Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900

by Shirane, Haruo, ed.

  19. Komurasaki (deep purple) is associated with Fujiwara because of the purple color of fuji (wisteria). Because it was the color worn by high-ranking members of the nobility, it also connotes courtliness.

  20. The rusticity of the woodsman is meant to represent the opposite of courtliness and functions as a metaphor for inferior poetry.

  21. Kokinshū, the first imperial anthology of waka, was edited in the early tenth century.

  22. That is, the early Heian period. The capital was moved to Heian (present-day Kyoto) in 794.

  23. This is the period during which the Kokinshū was compiled.

  24. The idea here is that poets can compose properly in the Kokinshū style only if they have a thorough knowledge of the Man‘yōshū. Mabuchi continues this line of reasoning in the following section, in which he explains the methodology of learning the Man‘yōshū before the Kokinshū in terms of the perspective one gains by climbing to a vantage point in order to view what lies below.

  25. Those “above” and “below” refer here to the rulers and the ruled.

  26. Norinaga affixed this poem to a self-portrait dating from 1790. It represents his ideal of seeking out an essentially Japanese spirit. Cherry blossoms are a conventional image in the Japanese poetic tradition, and the morning sun is associated with Japan, which, as the country farthest to the east, is described (in both Norinaga’s time and today) as the “land of the rising sun.” Shikishima no is a makurakotoba, an epithet for Yamato (Japan).

  27. That is, Confucianism and Buddhism. See the discussion of this issue in the selections from The Essence of The Tale of Genji.

  28. The term “august,” which is meant to convey somewhat the sense of Norinaga’s selfconsciously archaic style in this passage, is used as a translation for various honorific terms pertaining to gods and emperors. This kind of deliberate archaism is particularly prominent in The Spirit of the Gods.

  29. The “Fireflies” chapter of The Tale of Genji includes a scene in which monogatari are defended against the charge that they are a frivolous diversion and full of falsehoods. In an earlier section of The Essence of The Tale of Genji, Norinaga provides an extensive commentary on the defense of the monogatari in the “Fireflies” chapter and uses the ideas presented in this chapter to develop his own theory of the monogatari. Norinaga includes a similar discussion in his later work The Tale of Genji, a Small Jeweled Comb.

  30. According to the Kojiki, Amaterasu, the sun goddess, was the ancestor of the imperial line.

  31. The heavenly symbols (or the three divine treasures) are the mirror, beads, and sword that constitute the imperial regalia. Norinaga is referring here to a passage in the Kojiki in which Amaterasu Ōmikami bestows these on her grandson Ninigi no Mikoto, ordering him to descend from the heavens to rule Japan. Ninigi no Mikoto is the great-grandfather of Emperor Jinmu, the founder of the Japanese imperial line and the first human ruler in the Kojiki.

  32. Man‘yōshū, no. 800, a chōka, contains the lines “. . . as far as the heavenly clouds trail, and as far as the toad ranges, he reigns.”

  33. Tenmei (Ch. tianming) has a variety of meanings, but Norinaga is specifically dealing with the theory that a ruler’s legitimacy derives from having been granted a mandate from heaven to rule, a mandate that could be withdrawn if the ruler failed to govern properly. In Chinese historiography, the transfer of power from one dynasty to the next was explained in this way as a withdrawal of the mandate to rule from the old dynasty and its handover to the new dynasty, but here Norinaga argues that this kind of explanation is merely a pretense designed to grant moral authority to new rulers by covering up the fact that their power derived from an exercise of force.

  34. An alternative reading of Magatsuhi. The two Magatsuhi gods are Yaso Magatsuhi no Kami and ō Magatsuhi no Kami. According to the Kojiki, these gods have their source in the pollution to which the god Izanagi was exposed when he traveled to the underworld to visit his dead wife, Izanami. After returning from the underworld, Izanagi undergoes a process of purification by bathing in a stream, and the Magatsuhi gods are born from the impurities that he washes away from his body.

  35. Another name for Takamimusubi, one of three gods described in the opening section of the Kojiki as coming into being at the beginning of heaven and earth.

  36. Here Norinaga is specifically targeting Ogyū Sorai’s theory that the Way is a creation of the human rulers of ancient China.

  37. Izanagi and Izanami are described in the Kojiki as giving birth to the islands of Japan as well as to a large number of other gods.

