That night, as the ritual cups of saké were being exchanged, Osan acted as if she were very happy. Then very casually, she remarked, “Zetarō, I must tell you I was born in the year of the fiery horse.55 Most men don’t want to marry me because of that. You know what they say about women like me.”
“I don’t care if you were born in the year of the fiery cat,” Zetarō said, “or even the year of the fiery wolf.56 I love poisonous green lizards myself. In fact, I eat them all the time. And they haven’t killed me yet. I’m twenty-eight, and I’ve never even had a bellyache. Hey, Moemon, you really ought to become tough like me. Just look at this woman. She was raised in Kyoto, and actually she’s much too soft and gentle for me. But I have to marry her because of you. Talk about bad luck! I’m only doing this as a favor because you’re family.”57 He put his head on Osan’s lap, closed his eyes, and dozed off contentedly.
Osan was as amused as she was sad. She could hardly wait for Zetarō to fall soundly asleep, and when he did she and Moemon slipped out of the house. They headed north and disappeared into the depths of Tanba Province.
Several days later they returned to the main road and followed it north into Tango Province. Not much later they reached the shores of the Japan Sea. That night they went to the Monju Hall in Kireto, located near the break in the long, sandy arm of land known as the Amanohashitate,58 and there they spent the night in prayer with other pilgrims. Sometime around what must have been the middle of the night, when Osan was beginning to feel drowsy, she saw a vision of the revered Monju, the bodhisattva of wisdom. “You both have committed flagrant adultery,” the bodhisattva told her. “No matter where you go, you will never be able to escape pain and suffering. You cannot go back into the past now and change what you have done, but from this time on, you must give up your worldly ties. Cut off the long black hair you love so much and take Buddhist vows. If you and he live separately, abandon your bad thoughts, and meditate on the path to enlightenment, people will surely be willing to spare your lives.”
Osan listened to the revelation, unsure whether she was dreaming or awake. Then she thought she heard her voice saying, “Don’t worry about what’s going to happen to me in the future, Monju. I’m doing this because I want to. I like it. I chose to love that man outside my marriage and my social rank, and I’m willing to die for it. Monju, it’s common knowledge that you know all about love between men.59 But you don’t understand a thing about love between women and men!” Just then Osan was aware that an unpleasant dream had ended. All she could hear was the sea wind blowing through the pines on the long spit of land nearby.
“Buddhists say the world’s all dust and dirt,” Osan said to Moemon. “Well then, so what if we’re dirt? The wind blows everyone away, anyway.”
Osan’s love continued and grew even stronger.
EAVESDROPPING ON HIMSELF (5)
When things go badly, people act as if nothing has happened. Gamblers never talk about the times they’ve lost, and men who’ve been taken for everything by a woman in the licensed quarter strut around as though they were too smart ever to visit a place like that. Professional toughs don’t mention fights they’ve lost, and speculating merchants hide their bad investments. People commonly call this “pretending you haven’t stepped on dog shit in the dark.”
Nothing humiliates a married man as much as finding that his wife has been having an affair, and the calendar maker was no exception. But he couldn’t pretend Osan was still alive. She was dead, and that wouldn’t change, so he dutifully notified the authorities and everyone else involved of the facts of her love suicide just as they had been reported to him. After that he acted as if nothing had happened and tried to keep any new rumors from starting. When he remembered how he and Osan had once lived, his heart filled with hatred for her, but he did the proper thing and invited monks to come to his house to say prayers for the repose of her soul. How sad people were when they saw all Osan’s inventive silk robes given to the family temple and, following custom, cut up into Buddhist streamers and canopies. As people saw them turning and fluttering emptily in the wind, they realized Osan really was dead, and their grief grew even deeper.
Humans can be very reckless creatures. Moemon was an honest, responsible man, and so cautious he refused to go outdoors after dark for fear something might happen, but as time passed he began to forget he was a dead man hiding from the world. Gradually he found himself longing to see the capital again. So one day he disguised himself in some shabby clothes, pulled his wide sedge hat down over his face, left Osan with some neighbors in the village, and set off for Kyoto, where he had no business at all going.
