“Far from it. This may be the great castle town of the shōgun, but it is also the meeting place for all the sharpest men in Japan, and they won’t give you three zeni for nothing. In Edo you cannot get anywhere without capital.”
“But during all the time you’ve been looking about, have no fresh ideas for trade occurred to you?”
“Well, you could pick up the empty shells that people scatter all over the town, burn them at Reigan-jima, and sell the ashes as lime. Or since people are hard pressed for time in this place, you could shred edible seaweed or shave dried bonito into ‘flower strips’ and sell them by the plateful. Or you could buy a roll of cotton and sell it piecemeal as hand towels. Apart from things like this, there seems to be no way of starting trade on an almost empty pocket.”
Their words had given him the idea he wanted. At dawn he took his leave, and when he gave the three of them a parting gift of one hundred zeni each, their delight knew no bounds.
“Your luck has come!” they cried. “You’ll make a pile of money as high as Mount Fuji!”
After this he went to visit an acquaintance who had a cotton-goods shop in Tenma-chō, and there he related the details of his present predicament and his plans. The shopkeeper was sympathetic.
“In a case like this, honest work is the only answer,” he said. “Try your luck at trade for a bit.”
Taking heart, Shinroku purchased a roll of cotton on which he had set his mind and cut it up for sale as hand towels. On the twenty-fifth of the Third Month, the festival day of the Tenjin Shrine at Shitaya, he started his new business. Seated at the base of the holy-water font by the entrance, he offered his towels for sale. The pilgrims, believing that this was another way of improving their luck, bought them gladly, and at the end of the first day he had already made a profit. Every day thereafter he made more money, and within ten years he was rumored to be worth five thousand koban. For shrewdness he was considered in a class of his own. People took Shinroku’s advice on many matters, and he became a treasured asset in the area. On his shop awnings he printed a picture of the god Daikoku wearing a reed hat, and his firm was known as the Hatted Daikokuya. . . .
Eight for the daimyō’s agent,
Nine for the nuggets of gold in his stock,
Ten for a tale’s happy ending.
And happy too was his lot in living in this tranquil age!
All the Goodness Gone from Tea (4:4)
One gold bankin a day—that, they say, is the average toll levied on cargoes arriving at the port of Tsuruga in Echizen. The daily toll on freighters up and down the Yodo River is no higher. Tsuruga is a place where wholesalers of every kind flourish, but its period of greatest activity is in the autumn, when rows of temporary shops are erected for the annual market. The streets take on a truly metropolitan air, and to look at the women, strolling at ease amid crowds of men and bearing themselves with feminine grace and restraint, you might think that a new Kyoto had sprung up in the north. This also is the season for traveling players to converge on the town and for pickpockets to gather in strength. But people have learned to keep their wits about them: they have abandoned altogether the practice of hanging valuable inrō ornaments from their belts and hide their money wallets far out of reach in the folds of their kimono. These are hard times indeed, if even the brotherhood of thieves can no longer make a dishonest penny in a crowd this size. But honesty still reaps its reward, and a skillful tradesman, humbly inviting buyers to inspect his wares, treating each customer with courtesy and respect, need not despair of making a living.
On the outskirts of the town lived a man called Kobashi no Risuke. With no wife or children to support, his only care each day was to provide a living for himself. In his approach to this he displayed considerable ingenuity. He had built a smart portable tea server, and early every morning, before the town was astir, he set the contraption across his shoulders and set out for the market streets. His sleeves were strapped back with bright ribbon; he wore formal divided skirts, tightly bound at each ankle—the picture of efficiency—and on his head he set a quaint eboshi cap.172 He might have passed for the god Ebisu himself. When he cried “Ebisu tea! A morning cup of Ebisu tea!” the superstitious merchants felt obliged to buy a drink for luck, even if they were not at all thirsty, and from force of habit they tossed him twelve zeni for each cup. His luck never changed, day after day, and before long he had enough capital to open a retail tea shop and do business on a larger scale. Later he hired several assistants, and he rose to be a leading merchant in the wholesale trade.
