And so Shikibu devoted himself to his responsibilities, showing nothing of his emotions, but in his heart he was painfully aware of the transience of human existence. After safely bringing the young master back to the castle in good health, Shikibu pleaded illness and confined himself to his quarters. A short time afterward, his request for termination of his services was granted, and he left Itami. Near Kiyomizu, deep in the mountains of Harima, he and his wife turned their backs on the world and devoted themselves to the Way of the Buddha.
Until that time, no one really knew what had happened at the river, but when Tango learned the details of Katsutarō’s death, he was deeply moved by Shikibu’s resolve. Tango also asked that his service be terminated and entered the religious life. His wife and children put on the black robes as well, and they followed Shikibu to the mountains. There they were awakened from their dreamlike existence in this world of suffering by the sound of the wind soughing in the pines. The tears that they shed together for their sons took the place of the ritual offering of water. Joined by destiny in a most mysterious fashion, Tango and Shikibu worked together toward enlightenment. Like the moon disappearing behind the edge of the mountain,147 their pure and bright hearts joined in a unique friendship, and they aspired to be born together in paradise. Thus the months and the years passed as they performed their religious austerities.
Katsutarō (left) and Tanzaburō (right), each on horseback and each assisted by five male carriers and a footman in the back carrying a covered spear, cross the rough waves of the Ōi River. From the 1688 edition. (From SNKBZ 69, Ihara Saikaku shū 4, by permission of Shōgakukan)
These people are now gone and nothing of them remains in this world. And those who lingered in this world to tell their tale have also vanished into the great beyond.
[Ihara Saikaku shū 4, SNKBZ 69: 340–344, adapted from the translation by Ann Callahan in Tales of Samurai Honor, pp. 45–48]
JAPAN’S ETERNAL STOREHOUSE (NIPPON EITAIGURA, 1688)
In the 1660s, a national network of transportation and communication was formed, and the economy in the Kyoto-Osaka area grew quickly. At the same time, a new type of merchant, who made his fortune in the new currency-based capitalist economy in which capital was invested and circulated, came to the fore, replacing those who had made their fortunes earlier in the century through monopolistic privileges and special connections to domain lords. These enterprising merchants were active not only in Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka but also in the smaller cities and in farm villages in the provinces, where they accumulated wealth that far exceeded that held by the samurai. The first of Saikaku’s so-called chōnin narratives, Japan’s Eternal Storehouse, published in 1688, suggests the techniques for achieving wealth in this new economy. The subtitle of Japan’s Eternal Storehouse is Fortune, Gospel of the New Millionaire (Daifuku shin chōja kyō), indicating that it is a sequel to Gospel of the Millionaire (Chōjakyō), a short book published in 1627 describing how three merchants had become millionaires. The word “millionaire” (chōja) meant a self-made man, but the term “eternal generations” (eitai) also suggests that the objective was to establish a prosperous family line. The book is a “storehouse” (kura) of such models.
The virtues that Saikaku advocates here are ingenuity (saikaku), thrift, diligence, and honesty. The word saikaku (written differently from Saikaku’s name, although he may have chosen his pen name for this association) implies cleverness and quickness of mind, as exemplified in the first selection, “In the Past, on Credit, Now Cash Down” (1:4), in which the draper Mitsui Kurōemon sells goods for cash, eliminating the cost of the usual credit sales. He has each of his clerks specialize in a different cloth and divides the store into departments, thereby inventing the notion of the department store. Mitsui Kurōemon’s real name was Mitsui Hachirōemon, who opened the Echigoya store in 1683, beginning what became the Mitsukoshi Department Store chain.