Moemon walked along more fearfully than someone being chased by avenging enemies. By the time dark had fallen, he was at the edge of Kyoto. The double reflection of the moon on the surface of Hirosawa Pond60 made him think of Osan, and he began crying uncontrollably into his sleeve. As he passed Narutaki Falls roaring nearby, he was weeping so hard his tears mixed with the water frothing at the foot of the falls.61 He pressed on and made good time through Mimuro and Kitano along a route he knew well, and soon he was walking down city blocks. They made him feel strangely uneasy. Several times his whole body froze in terror at the sight of a figure following right behind him—and each time it turned out to be his own shadow in the bright light of the moon, which was only two nights past full.
Moemon kept walking until he reached the block on which Osan’s parents’ store was located, a block on which he’d spent so much of his own life. There he found a dim spot and stood trying to overhear what people there were saying. First he heard some men wondering why a payment from Edo was late arriving, and then he heard clerks talking, comparing their hairstyles and the cut and fit of their cotton robes. They all were interested in women and wanted to look as sexy as they possibly could. After discussing various things, they finally began to talk about what he was waiting to hear.
“Hey, now, wasn’t that Moemon something?” One said. “First he runs off with the most beautiful woman anybody’s ever seen, and then he doesn’t even hesitate to give up his life. He’s dead, but still, he was a lucky, lucky man.”
“You can say that again. He must have had the time of his life.”
Then Moemon heard a pompous-sounding voice: “Really,” the man said, “you shouldn’t even mention that man’s foul name upwind of normal people. He betrayed his own employers and seduced their daughter, even though she was married. I’ve never heard of such a disgusting thing in my whole life.” The voice went on and on, criticizing Moemon and saying that he was thoroughly immoral.
Moemon was sure it was Kisuke, who worked at the Daimonjiya dry goods store nearby. What an insensitive bastard he is, Moemon thought, saying things like that without any regard for the person he’s talking about. He borrowed ten and a half ounces of silver from me and gave me a receipt for it, but he still hasn’t paid it back. Moemon ground his teeth together in anger. Kisuke, he swore to himself, you’re not going to get away with this. I’ll get that money back from you if I have to wring your neck to get it. But Moemon had no choice. He just stood there hiding, barely managing to endure his rage. Then he heard another voice.
“From what I hear,” the clerk said, “Moemon’s still alive. They say he escaped together with Osan. They probably went somewhere near Ise, and he’s living there with Osan right now. That’s a very sweet thing he’s getting away with, isn’t it.”
When Moemon heard that, his body began shaking uncontrollably, and he broke out in a cold sweat. He left as quickly as he could and went to Third Avenue, where he found a cheap inn for the night. He was so afraid of being discovered that he went directly to his room, without going to the bath. Later, when a beggar passed by in the street crying out for donations during the seventeenth-night moon-viewing ceremonies,62 Moemon went out and gave him a folded paper with twelve copper coins inside and asked him to deliver a written prayer for him to the fire god at the Atago Shrine. As the beggar moved his brush, Moemon dic
tated a prayer asking the god to “keep my matter very secret forever.” But how could he possibly expect the god who protects against fires to help someone who had done such grievous wrong?
Early the next morning Moemon set out to take a last look at Kyoto. Hiding his face, he walked through the eastern hills and then down through the kabuki theaters along the river near the Fourth Avenue. “Come right in,” cried one ticket seller. “See a true-life three-act play starring Fujita Koheiji.63 Show’s starting, show’s starting!” Curious, Moemon went in, thinking he could tell Osan about it when he got back. He rented a round straw mat and went to the back of the open seating area, where he sat down nervously and watched the play from a distance, half-trembling with fear that someone in the theater would recognize him.
