The Calendar Maker’s Wife (Written in the Calendar’s Middle Column)
JUDGES OF BEAUTY STRICT AS BARRIER GUARDS (1)
“New Year’s Day: Write for the first time this year,” begins the lower column of the Kyoto Daikyōji almanac calendar for 1682.32 “On this day everything will go well. The second: Make love for the first time this year.”33 In ancient times a pair of amorous wagtails taught the first gods how to make love for the first time, and the gods later gave birth to humans. Ever since, men and women have never stopped pursuing this pleasure.
In the year 1682 the woman married to the owner of the Daikyōji shop that printed these famous Kyoto calendars, was widely known as “the calendar maker’s beautiful wife.” Her reputation had begun to spread while she was still young, and she aroused a mountain of desire among the men of Kyoto. To them, her eyebrows curved as gracefully as the crescent new moon high atop a float in the Gion Summer Festival; her face had the freshness of cherry buds at Kiyomizu Temple just as they burst into bloom; and her scarlet lips rivaled the autumn leaves on Mount Takao at the height of their color. She grew up on Muromachi Avenue, a street of prosperous clothiers, and her robes were always so novel and imaginative that she set fashions in the capital. No other woman in all Kyoto could compare with her.
One year, when spring was at its height, people were feeling lighthearted and restless, and many went to the eastern hills of Kyoto to see the wisteria in bloom. At Yasui Temple, the blossoms on their trellises trailed through the air like purple mist and made even the brilliant green of the pines almost invisible. After the sun went down, the blossoms became still more beautiful, floating endlessly in the gathering dimness. So many wisteria viewers were gathered together then that they turned the eastern hills into living hills of attractive women.
In Kyoto in those days there were four famous playboy friends nicknamed the Four Heavenly Kings.34 They all were noted for their stylish appearance, and they’d inherited so much money from their parents that they caroused throughout the year. One day they would go to the Shimabara licensed quarter and spend the night with leading tayū like Morokoshi, Hanasaki, Kaoru, or Takahashi, and the next day they would tryst with star kabuki actors such as Takenaka Kichizaburō, Karamatsu Kasen, Fujita Kichizaburō, or Mitsuse Sakon, who played young women’s and young men’s roles. They loved both women and men night and day in almost every imaginable way. Today they’d spent the day at a kabuki performance,35 and now they all sat together at the Matsuya teahouse36 nearby, along the Kamo River by the Fourth Avenue.
“I’ve never seen so many good-looking ordinary women37 out before,” one of the men said. “If we looked, who knows, we might even see one who’d really impress us.” The men decided to try this new diversion and asked a discriminating kabuki actor to be head judge. Then they sat back and waited for women to pass by on their way back to the city after blossom viewing.38
Most of the women rode in enclosed palanquins, and the disappointed men tried to guess what kind of woman sat inside each. Then some women walked by in a loose group. They all had pleasant looks, the men felt, but none, they judged, was truly beautiful.
“However this turns out,” one man said, “we ought to keep a list of the striking ones.” So the men got ink and paper from the teahouse and began writing brief descriptions of their choices. The first woman they recorded looked thirty-four or thirty-five. The nape of her neck was long and slender, and she had large, bright eyes and a beautiful natural hairline, although the bridge of her nose, they felt, could have been a bit less prominent. She wore three satin robes with the material turned under at the cuffs and hems. Next to her skin was a white robe, then one of blue green, and over this a deep orange outer robe with traditional ink paintings on it. The painting on her left sleeve of the writer-monk Kenkō showed him just as he described himself,39 sitting alone at night poring over old books below a wick lamp. And it was done with remarkable invention! Around her waist was a velvet sash woven in a multicolored checkered pattern. Over her head she elegantly wore a thin silk shawl dyed with a colorful courtly pattern. Her socks were pale purple silk, and she seemed to glide without a sound in her leather sandals with thongs braided from cord of three colors. And how natural the motion of her hips was as she walked! Just as the men were exclaiming at how lucky her husband was, the woman opened her mouth to say something to one of her maids—and showed she was missing a lower front tooth. The men’s desire cooled rapidly.