Japan’s Eternal Storehouse is, however, ultimately a contradictory text. The book begins by purporting to reveal the means of amassing a fortune in the new economy, but in the end, Saikaku shows how difficult it is to achieve that objective and even questions its validity as a goal for urban commoners. Many of the stories, in fact, criticize the worship of money and advocate an honest, frugal, and steady lifestyle. Even though only a few people could make a fortune, all merchants could benefit from the virtue of thrift, which Saikaku ends up making one of his central themes. The most famous example is Fuji-ichi in “The Foremost Lodger in the Land” (2:1). Even if one can make a large profit, if it is by dishonest means, it is better to be poor, as demonstrated by “All Goodness Gone from Tea” (4:4). Saikaku also emphasizes diligence and steady work, which can help anyone, rich or poor. There is a strong tendency to think of the Genroku chōnin as the pleasure-seeking, spendthrift consumers found in the drama and ukiyo-zōshi of the period, particularly Saikaku’s love tales, but the portrait that Saikaku draws here of the honest, steady, and frugal urban commoner is probably more appropriate. Saikaku even provides a number of stories about financial failures, anticipating his more pessimistic view of commoner economic life in Worldly Mental Calculations.
Japan’s Eternal Storehouse was written as much to entertain as to teach. If Saikaku had simply shown examples of those who had succeeded in accumulating a fortune, he would not have been able to attract the interest of his urban commoner readers. Instead, he placed at the center of Eternal Storehouse those who, having broken with normal standards of behavior, enjoyed great success or suffered disastrous failure. As with much of Saikaku’s fiction, the appeal of these stories frequently derives from the humorous twists that he gives to them. (For guidance on currency, see the front matter.)
In the Past, on Credit, Now Cash Down (1:4)
Ancient simplicity is gone. With the growth of pretense, the people of today are satisfied with nothing but finery, with nothing but what is beyond their station or purse. You have only to look at the way our citizens’ wives and daughters dress. They can hardly go further. To forget one’s proper place is to invite the wrath of heaven. Even the august nobility are satisfied with clothes made of nothing more splendid than Kyoto habutae silk,148 and in the military class the formal black dress of five crests149 is considered ill suited to none, from minor retainers to the greatest daimyō. But in recent years, ever since some ingenious Kyoto creatures started the fashion, every variety of splendid material has been used for men’s and women’s clothes, and the drapers’ sample books have blossomed in a riot of color. What with delicate stylish stencil-patterns, multicolored imperial designs, and dapple-dyed motifs, one must seek an exotic effect in other worlds, for every device on earth has been exhausted. Paying for his wife’s wardrobe or his daughter’s wedding trousseau has lightened the pocket of many a merchant and dampened his hopes in business. A courtesan’s daily parade of splendor is made in the cause of earning a living. Amateur beauties—when they are not blossom viewing in spring, maple viewing in autumn, or getting married—can manage well enough without dressing in layers of conspicuous silks.
Not long ago, in a tailor’s shop set back a little from Muromachi Street and displaying on its curtains the crest of a fragrant citron, there was a craftsman who tailored stylish clothes with even more than the usual Kyoto dexterity. Such piles of silk materials and cotton wadding were deposited with him that he enjoyed a constant prospect of Silk Clothes Mountain150 without stirring from his shop. Although it was always a rush to remove the tacking stitches and apply the smoothing iron in time, each year on the first day of the Fourth Month—even as the impatient cuckoo sounded its first notes in the skies above Mount Machikane—he had in his shop a fresh array of splendidly colored summer kimono ready for the season’s Change of Clothes.151 Among them one might have seen garments of three distinct layers—scarlet crepe inside translucent layers of delicate white silk—and garments with sleeves and collars stiffened with padding. Such things were unheard of in earlier days. One step further and we might have been wearin
g imported Chinese silks as work clothes. The recent clothing edicts152 were truly for the good of every one of us, in every province in the land, and on second thought, we are grateful. A merchant wearing fine silks is an ugly sight. Not only is homespun better suited to his station, but he also looks smarter in it.