The play was about a man who was running off with another man’s daughter. As he watched, Moemon grew more and more uneasy, and then he noticed that the man sitting near the stage several rows directly in front of him was Osan’s husband. Moemon was so shocked his soul almost left his body, and he struggled to stay conscious. He felt as if he were leaping from the top of one cliff to the top of another with all hell down below. Large beads of sweat were running down his body. Managing to stand up, he rushed out of the theater, and he didn’t stop until he was back in the village in Tango Province where he and Osan lived. After that he was so afraid of Kyoto that he never went there again.
A few days before the Chrysanthemum Festival on the ninth of the Ninth Month, a chestnut seller from Tanba Province on a trip to Kyoto stopped at the calendar maker’s house, as he did every year at that time. After rambling on about all sorts of things, he asked about the calendar maker’s wife. No one in the house was willing to say anything, and they all stood awkwardly in silence. “Her?” the calendar maker finally said, a bitter look on his face. “Oh, she dropped dead.”
“Well now, I guess some people are just born into this world to be doubles,” the salesman exclaimed as he was leaving. “In Tango, near where the ocean flows through at the end of the Amanohashitate land spit, there was a woman who was the perfect look-alike for your wife. And the young man with her, he was the living image of Moemon.”
The calendar maker was very interested in what he’d heard, and he sent some men to Tango to see if it was true. When the men came back and reported that the two really were Osan and Moemon, the calendar maker gathered together all the men he had working for him and had them go capture the fugitives.
Osan and Moemon were unable to escape punishment for their serious crimes, and after an investigation they were condemned to death, along with Tama, the woman who had acted as their go-between. Like a dream at dawn on the twenty-second of the Ninth Month, all three were bound and paraded on horseback around the capital as a lesson to others and then taken to the Awataguchi execution grounds, where they disappeared like the dew on the morning grass. But they lived their last moments with such dignity that they became a legend. Even now people talk about Osan and describe her as if she were again before their eyes riding along in her plain blue green prisoner’s robe.
[Saikaku shūjō, NKBT 47: 260–280, translated by Chris Drake]
LIFE OF A SENSUOUS WOMAN (KŌSHOKU ICHIDAI ONNA, 1686)
Ihara Saikaku wrote Life of a Sensuous Woman at the peak of his career. Published in Osaka, the work, in six volumes and twenty-four chapters, marks one of the last in a series of “books on love” (kōshoku-mono), a subgenre of books of the floating world (ukiyo-zōshi), which began with Life of a Sensuous Man. Life of a Sensuous Woman is an aging woman’s extended confession to two young men. She describes her various experiences, beginning with her childhood (as the daughter of a former aristocrat in Kyoto) and her life as an attendant in the imperial palace through a series of increasingly low positions, until in the end she falls to the position of a streetwalker. If Life of a Sensuous Man is seen as a parody of the noted Heian male lovers Genji and Narihira, Life of a Sensuous Woman can be regarded as a seventeenth-century version of the legendary Ono no Komachi, known for her transformation from a stunning beauty with many lovers to an unattractive old woman. In contrast to Life of a Sensuous Man, about a man who seems to remain forever young and optimistic, Life of a Sensuous Woman looks at the world of love and sexuality from the perspective of a woman who is growing older and whose outlook is becoming increasingly bleak.
Life of a Sensuous Woman, the only major narrative that Saikaku wrote in the first person, structurally echoes the Buddhist zange, or confession narrative, as found, for example, in the late medieval tale The Three Priests (Sannin hōshi) or the early-seventeenth-century Two Nuns (Nininbikuni, ca. 1632), in which someone who has become a priest or nun recounts a past life of sin, particularly the crisis that led to spiritual awakening. Instead of a religious confession, the aged woman narrator is implicitly initiating the two young men visitors into the secrets of the way of love, describing a life of vitality and sexual desire. Some of the earlier chapters, in fact, reveal the influence of courtesan critiques. It is not until the end, when the sight of the statues of the five hundred disciples causes the woman to have a vision of many of the men with whom she has had relations, that the narrative takes the form of a Buddhist confession.