On the right, two men carry a women’s palanquin, preceded by a merchant’s wife wearing an elegant shawl. A male servant carries a luggage box with a folded rug for them to sit on while flower viewing. Fastened to his carrying pole is a container for lunch boxes. A young woman (left) wears a rush hat and a sash tied stylishly in front. To her right is a nun in black robes watching over the young women, who are followed by a maid. In the teahouse, a young woman boils water on a stove. In the entrance, one of the playboys watches the women, as does his footman. The illustrations are attributed to Yoshida Hanbei (act. 1684–1688). From the 1686 edition.
Soon afterward, the men recorded a young woman of fifteen or sixteen. Surely, they thought, she couldn’t have been seventeen yet. The older woman on her left looked like her mother, and on her right walked a black-robed nun who would take responsibility in case she did something wrong in public. The woman trailed several maids, and male servants walked vigilantly, as if they were guarding an unmarried woman. But her teeth were blackened, so she had to be married. She must have a child, too, since she’d shaved off her eyebrows. She had a round, pretty face; intelligent, bright eyes; cute, clearly formed earlobes; and smooth, white, fleshy fingers and toes. She also had a stunning way of wearing her clothes. Above her inner robe, yellow on both sides, was a completely dapple-dyed purple robe. Over that she wore a gray satin outer robe covered with swallow-shape patches. Her wide silk sash was stripe-dyed horizontally in many colors. Her loose robes were suggestively open at the neck, and she moved in them very gracefully. Her wide-brimmed, lacquered paper hat was lined inside, and from it hung a finely braided paper cord.
The men were drawn to this glamorous woman, but when they looked again they saw a scar almost an inch long on the side of her face, where she’d struck something. They were sure she hadn’t been born with it. “She must have quite a grudge against the nurse who was taking care of her when that happened,” one of the men remarked. They all laughed and let the woman pass by without further comment.
Next they recorded a woman of twenty-one or twenty-two wearing a single homemade striped cotton robe. As she walked by, the wind lifted it, exposing all the ragged, improvised patchwork on the inside. Her pitifully narrow sash seemed to be made from cloth left over from a cloak, and she wore what were obviously her only pair of shabby, out-of-date purple leather socks in nonmatching straw sandals. On top of her head was an old cloth headpiece, and her messy, uncombed hair had obviously been gathered up in a hurry. She walked alone without putting on the slightest airs, enjoying herself regardless of what others might think. When the men looked more closely they saw she had a perfect face. They all wondered if a more beautiful woman had ever been born and were quite taken with her.
“If you gave her some nice clothes to wear,” one of the men said, “she’d be an absolute killer. It’s not her fault she’s poor, after all.” They felt very concerned, and after the woman had passed by, they sent someone to follow her. She lived, it turned out, at the end of Seiganji Street, where she worked in a small shop chopping tobacco leaves. The men felt very sad to hear that, but their concern was mixed with desire.
The next woman the men recorded was twenty-seven or twenty-eight and dressed with impeccable elegance. All three of her robes were of the finest black silk, edged at the hems with scarlet from the inner sides. On her outer robe, sewn in gold thread, was a discreetly embellished version of a very private crest. Her wide, striped sash was of Chinese silk, tied conspicuously in front. Her stylish chignon with a low topknot was tie
d far back with a wide, folded paper cord. In her hair were two matching decorated combs, and over her head was a kerchief dyed with a brush-stroke design. Above this she wore a wide rush hat in the style of the female-role kabuki actor Kichiya, tied with a four-color cord. She wore the hat tilted up to show her face, and she imitated the deliberate, wide-stepping walk of tayū in the licensed quarters, complete with a swaying hip motion.
“She’s the one, she’s the one.”
“She’s got to be the best one.”
“Calm down, will you?”
As the men waited for the woman to come closer, they noticed that each of the three maids behind her carried a baby. Suddenly they found the woman amusing and joked that she was having one a year. The woman walked past without turning her head, pretending not to hear the shouts of “Mommy! Mommy!” behind her.