With samurai, of course, for whom an imposing appearance is essential in the course of duty, even those without any servants should not dress like ordinary persons. In Edo, where peace reigns changeless as the pine, on foundations as firm as the ageless rocks of Tokiwa Bridge, drapers’ establishments were recently opened in Hon-chō to cater to the great lords. As branches of Kyoto firms, they proudly advertised their crests in all the trade guides. Managers and clerks, in single-minded devotion to duty, were united in their efforts to secure orders from the various great mansions that favored them with patronage. Never relaxing for a moment from matters of business, they displayed eloquence and finesse, judgment and ingenuity. Expert in accountancy and never deceived by a dubious coin, they would gouge the eyes from a living bull for profit. To pass beneath the Tiger Gate in the darkness of the night, to prowl a thousand miles in search of custom—such things they accepted as no more than necessary duties. Early next day, while the stars were still shining overhead, they would be hard at work in the shops, checking the weights on the rods of their scales. From dawn until dusk they courted the favor of customers—but things were no longer as they used to be. The broad and fertile plain of Musashi was still there, but every inch of the ground had been exploited, and there were no easy pickings left. Earlier, on the occasion of a lord’s wedding or a distribution of presents, it had been possible for the contractor—with the friendly cooperation of the lord’s chamberlain—to do a little trade on satisfactory terms, but nowadays, with offers invited from all sides, the expected profits were meager and more than outweighed by incidental expenses. The true condition of these businesses told a sad story, and orders were supplied to the great households for prestige only. Not only that, but the greater part of the sales were on credit, and accounts remained unsettled year after year. Such money would have been more profitably invested even with a Kyoto banker. Because the shops were in constant difficulty because of the shortage of ready cash to negotiate new bills of exchange and because it was unthinkable suddenly to close down businesses that had only just been opened, they were obliged to limit themselves to small-scale transactions. But do what they might, the accounts balanced no better, and before long, the main shops in Kyoto were closed and only the Edo branches remained, with their losses running into hundreds and thousands of kanme. Each firm began devising methods of cutting expenses while they were still in business. Had they only known that other ways of trade existed.
In Suruga-chō—a name that brings back memories of the gleam of old koban153—a man called Mitsui Kurōemon risked what capital he had in hand to erect a deep and lofty building of eighteen yards frontage and eighty yards depth and to open a new shop. His policy was to sell everything for cash, without the inflated charges customary in credit sales. More than forty skilled clerks were in his service, constantly under the master’s watchful eye, and to each he assigned full charge of one type of cloth: one clerk for gold brocades, one for Hino and Gunnai silks, one for habutae, one for damask, one for scarlets, one for hempen overskirts, one for woolen goods, and so on. Having divided the shop into departments in this manner, he willingly supplied anything his customers asked for, however trifling—a scrap of velvet an inch square, a piece of imported damask suitable for the cover of an eyebrow tweezers, enough scarlet satin to make a spear-head flag, or a single detachable cuff of ryūmon silk.154 Whenever a samurai required a formal waistcoat for an immediate audience with his lord or someone was in urgent need of a gown for a dress occasion, Kurōemon asked the messenger to wait, marshaled a score or so of the tailors on his staff, manufactured the garment on the spot, and delivered it immediately to the customer. By such means the business flourished, and the average daily sales were said to amount to 150 ryō. The shop was a marvel of convenience to all. To look at, the master was no different from other men—he had the usual eyes, nose, hands, and feet—but a difference lay in his aptitude for his trade. He was the model of a great merchant.
Neatly folded in the alphabetically arranged drawers of his shop were all the materials of Japan and countries overseas, a varied selection of antique silks, Lady Chujo’s homespun mosquito net, Hitomaro’s Akashi crepe, Amida’s bib, a strip of Asahina’s flying-crane kimono, the mattress which Daruma Taishi used for meditation, Rin Wasei’s bonnet, and Sanjō Kokaji’s sword sheath.155 Absolutely nothing was missing. A firm with such well-filled stock books is indeed fortunate!
In Mitsui Kurōemon’s drapery (kimono) store, two salesclerks, one using an abacus and the other displaying various rolls of uncut fabric, attend a samurai customer in a hemmed cap. His servant, wearing a lozenge-pattern robe and holding a sedge hat and a walking stick, crouches beside the pillar. Two other samurai customers, sitting on a bench (lower left), talk to the salesclerks, who are busy weighing coins and entering sales into a ledger. On the earthen floor, a footman with a pole-bound lacquered box (hasamibako), for carrying accoutrements, waits for his master. From the 1688 edition.