Significantly, the two young male listeners ask the aged woman to tell them about her past experience in “the style of the present” (imayō). Instead of describing her life in the past as it happened, she transforms it into the present, telling it as if she were repeatedly living “today.” In this fashion, Saikaku explores many of the positions that a woman could have at the time—as a palace attendant, a dancer, a mistress of a domain lord, a high-ranking woman of the licensed quarter (tayū), a priest’s wife, a teacher of calligraphy and manners, a nun who performs Buddhist chants (utabikuni), a hairdresser, a seasonal house cleaner, a go-between for marital engagements, a seamstress, a waitress at a teahouse, a streetwalker, and many other professions—providing a remarkable portrayal of a cross section of contemporary commoner society. Life of a Sensuous Woman has in fact been described by many modern scholars as a novel of manners. Sometimes with the names of actual people barely disguised, Saikaku satirically reveals the underside of the lives of domain lords, powerful samurai, wealthy priests, and upper-level merchants. Throughout the work, Saikaku’s main interest remains the woman’s resourcefulness and imagination in these concrete social circumstances and how these contexts evoke or frustrate her irrepressible desire.
An Old Woman’s Hermitage (1:1)
A beautiful woman, many ages have agreed, is an ax that cuts down a man’s life. No one, of course, escapes death. The invisible blossoms of the mind64 finally fall and scatter; the soul leaves; and the body is fed like kindling into a crematorium fire in the night. But for the blossoms to fall all too soon in a morning storm—ah, how foolish are the men who die young of overindulgence in the way of sensuous love. Yet there is no end of them.
On the seventh of the First Month, the day people go out to have their fortunes told, I had to visit Saga65 in northwest Kyoto. As if to show that spring had truly come, the plums at Umezu Crossing66 were just breaking into blossom. On the eastbound ferry to Saga I saw an attractive young man dressed in the latest style but unmistakably disheveled. His face was pale, and he was thin and worn, obviously from too much lovemaking. He looked as if he didn’t have much time left and was getting ready to leave his inheritance to his own parents.
“I’ve never lacked anything at all,” he said to the man with him. “But there’s one thing I really would like. I wish my pledging liquid could keep flowing on and on like this river and never stop.”
His friend was startled. “What I’d like,” he said, “is a country without women. I’d go there and find a quiet place to live, far from any town. There I’d take good care of myself, so I could live to a decent old age. The world keeps changing, and I’d really like to see a lot of different things.”
The two men had opposite attitudes toward life and death. One sought as much sens
ual pleasure as he could get, even though he knew that it was shortening his life, and the other wanted to give up love altogether and live many more years. Both longed for the impossible, and they talked in a dazed way, halfway between dreaming and waking.
After we reached the other side, the men joked and horsed around, staggering along the path on the bank and stamping without a thought on the parsley and thistles that were coming into leaf. Finally they turned away from the river, left the last houses behind, and entered the shadows of the mountains to the north. I felt curious about them and followed at a distance. Eventually we came to a grove of red pines and, within it, an old fence made of bundled bush-clover stalks that were beginning to come apart. Beside the braided bamboo gate a gap had been opened so a dog could pass through. Inside the fence, in deep silence, stood a meditation hut, its front roof sloping down from a boulder above the mouth of a natural cave. Ferns grew in its thatched eaves, and vines clung to the roof, their leaves still tinted with last fall’s colors.
To the east stood a willow tree, and from below it came a soft sound. Clear, pure water was flowing naturally through a raised pipe of split bamboo from a source nearby. I looked around for the venerable monk that I assumed must live there and was surprised to see an old woman, one whose face the years had given a refined beauty. Her back was bent, but her frost-touched hair was well combed. Her eyes were as soft and hazy as the moon low on the western horizon. Over an old-style sky blue wadded-silk robe embroidered with gold thread, she wore another splashed with a dappled pattern of thickly petaled chrysanthemums. Her medium-width sash, with flowers in a lozenge design, was tied in front—stylish even at her age. To the crossbeam above the front of what seemed to be her bedroom was attached a weathered plaque that read “Hut of a Sensuous Hermit.” A scent of incense lingered in the air. I think it must have been First Warbler’s Cry, a very fine aloeswood.67
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