So far, as a man who had made a fortune by his own efforts, he had earned nothing but admiration and respect. He even received, and rejected, requests from influential citizens to marry their daughters.
“I shall take no wife before I have ten thousand ryō,” he used to say, calculating that matrimony might involve inconvenient expenses at the moment. “There is plenty of time left before I pass forty.”
For the time being, he found sufficient pleasure in watching his money grow, and he lived in solitary bachelorhood. As time passed he became less scrupulous in his business methods: sending his assistants to all parts of Etchū and Echigo Provinces, he bought used tea leaves on the pretext they were needed for Kyoto dyes, and he mixed these with the fresh leaves in his stock. People could see no difference, and his sales brought tremendous profits. For a period, at least, his household enjoyed great prosperity, but heaven, so it would seem, did not approve. Risuke became stark-raving mad, gratuitously revealing his private affairs to the whole province and babbling about tea dregs wherever he went. People cut him dead: they would have no dealings with a man whose fortune was so disreputably made. Even when he summoned a doctor, no one would come. Left to himself he grew steadily weaker, until he did not have even the strength to drink hot or cold water. Once, toward the end, he begged tearfully for a mouthful of tea to cleanse him of worldly thoughts, but although they held the cup before him, a barrier of retribution was firmly settled in his throat. Then, scarcely able to breathe, he ordered his servants to bring the money from his strong room and lay it about his body, from head to foot.
“To think that all this gold and silver will be someone else’s when I die!” he sobbed. “What a sad and dreadful thought that is!”
He clasped the money to his breast; he clenched it between his teeth; his tears trailed crimson streaks across his ashen face; and he needed only horns to be the image of a white devil. In his madness he leaped wildly about the room, a shadow of his former self, and even though he sank down again and again in exhaustion, no one could hold him still for long. He revived and started searching for his money once more. Thirty-four or thirty-five times he repeated this performance. By then even his own servants could find no more pity for him. They were terrified, and one by one they gathered in the kitchen, grasping sticks and clubs to defend themselves. They waited for two or three days, and when they could no longer hear any sounds, they rose together and peeped into the room. Risuke lay there with staring eyes, still clutching his money. Nearly dead with fright they bundled his body, just as it was, into a palanquin and set off for the cremation ground.
It was a mild spring day, but suddenly black clouds swirled into view; sheets of rain sent torrents racing across the flat fields; gusts of wind snapped withered branches from the trees; and lightning lit the skies. Perhaps it was the lightning that stole away the body even before they had a chance to burn it. In any event, nothing remained now except the empty palanquin. With their own eyes they had witnessed the terrible truth that this world of the senses is a world of fire.173 They turned and fled, and every one of them became a devout follower of the Buddha.
The frenzied Risuke has leaped out of his sickbed, clasping a packet of silver in his right hand and a piece of gold coin in his left. Other bundles of money and coins are scattered around his bedding. Three servants, each holding a stick, attempt to restrain Risuke while a bald doctor in a black robe and three female servants flee. In the shop
front are a large tea bushel, a gigantic tea jar, a basket filled with tea leaves, and a tea-leaf scale.
Later, all of Risuke’s distant relatives were summoned and asked to divide the deceased’s property, but when they heard what had happened they shook with fright, and none of them would take so much as an odd chopstick. They told the servants to split the property among themselves. But the servants showed no enthusiasm at all; on the contrary, they left the house and even the articles of clothing that Risuke had given them during their service. Since the laity, trained in the world of greed, had shown themselves to be so stupid, there was nothing to do but sell the whole property at a loss and donate the proceeds to the local temple. The priests were delighted with their windfall. Because the money could not be used for sacred purposes, they went to Kyoto, where they had the time of their lives with boy actors and brought smiles of happiness to the faces of the Higashiyama brothel keepers.
Strangely enough, even after his death Risuke made regular rounds of the various wholesale stores to collect his dues on previous credit sales. The proprietors knew well enough that he was dead, but from sheer terror at seeing him in his old form they settled their accounts at once, without attempting to give him short weight. The news of his reappearance caused wide alarm. They called Risuke’s old house a “ghost mansion,” and when nobody would take it even as a gift, it was left to crumble and become a wilderness.