The Foremost Lodger in the Land (2:1)
“This is to certify that the person named Fuji-ichi,156 tenant in a house belonging to Hishiya Chōzaemon of Muromachi is, to my certain knowledge, the possessor of one thousand kanme in silver. . . .”
Such would be the style of his testimonial when Fuji-ichi sought new lodgings. He was unique, he claimed, among the wealthy of this world, for although he was worth one thousand kanme, he lived in a rented house no more than four yards wide. In this way he had become the talk of Kyoto. One day he accepted a house in Karasuma Street157 as surety for a fixed-time loan of thirty-eight kanme. As the interest mounted, the surety became forfeit, and for the first time Fuji-ichi became a property owner. He was much vexed at this. Until now he had achieved distinction as “the rich man in lodgings,” but now that he had a house of his own, he was nobody—his money in itself was mere dust by comparison with what lay in the strong rooms of Kyoto’s foremost merchants.
Fuji-ichi was a clever man and made his substantial fortune in his own lifetime. But first and foremost he was a man who knew his own mind, and this was the basis of his success. In addition to carrying on his regular business, he kept a separate ledger, bound from odd scraps of paper, in which, pen in hand, he entered a variety of chance information as he sat all day in his shop. As the clerks from the money exchanges passed by, he noted down the market ratio of copper and gold; he inquired about the current quotations of the rice brokers; he sought information from druggists’ and haberdashers’ assistants on the state of the market at Nagasaki; and he noted the various days on which the Kyoto dealers received dispatches from the Edo branch shops for the latest news on the prices of ginned cotton, salt, and saké. Every day a thousand things were entered in his book, and people came to Fuji-ichi if they ever had questions. He became an invaluable asset to the citizens of Kyoto.
His dress consisted invariably of a thin undervest beneath a cotton kimono, the latter stuffed if necessary with three times the usual amount of padding. He never put on more than one layer of outer garments. It was he who first started wearing detachable cuffs on the sleeves—a device that was both fashionable and economical. His socks were of deerskin, and his clogs were fitted with thick leather soles, but even so, he was careful not to walk too quickly along the hard main roads. Throughout life his only silk garments were of pongee, dyed plain dark blue—there was one, it is true, that he had dyed an undisguisable seaweed brown, but this was a youthful error of judgment, and he was to regret it for the next twenty years. For his ceremonial dress he had no settled crests, being content with a three-barred circle or a small conventional whirl, and even during the summer airing time, he was careful to keep these from direct contact with the floor mats. His overskirts wer
e of hemp, and his starched jacket of an even tougher variety of the same cloth, so that they remained correctly creased no matter how many times he wore them.
When there was a funeral procession that his whole ward was obliged to join, he followed it to the cemetery on Toribe Hill, but coming back he hung behind the others, and on the path across the moor at Rokuhara, he and his apprentices pulled up sour gentian herbs by the roots.158
“Dried in the shade,” he explained, “they make excellent stomach medicine.”
He never passed by anything that might be of use. Even if he stumbled, he used the opportunity to pick up stones for fire lighters, and tucked them in his sleeve. If the head of a household is to keep the smoke rising steadily from his kitchen, he must pay attention to a thousand things like this.
Fuji-ichi was not a miser by nature. It was merely his ambition to serve as a model for others in the management of everyday affairs. Even in the days before he made his money, he never had the New Year rice cakes prepared in his own lodgings. He considered hiring a man to pound the rice, and to bother over the various utensils was too much trouble at such a busy time of the year; so he placed an order with the rice-cake dealer in front of the Great Buddha.159 However, with his intuitive grasp of good business, he insisted on paying by weight—so much per kanme. Early one morning, two days before New Year’s Day, a woman from the cake maker arrived at Fuji-ichi’s shop. Hurrying about her rounds and setting down her load, she shouted for someone to receive the order. The newly pounded cakes, invitingly arrayed, were as fresh and warm as spring itself. The master, pretending not to hear, continued his calculations on the abacus, and the woman, who begrudged every moment at this busy time of the year, shouted again and again. At length a young clerk, anxious to demonstrate his businesslike approach, checked the weight of the cakes on the large scales with a show of great precision and sent the woman away.
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