (ukiyo-zōshi). It was Saikaku’s first work of prose fiction and included his own pictures in a light, haikai-sketch style.1 The protagonist, Yonosuke, is a second-generation, well-to-do Osaka-Kyoto chōnin whose father, Yumesuke, is an expert in the ways of love and whose mother is a famous, high-ranking performing woman (tayū) in the licensed quarter in Kyoto. Tayū were not strictly courtesans, since they could refuse to serve men they did not like. Although they could not leave the semipublic confines of the licensed quarters, they were outstanding artists who had mastered everything from discerning rare incenses to writing waka and haikai poetry. Outside the quarters, tayū were widely revered, and their charisma resembled those of modern media stars. Thus it is no surprise that Yonosuke also embarks on a wild life of love at the early age of seven. Because of his reckless ways, he shows himself unfit to become a merchant and is disowned at the age of nineteen. He then wanders, impoverished, from one end of Japan to the other, meeting women of many classes and professions. When Yonosuke is thirty-four, his father dies and Yonosuke unexpectedly comes into an enormous inheritance. Drawing on his extensive experience of love and his newly found wealth, Yonosuke visits famous tayūin licensed quarters, such as Yoshino in Misujimachi (Kyoto), Yūgiri in Shinmachi (Osaka), Takahashi in Shimabara (Kyoto), and Takao in Yoshiwara (Edo). Finally, in 1682, at the same time the book was published, he boards a ship and heads for the Island of Women.
Life of a Sensuous Man has five volumes and fifty-four sections, one for each year of
Yonosuke’s life and reminiscent of the fifty-four chapters of The Tale of Genji, one of its many allusions to Genji. The Heian classic The Tales of Ise is referred to even more often, probably because Narihira, its hero, was considered an even greater lover than Genji. Told in a unique mixture of colloquial styles and haibun, with an overlay of classical rhetoric and allusion, Life of a Sensuous Man can be divided into two parts. The first describes Yonosuke’s youthful affairs and life of wandering. The second follows his life as a big spender in various licensed quarters and focuses on the famous women performers in a complex, realistic, and often humorous way that goes well beyond the stereotypes found in contemporary courtesan critiques. If the life of Yonosuke (literally, man of the world) is an unapologetic affirmation of the constantly changing “floating” world of the senses, then the licensed quarters, the site of most of the second part, similarly represent a place of partial liberation, a “bad” area, that allowed wealthy males to temporarily leave the rigid class system of Tokugawa society and to fulfill dreams not achievable in the everyday world. Yonosuke embodies these ideals and fantasies in, sometimes, their most imaginative and extreme form, although more often he ironically or parodically shows their limitations. He is an endlessly energetic prodigy who can act as a man of refinement (sui), raising erotic life to an aesthetic and cultural ideal, but also willfully, breaking the quarters’ rules or showing his true feelings when he should not. Included here are the first chapter of the first half, which describes Yonosuke’s early awakening to love as a young boy; the first chapter of the second half, which focuses on Yoshino (d. 1643), one of the most famous tayū of the seventeenth century; and the last chapter of the second half, in which Yonosuke sails off to the Island of Women. In Yonosuke’s meetings with tayū (and occasionally with kabuki actors) in the second half, he cedes the stage to famous women in the quarters from the 1630s to the 1670s (most already were dead by the time the book was published), who display their intelligence, creativity, humor, and capacity for emotion in colorful ways. Saikaku often describes these women as violating the quarters’ etiquette. In Yoshino’s case, it was a strict rule that a tayū could not meet a man of low status: in her day, a tayū in Kyoto could meet only an aristocrat or a very wealthy, cultured merchant. According to Fujimoto Kizan’s Great Mirror of the Way of Love (Shikidō ōkagami, 1678), an encyclopedia of life in various licensed quarters, Yoshino broke this rule and was consequently forced to leave the Misujimachi quarter in Kyoto. In Saikaku’s imaginative reworking of the story, it is the breadth and depth of Yoshino’s true feelings and her fearless willingness to violate this rule through her acceptance of a man of extremely low status who has yearned for her intensely that endear her to Yonosuke, who decides immediately to buy out her contract and marry her. Above all, Yonosuke sees in Yoshino’s act a fidelity to her true feelings that suggests that her feelings for him also go beyond the usual coquetry and monetary calculations. Yoshino’s flouting of the quarters’ rules ironically implies that money—the primary means by which urban commoners gained power—cannot, in the end, buy love. At the same time, like other commoners, Yoshino achieves her refinement and her high position through her individual talent as a performer, intense training, and emotional integrity rather than, as in medieval aristocratic society, through family connections and inheritance.
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