“All dressed up like that,” one of the men said, “she must really hate to hear them—even though they’re hers.”
“A woman can look very nice,” said another man, “until she has children.” The men laughed so hard the woman must have been deeply shocked.
Later a young woman of thirteen or fourteen came walking along at a leisurely pace in front of her palanquin, which the carriers brought along after her. Her hair was combed straight down in back, gathered up at the end, and tied with a folded strip of crimson silk. In front her high-combed hair was parted in the middle like a young man’s, and the chignon at the top of her head was secured with gold paper cord and accented in front with a large decorated comb. She gave off an immediate, overwhelming impression of beauty, and her features left the men speechless. Next to her skin she wore a white satin robe ink-painted with various scenes. Above that was a satin robe shimmering with various shades of purple and green and sewn with peacock shapes. Over it all was a transparent netting of gold Chinese silk. The novel design showed striking imagination. She had on a soft, twelve-color sash and walked along barefoot in paper-thonged sandals, while behind her a maid carried her wide-brimmed sedge hat. In her hand she held a wisteria branch with many blooming tassels hanging from it, obviously to show to people at home.
None of the other women the men had seen that day compared with this one. The men asked her name.
“She’s the daughter of a prominent merchant on Muromachi Avenue,” said a man in her group as he went by. “Don’t you know? Everyone’s calling her the ‘modern Komachi.’”40
Soon the men reached their decision. This last young woman was truly the flower of all the women they’d seen that whole day. The passionate Komachi lamented long ago in one of her poems that without her lover she was spending her days in vain,41 and those who saw the modern Komachi that day later came to realize how far she, too, was willing to follow her own desire.
SLEEPERS DONE IN BY THEIR DREAMS (2)
A bachelor living with other men leads a carefree life, but without a wife at home he can get awfully lonely in the evenings. The owner of the shop that printed prestigious Daikyōji almanac calendars42 had remained a bachelor for many years. Living in the capital, he saw many women dressed with great imagination and sensitivity, but his tastes were so exacting that he had yet to meet a woman he considered stylish and beautiful enough to marry.
The calendar maker had begun to feel, as he put it, as melancholy as the free-floating river grass to which Komachi had compared herself in a poem centuries before,43 and he wanted to know more about the young woman who was getting quite a reputation as the modern Komachi. The calendar maker asked someone who knew her family to help him get a look at her, and when he went and saw her, she was indeed the same young woman he and the other playboys had judged most attractive of all on Fourth Avenue that spring, when her beauty had been as delicate as the wisteria she carried. Her name was Osan. The calendar maker immediately fell completely in love with her and couldn’t find the slightest thing to criticize. People were amused to see how quickly this sophisticated bachelor tried to arrange a marriage.
In those days there was a famous go-between who was known as Smooth-Talking Naru because of her high success rate. The calendar maker went to see her at her office just north of the intersection of Shimo-Tachiuri and Karasumaru Streets in uptown Kyoto and begged her to do her best for him. Naru succeeded in arranging an engagement,44 and to seal it, the calendar maker sent Osan’s family the traditional pair of double-handled kegs of saké and other gifts. A wedding was agreed on, a felicitous day was chosen, and finally the calendar maker and Osan were married.
From then on, the calendar maker gazed only at his wife, ignoring every other beautiful sight, even cherry blossoms at night and the moon at dawn. The two became intimate and got along well as husband and wife for three years. From morning to night, Osan applied herself to directing the housework, and she herself carefully bought and prepared imported pongee thread and oversaw the maids as they wove it into striped silk cloth. She always made sure her husband looked his very best. She also was frugal, never letting too much firewood burn in the ovens and keeping detailed daily records in her expenditures book. She was the kind of wife a city merchant loves to have.
The calendar business prospered, and the couple was extremely happy. But then the calendar maker had to make an extended trip to Edo and other eastern areas.45 The thought of leaving Kyoto grieved him, but the calendar business made hard demands. Finally he resigned himself to going, and before he left, he went to see Osan’s parents on Muromachi Avenue and explained the situation to them.