  Chapter 16

  SHAREBON: BOOKS OF WIT AND FASHION

  The sharebon, which flourished in the late eighteenth century at the same time as senryū, kyōka, kyōshi, and kibyōshi, was a short-story form that satirized the life of the sophisticate in the licensed quarters, particularly Yoshiwara in Edo. The sharebon was preceded by the ukiyo-zōshi, which became popular in the late seventeenth century, and was followed by the ninjōbon, which emerged in the early nineteenth century. The sharebon differed from the ukiyo-zōshi in having been influenced by enshi, Chinese courtesan literature. Very early sharebon such as Words on the Wine Cup of the Pleasure Quarters (Ryōha shigen, 1728), which was a narrative description of the Yoshiwara and its customs, were written in kanbun (Chinese prose), were similar in size to Chinese books, bore Chinese titles, and had a preface and an afterword. By the Kyōhō era (1716–1736), Chinese studies was no longer confined to ethics and politics but had come to embrace poetry and belles lettres, which were pursuits of both samurai and urban commoners. These scholars considered themselves Chinese-style literati (bunjin), detached literary dilettantes, for whom Chinese courtesan literature was a form of escape and entertainment. In their experimentation with Japanese versions, they produced the early sharebon. The form became popular and spread from Edo to Kyoto and Osaka, where it incorporated a dialogue-libretto style derived from drama.

  Sharebon acquired a definitive shape during the Meiwa era (1764–1772), particularly after the publication of The Playboy Dialect (Yūshi hōgen) in 1770, and took the generic name of sharebon in the An’ei era (1772–1781). The Edo-based sharebon, beginning with The Playboy Dialect, blended two fundamental dimensions. The first was satirical humor, which it shared with the Edo-based dangibon (satiric sermons), and the second was an interest in the manners of the pleasure quarters. Licensed quarters such as the Yoshiwara in Edo were a world run by money and separate from everyday life and society. To understand this special culture with its complex rules and customs and to know how to conduct oneself in this world was to be a tsūjin (man of tsū), a sophisticate or connoisseur. Accordingly, the Edo-based sharebon satirized customs of the pleasure quarters, and the main target became the half-sophisticate, the fake tsū or half-tsū, whom the contemporary reader both laughed at and empathized with. That is, instead of describing a person of tsū, the sharebon humorously described those who failed to achieve this aesthetic and social ideal.

  THE PLAYBOY DIALECT (YŪSHI HŌGEN, 1770)

  The first true sharebon was The Playboy Dialect, written by an anonymous author who called himself Inaka Rōjin Tada no Jijii (Justa Geezer the Old Hayseed). The title Yūshi hōgen is a comic twist on Master Yang’s Sayings (Yōshi hōgen), a noted Chinese imitation of Confucius’s Analects by Yang Xiong (53 B.C.E.-C.E.18), a Han Confucian scholar. On the surface, The Playboy Dialect resembles the early sharebon Words on the Wine Cup of the Pleasure Quarters (Ryōha shigen, 1728) with its Chinese-style cover, Chinese title, and Chinese preface. The body of The Playboy Dialect, however, combined dramatic dialogue with the satire of the Edo-based dangibon to create a new form that flourished throughout the An’ei-Tenmei era (1772–1789). The title Playboy Dialect refers to the highly specialized, modish jargon used only in the licensed quarters, the mastery of which was a mark of a tsū. In the manner of the sharebon, the main character (the Man-About-Town), a half-baked sophisticate, takes a young man (the Youth) on a trip to the Yoshiwar
a, where the Man-About-Town tries to show off his “knowledge” of the quarter. The Youth, who is well dressed and has an attendant, appears to be from a prosperous merchant family, while the Man-About-Town is a middle- or lower-level samurai—as are almost all the half-tsū characters in other sharebon—and is not affluent, even appearing to have run up debts around town. Hira, another important male character, is a high-ranking samurai, probably from the provinces, with more resources. Like the Man-About-Town, Hira has pretensions but is in fact largely ignorant of the subtleties of Yoshiwara. The Man-About-Town boasts to the Youth that he is engaging in a tsū activity called shinzō-kai (literally, buying an apprentice courtesan) in which the favored (and usually young and less affluent) lover of a high-ranking courtesan hires an apprentice courtesan in the same establishment at a much lower price, and the high-ranking courtesan then finds an opportunity to slip away from her paying client and surreptitiously spend time with her lover. In a somewhat similar fashion, Hira mistakes the custom of myōdai (substitution) for shinzō-kai. Myōdai was a common practice in which an apprentice courtesan was sent to fetch and then to entertain (but not sleep with) a client as he waited for his assigned courtesan while she was occupied with another customer.