It is easy enough, as may be observed, to make money by shady practices. Pawning other people’s property, dealing in counterfeit goods, plotting with confidence tricksters to catch a wife with a large dowry, borrowing piecemeal from the funds of innumerable temples, and defaulting wholesale on a plea of bankruptcy, joining gangs of gambling sharks, hawking quack medicines to country bumpkins, terrorizing people into buying inferior ginseng roots, conniving with your wife to extort money from her lovers, trapping pet dogs for skins, charging to adopt unweaned babies and starving them to death, collecting the hair from drowned corpses174—all these are ways of supporting life. But if we live by subhuman means, we might as well never have had the good fortune to be born human. Evil leaves its mark deep in a man’s heart, so that no kind of villainy seems evil to him any longer. And when he has reached that stage, he is indeed in a pitiful state of degradation. The only way to be a man is to earn one’s livelihood by means appropriate to a man. Life, after all, is a dream of little more than fifty years, and whatever one does for a living, it is not difficult to stay so brief a course.
[Saikaku shūge, NKBT 48: 46–49, 59–63, 125–129, adapted from the translation by G. W. Sargent in The Japanese Family Storehouse]
WORLDLY MENTAL CALCULATIONS (SEKEN MUNEZAN’YŌ, 1692)
Worldly Mental Calculations, the last major prose work published in Saikaku’s lifetime, appeared in the first month of 1692, a year before Saikaku’s death. With only a few exceptions, the twenty short stories in Worldly Mental Calculations focus on the twenty-four hours of the last day of the year. By the end of the seventeenth century, buying and selling on credit was standard practice, with certain days set as the deadline for returning loans.175 The last day of the year was by far the most important day, when expenses and debts for the entire year had to be settled. There was a widespread belief that if one survived the last day of the year, one could survive the next year. One consequence was that many people with little money pawned their clothing and other possessions on the last day of the year.
Worldly Mental Calculations focuses on this tumultuous day in the Kyoto-Osaka region, the two major merchant cities at the time, looking specifically at the middle-and lower-class urban commoners who had been left behind by the new economy and for many of whom urban life had become a kind of hell on earth. Unlike Japan’s Eternal Storehouse, which describes upper-class merchants who had made fortunes in the old and new economies, Worldly Mental Calculations, probably Saikaku’s darkest and most pessimistic text, deals mostly with city dwellers who cannot make ends meet. Here, the interest of the narrative has shifted from imaginative ways of making money to the elaborate ruses and schemes to avoid debt collectors and to the psychological and social effects of extreme poverty. As revealed in “In Our Impermanent World, Even Doorposts Are Borrowed” (2:4), even when the characters engage in devious behavior, the narrator reacts with amazement or occasional pity rather than with words of condemnation. At the same time, Saikaku shows, as in “His Dream Form Is Gold Coins” (3:3), that not all impoverished commoners are ready to sell themselves for money. Significantly, relatively few of the characters in Worldly Mental Calculations have names, and many appear only briefly. Instead, as in “Holy Man Heitarō” (5:3), anonymous individuals are often linked by a common sense of desperation and loss. In this story, a priest is about to give a special New Year’s Eve sermon about Heitarō, a disciple of Shinran, the founder of the True Pure Land sect (Jōdo shinshū), which, along with the Nichiren sect, was the most popular Buddhist institution. He attracts only three listeners, however, each of whom “confesses” his or her nonreligious motives for coming to the temple. Here, as in the other stories, Saikaku mixes humor, surprising twists, and irony even in his darkest stories, ultimately creating the effect of tragicomedy.