When they heard about the calendar maker’s long business trip, Osan’s parents worried about how their daughter would get along during his absence. They felt that she needed someone who knew a lot about everything and who could oversee the printers and the shop out front and help Osan with practical advice about running the big house in back. Out of the same deep concern that parents everywhere have for their daughters, Osan’s parents decided to send over Moemon, a trustworthy clerk who’d worked in their store for many years, to their son-in-law’s house.
Moemon was so honest and straightforward that the gods came, as they say, and lived in his head. Unconcerned with styles, he let hairdressers do what they wanted with his hair, and he didn’t pluck out the hairs on his temples trying to look desirable to women. He was a conscientious worker who wasn’t interested in robes with flashy, wide-hanging sleeves. He carefully kept his sleeve openings narrow at the cuffs. And never, in all the time since he’d begun to grow his hair long as a young boy, had he ever borrowed a wide sedge hat from a teahouse and gone, face hidden, to the licensed quarter. Neither did it occur to him to gaudily decorate his short sword the way many men did. During the day he thought only of business, and at night his abacus was his pillow. Even his dreams were about new ways to make money.
Autumn deepened, and at night bitter winds began to blow. Moemon, wanting to stay healthy through the winter, decided to have some moxibustion treatment to strengthen his body’s resistance. Osan’s personal maid Rin was supposed to be very skillful at burning the tiny cones of grass on special points, so he asked her to do it. Before they began, she rolled a supply of the little cones between her fingers and draped a striped quilt over both sides of the mirror on her low dressing table so Moemon could hold on to it during the treatment.
The first couple of burning cones on his back were too hot for Moemon to bear. The nurse, the middle maid, and even Také, the kitchen helper, all pressed on Moemon’s skin around the spot to help dull the pain, but they couldn’t help laughing at his grimaces. Smoke rose thickly from one cone after another, and at last the treatment was almost over. Moemon could hardly wait for Rin to light the final cone, which she put on top of a smear of salt to prevent swelling. But when Rin lit the little cone, it fell off the salt and tumbled down Moemon’s spine. His skin twitched wherever the burning grass touched, but he closed his eyes, grit his teeth, and did his best to endure it silently because Rin was being very kind. Rin saw Moemon being considerate, and she pitied him. She kept rubbing his lower back un
til finally she’d managed to put out all the shreds of burning grass.
Rin gives moxibustion treatment to Moemon, who sits on the mat floor with his robe pulled down to his waist. On an acupoint she has lighted a small cone of moxa grass, which gives off smoke, and she will soon remove the hot ashes with special wooden chopsticks. She looks back at Osan, who wears a fine robe decorated with a pattern of stylized wheels. Beside Osan is a nursemaid in a cotton cap. On the board floor is a female servant standing and a parlor maid sitting.
It was the first time Rin had ever touched a man, and in the days that followed she found herself falling in love with Moemon. She suffered alone with her feeling, but someone noticed, and soon everyone in the house, including Osan, knew about it. But even that didn’t deter Rin.
Rin’s parents were poor, and she’d never learned how to write. It pained her deeply not to be able to send Moemon a letter telling him how she felt, and she envied Kyūshichi, the odd-jobs man, his ability to brush out a few basic phrases. Secretly she went to him and asked him to write a love letter to Moemon in her name. Kyūshichi, however, tricked her and tried to make her love him instead. For Rin, the days that followed were long and hard.
One cold, rainy day at the beginning of winter, Osan was writing a letter to her husband in Edo. It was the Tenth Month, when all the gods were believed to leave and gather in Izumo and when ancient poets wondered whether their lovers were as true to them as the cold rains that always fell at that time. For Osan, it was the beginning of a season of untruth. After she finished her letter to her husband, she wrote one for Rin as well, with rapid, flowing strokes of her brush. She folded the letter several times and on the outside fold wrote simply “To Mo,” using the first character of Moemon’s name, followed by an equally intimate “From Me.” Rin was overjoyed when Osan gave her the letter, and she waited for a chance to ask someone to give the letter to Moemon.
Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900 Page 11