  The Playboy Dialect set the pattern for all subsequent sharebon, with its pseudo-dramaturgical format, its description of a journey to the pleasure quarters, an implicit comparison of the tsū and the half-tsū, and the temporal span of one afternoon and one night. In The Playboy Dialect the implicit desire of the protagonist—the half-baked sophisticate—is to be liked and admired by the courtesan or to create the appearance of being attractive to the courtesan. Note here that the women maintain firm control over the men, whom they skillfully manipulate, stroking their egos, keeping them in line, and extracting from them as much money as possible. The exception here is the Youth, whom the women find genuinely attractive for his good looks, youth, and lack of pretension. While the Man-About-Town’s and Hira’s bungled attempts to be admired by the top courtesans are satirized and the reader laughs at their struggles, the contemporary reader and the author at the same time empathized and identified with the half-tsu’s desire to be admired by the courtesan—a desire that lay at the heart of this genre but was never explicitly stated.

  Preface

  There are many blossoms of great beauty—many indeed. But they cannot compare with the beauty of the blossoms of blossom town,1 for these blossoms also have human feelings. The blossoms of the peach and plum may be beautiful, but they can neither speak nor recite verse. Peony and crabapple blossoms may be splendid, but they can neither laugh nor sing. But as for these blossoms, not only can they speak and recite, but glance once at their hues and instantly they will snatch away your spirit and bemuse your soul; let their fragrance once touch your nostrils, and instantly it will cause your heart to soar and your guts to twist. And what is more, they do not droop beneath the frosts and dews, nor are they crushed by the winds and rains. To possess them is not forbidden; to use them is not to exhaust them. Spring or fall, day or night, we never need be without their fragrant loveliness. How can we equate their flowering and decline with the blossoms of mere shrubs and grasses? We sing the praises of flowers that bloom on plants—but what, then, of these blossoms? Ah, what a delight it is to roam at will throughout the Northern Continent!2 And thus concludes my preface.

  Justa Geezer the Old Hayseed

  Live for Pleasure Alone! 3

  BEGINNING

  On an unseasonably warm day in early winter, a man some thirty-four or thirty-five years of age can be seen near Weeping Willow Bridge.4 He is balding slightly, and his hair is shaven far back from his forehead on top and plucked back above the temples in an outsize broad-forehead Honda hairstyle.5 He wears an outer coat of fine black- and yellow-striped figured silk, with a narrow striped sash wound high about the midriff, into which is thrust a rather slender short sword, its haft somewhat stained. The family crests on his kimono6 of fine, glossy black silk are slightly soiled, and he appears to have exchanged one of the sleeves of his finely patterned silk undercoat for that of a lover’s garment. He wears an underrobe of faded scarlet silk crepe, and his feet are in wide, low, uncomfortable-looking geta. In one hand he holds a pointed Yamaoka cloth hood. He has no tissue case; some leaves of kogiku tissue paper, folded in four, can just be seen protruding from under his lapel.7 He gazes about him with glittering eyes as if to say, “No man can hope to rival me in love.”

  As he ambles along with no apparent destination, from the opposite direction comes a young man of barely twenty. He looks to have a mild and congenial disposition. He is wearing a splendid short sword and a cotton-padded outer coat of black crepe marked with five pure white family crests,8 a kimono patterned in brown stripes on a dark background, an olive-color crepe underrobe, glossy striped hakama trousers of fine kohaku silk, and straw sandals, their thongs intertwined with white paper. He is accompanied by an attendant carrying a bunch of flowers and a parcel wrapped in an unfigured silk cloth, and he shades his face with a fan as he walks.

  The Honda hairstyle.

  MAN-ABOUT-TOWN: Hey, there, lover boy, lover boy!

  YOUTH: Well, hello—how goes it? I was just talking about you with our teacher9 the other day.

  MAN-ABOUT-TOWN: Teacher? Never mind all that, never mind all that! Where are you off to?

  YOUTH: I’m headed up toward Honjo.

  MAN-ABOUT-TOWN: Do you have to go? What is it you’re going there for?

  YOUTH: My uncle is sick, and I’m going over to visit him.