In Our Impermanent World, Even Doorposts Are Borrowed 176 (2:4)
Familiarity takes away our fear of things. In Kyoto there is a rice-field path called the Narrow Path of Shujaka that has become very famous and is often sung about in popular short songs because it leads to the Shimabara licensed quarter. One fall at harvest time, a farmer whose field was near the path put up a scarecrow with an old wide rush hat and bamboo walking stick. But the crows and kites were so used to seeing big spenders with their friends and attendants walking to and from the quarters discreetly wearing rush hats down over their faces that the birds thought the scarecrow was just another visitor who’d decided to come alone. They weren’t the slightest bit afraid, and later they began to perch on its hat, flattering and cajoling it as if it were a rich patron.
For most people, there’s nothing more frightening than a visit from a bill collector, but one Kyoto man who’d been in debt for many years stayed home even on the last day of the year and didn’t try to dodge the collectors. “Not a single person in history,” he told the assembled collectors, “has ever had his head cut off for owing money. I’ll definitely pay back what I have. Honestly speaking, I’d like to pay it all back. But I can’t pay what I don’t have. What I’d really like right now,” he said, walking over to a tree in a sunny corner of the garden, “is a money tree. But I haven’t planted any seeds, so I’m not counting on finding one.” Then he unrolled an old straw mat and got out a pair of iron fish skewers and a kitchen knife, which he began to sharpen.
“Now, there, so much for the rust,” he said. “But I can’t even afford dried sardines this New Year’s, so I’m not going to chop a single one with this. You just never know about emotions. Right now I might suddenly be feeling extremely angry about something, and this knife might very well help me kill myself. I’m getting pretty old. I’m fifty-six already, and I’m certainly not afraid of dying. You all know that fat, greedy merchant in the business district who’s going to die young for something he’s done. Well, if he’ll pay back all my debts for me, completely, just like that, then I swear, in all truthfulness before the great fox god Inari, I swear I’ll take all the responsibility for whatever it was the man did. I’ll cut myself wide open and die instead of him.”
The man waved the knife around, and his eyes gleamed wildly as if he were possessed by the fox god. Just then a large cock came by, clicking its beak.
“Hey,” he shouted at the bird. “Today you’re my sacrifice. Bring me good luck on my journey to the other world, will you!” Then he cut off its head.
The debt collectors were shaken. It would be dangerous to try to negotiate with the man in the state he was in, and one by one they began to leave. On their way out each collector stopped in front of the teapot boiling on the kitchen hearth and told the
man’s wife how much he sympathized with her for being married to such a short-tempered man. The aggressive strategy the man had used for getting rid of the bill collectors was a common one, yet it was a shabby way to settle his accounts for the year. He hadn’t said a single word of apology, and he’d finished everything all too simply.
Among the bill collectors was an apprentice to a lumber dealer in Horikawa.177 He was still eighteen or nineteen and hadn’t yet begun to shave the top of his head. He kept his hairlines at ninety-degree angles at the temples to show he was already a young man, but he still wore his hair long, and his body looked as delicate and frail as a woman’s. In actuality, he was strong willed and fearless. While the owner of the house was threatening the other collectors with his act, the young man sat on the low bamboo verandah, not paying the slightest attention. Nonchalantly he took a string of prayer beads out of his long, hanging sleeve and began to count the number of times he’d chanted Amida Buddha’s holy name. Later, after the other collectors had left and the house had returned to normal, he went over and addressed the owner.
“Well,” he said, “the play seems to have ended. Now it’s time to pay me the money you owe so I can leave.”
“‘Pay’?” the owner replied. “What right have you got to stay here with that smirking, know-it-all look on your face when all the grown men have had the good sense to leave?”
“I’m very busy right now,” the young man said, “and yet I was forced to sit through a useless farce about a man pretending to threaten suicide.”
“You’re wasting your time prying around.”
The owner goes to the front gate to stop the debt collector, holding a large mallet for knocking out the gateposts. Having pretended to disembowel himself, the owner stands with his robe half off. Two felicitous pines, a New Year’s decoration, stand in front of the gate. A peddler of decorative pine branches (left), a woman carrying a New Year’s decorative paddle and arrow (right), a fish seller, a man delivering saké, and a crockery peddler, resting his load on a pole, all look on. From the 1692 edition.
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