  MAN-ABOUT-TOWN: If your uncle is sick, then I’d say just to let it slide.10

  YOUTH: Why is that?

  MAN-ABOUT-TOWN: It’s such splendid weather; I was hoping to get you to come view the autumn leaves with me at Shōtō-ji temple.

  YOUTH: I see. I’d like to visit Shōtō-ji too. I wonder if I could go there and still make it back in time to get to Honjo.

  MAN-ABOUT-TOWN: Oh, you’ll make it, you’ll make it! Or you could always just let Honjo slide entirely.

  YOUTH: Anyhow, I believe I will go.

  MAN-ABOUT-TOWN: In that case, it’s best if you send your attendant home. If he did come, the autumn leaves would be no fun for him at all; he’d be better off just staying home. You, Kakuhei!—some man about town you are! And as for you, lover boy, off with those hakama, off with them!11

  ATTENDANT KAKUHEI: Or if you think you’ll need me, should I come along?

  YOUTH: No, there’s no need for you to come. Go home and tell them that I ran into this gentleman and have gone with him to Shōtō-ji temple, so I’m sending you home, and be sure not to worry.12 (The attendant departs.)

  MAN-ABOUT-TOWN: Ah, good, this is much better! I have a lot to tell you on the boat as we make our way there. Our would-be lover boy could easily end up as a “buried tree,”13 so I’m going to have to initiate you by transmitting to you the secret instructions that will transform you from a Zenjibō-type lover boy into one like Agemaki’s Sukeroku.14 Ah, here we are at the Izu House, the boathouse inn where everyone embarks. I myself embark here every day. We’ll get a boat from here. Mistress! Just snip us off a skiffy in a jiffy—we want to be on our way without delay!15

  BOATHOUSE INN PROPRIETRESS: Yes sir, good day, gentlemen, and welcome to our establishment. We do have skiffs, sir, but I’m afraid we haven’t got any of these other whatchamacallem boats you mention.

  MAN- ABOUT-TOWN: Yes, well . . . just any skiff will do fine.

  PROPRIETRESS: And where will you be going, gentlemen?

  MAN-ABOUT-TOWN: What do you mean, where? To the Moat—to the Moat, of course!16 (The proprietress goes down to the riverbank. A boatman has just returned and, intending to take a break, has moored his boat at the riverbank.)

  PROPRIETRESS: Gorō! I hate to ask you, but could you row out one more time? . . . Hey, hey, now, what’s wrong?

  GORŌ: Nothing’s wrong, I’m just hungry! And I oughta be hungry! I’ve rowed out to Matsusaki and bac
k twice and taken two boatloads over to the Moat, and I’m starving!

  PROPRIETRESS: OK, then, just have a quick bowl of chazuke,17 then get going. They’re in a hurry. (The Man-About-Town and the Youth emerge from the boathouse inn, pipes dangling from their mouths, to see whether their boat is ready yet.)

  PROPRIETRESS (apologetically): Please wait just a moment longer. All the boatmen were out; now one of them’s finally gotten back in, but he says he’s famished. He’ll just have a bowl of chazuke, and then he’ll be right along.

  MAN-ABOUT-TOWN: Well, dammit all!

  PROPRIETRESS: Yes sir, but the tide is favorable right now, so the boat should get you there in no time.

  MAN-ABOUT-TOWN: Well, in that case, let’s have us a smoke. (With these words, he goes down to the boathouse to wait. A roofed boat arrives with two or three dancing girls on it. Three or four men embark, whereupon the Man-About-Town, smoking his pipe, strikes a pose suggesting that he knows them and expects them to address him. The older man in the group bows silently and moves away.)

  MAN-ABOUT-TOWN: Don’t know any of those fellows. There are only two of them whose faces I’ve even seen before.

  YOUTH: That vigorous-looking old man who just bowed to you—I’ve seen him around here from time to time.

  MAN-ABOUT-TOWN: That’s an old acquaintance of mine, an uncouth old geezer named old Kamachi-ya Honjirō. The debonair-looking one behind him, with the loose Nitayama Honda hairstyle,18 is named Yokosuke. When he walked by, he put on a look as if he knew me, though I’ve never even met him. You know, seeing someone getting out of a boat who tries to act as if he knew me always makes me just want to hurry up and go. How about it?

  BOATMAN (from the riverbank): Climb aboard, gentlemen! (The two men climb briskly into the boat.)