[Kibyōshi, senryū, kyōka, SNKBZ 79: 171–193, translated by Chris Drake]
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1. This line, by the eighth-century Chinese poet Li Bo, is from his poetic essay A Prelude to a Banquet on a Spring Eve for My Clan in the Garden of Peaches and Plums (Chunye yan zhuzongdi taoliyuan xu), which is in the Tang wen cui (juan 97) and other anthologies.
2. One of the secret transmissions of the Kokinshū (905), concerning the identity of three birds that appear in the poetry.
3. At this time, Meguro was on the outskirts of Edo. Fudō (Acala) is a ferocious Buddhist guardian deity.
4. Ennin (794–864), one of the founders of the Tendai sect, who wrote a diary about his travels in China between 838 and 847.
5. A type of palanquin that townspeople of means or those in specialized professions were sometimes allowed to own privately.
6. Raishi was the haikai name of the actor Arashi Sangorō, who played the role of Lazy Taro (Monokusa-tarō) on the Edo stage in 1773.
7. Yotsuya and Shinjuku were stopping points for travelers and horses on the highway leading westward out of Edo. The brothels of Shinjuku, closed down earlier by the government, were reopened the year this story was published. The song parodies the lines from a popular boatman’s song, “How lovely to see an iris blooming amid wild rice at Itako Dejima.” The last two lines are from “Konpira-bushi,” a type of folk song that was in vogue in cities around this time.
8. The Yoshiwara licensed pleasure quarter in Edo.
9. There is a pun on the word yo, which means both “night” and “world.” The vicissitudes of life in “a world where darkness enshrouds everything more than an inch beyond one’s nose” is proverbial in Japan.
10. Spring began in the First Month of the New Year. The custom was to scatter roasted beans at that time of the year to chase out evil forces. Kinokuniya Bunzaemon (1666–1734), a well-known tycoon, is said to have been the first to scatter gold coins instead of beans.
11. “Crow-bird mountain of luck” is a rendering of the nonsense phrase arigata-yama no tonbi-garasu, which contains the words “grateful,” “mountain,” “kite,” and “crow.” The practice of buying a higher rank as a blind minstrel was not uncommon.
12. Gengobei, the hero of the fifth story in Ihara Saikaku’s Five Sensuous Women (Kōshoku gonin onna, 1686), inherits a fortune at the end of the tale. Umegae, the heroine in the puppet drama Hiragana Tales of Glory and Decline (Hiragana seisuiki, 1739) is, in a climactic scene, the recipient of a shower of gold coins.
13. The “Dragon-Serpent” (southeast) sector of Edo was the site of the unlicensed pleasure quarter at Fukagawa.
14. A parody of a passage from the nō drama The Potted Tree (Hachi no ki): “Ah, such snow! How it must delight those who have station in life. Snowflakes swirl about like goose down. Cloaked in a mantle of crane feathers, a man aspires to roving.” The nō passage is, in turn, modeled on a verse by the Tang poet Bo Ju-yi.
15. An allusion to, and a parody of, a passage from the nō drama The Commuting Courtier of Komachi (Kayoi Komachi): “Though steeds are available in the hamlet of Kohata in Yamashiro Province, it is only because I love you that I came barefooted [spoken by Captain Fukakusa]. And you were attired [spoken by Komachi] . . . in a platter hat and a straw coat [spoken by the captain].”
16. The first line, “Genshirō said to tell you to come,” approximates the Japanese, in which extra syllables, all beginning with “k,” are injected into words. The next line is “Tell him to wait and I’ll be there soon.”
17. Shinagawa is the location of lower-class brothels, south of the center of Edo.
18. Enjirō means “Sexy Son,” and Adakiya means “Wanton Shop.”
19. Kitari Kinosuke means “Fond of the Yoshiwara,” and Warui Shian means “Bad Idea.”
20. Educated maids were an important part of the readership of kibyōshi picture books and later gōkan picture books. They loved romantic plots and were considered to be naı¨ve. But even they could see through the broadsheet.
21. Yoshiwara insider talk. Bokuga was the haikai name of Ōgiya Uemon, the owner of the Ōgiya House in Yoshiwara, which is alluded to later in the text. In the first month of 1784, the famous kabuki actor Matsumoto Kōshirō IV actually played a character named Ōgiya Izaemon in a play at the Morita Theater. Sophisticated visitors to Yoshiwara would have recognized that the character Izaemon was based on the actual Uemon.
22. The name Ukina (literally, floating name) means “Hot Reputation.”
23. A man caught two-timing a high-ranking courtesan was taken back to the first woman’s house where, as punishment, his topknot was cut off and he was forced to dress in women’s clothes.
24. The image of the Zen saint Dōryō had been shown at this temple the previous year, in the spring of 1784. Kyoden’s own grave is located there.
25. Kabuki plays that feature an erotic male protagonist usually include a scene in which he gets beaten up.
26. People will see that their resolve to die together is as firm as that of the couple in the song.
27. Shigemasa was a famous Edo painter and Kyōden’s teacher. Privately distributing poems on sheets with paintings was an important literary activity at the time.
28. Alludes to the no play Dōjōji Temple.
29. In several passages, Kyōden draws on the writings of Nakazawa Dōni, specifically, Old Man Doni’s Lectures on the Way (Dōni ō dōwa, 1791) and Old Man Doni’s Lessons for the Young (Dōni ō zenkun). But Kyōden also saturates this work, like most of his kibyōshi, with irony and humor.
30. The title Fast-Dyeing Mind Study (Shingaku hayasomegusa) parodies the name of a popular Edo clothes dye called “fast-dyeing grass” (hayasomegusa). The comparison of Mind Study (Shingaku) to a fast-working product suggests that Mind Study aims at immediate, effective “mind dyeing.” “Grass” also means “book,” as if the kibyōshi were an easy guide to understanding Mind Study.
31. This is a parody of a stock phrase in earlier kusa-zōshi picture books, which allows Kyōden to treat Mind Study on a simplistic, childish level without contradiction. That is, he can present Mind Study with apparent moral seriousness and, at the same time, maintain an ironic distance.
32. This phrase refers to the Mind Study doctrine of the “six virtues of women,” one of which was to be “pure and clean.”
33. White Pines (Hime-komatsu ne no hi no asobi) was first performed in 1757.
34. The energy of the five elements—wood, fire, earth, metal, and water—are combined with yin and yang in this traditional Chinese theory to constitute all the forms of the cosmos.
35. This view is a basic Mind Study belief.
36. The Heavenly Emperor is not a standard Mind Study belief.
37. The Quick and Easy Shop, or Right in Front of Your Eyes Shop, suggests his narrow interests and focus on quick profits.
38. The term “gem” (tama) is homophonous here and elsewhere with “soul” as well as with “circle” or “sphere.”
39. “Ordinary people” was a commonly used term in Mind Study.
40. Ritarō means “Greatest Truth or Principle.”
41. A proverb, not from Mind Study doctrine.
42. Satirizes the contemporary practice of buying and selling official positions and names.
43. Here and elsewhere the bad souls compare themselves with many kinds of ordinary people living in the world.
44. The bad souls suggest the large number of unemployed or minimally employed laborers gathering in Edo at the time. These people were a major problem for the bakufu, which asked Nakazawa Dōni to preach to them and reform them.
45. Ayashino means “Suspicious Field.”
46. Two famous Edo kabuki narrators, neither of whom is there to accompany the main actor’s silent travails with background singing. The good soul is tied to a large character meaning “disaster,” a reflection of the Mind Study practice of showing large characters during sermons.
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7. In Hiraga Gennai’s puppet play Epiphany at Yaguchi Crossing (Shinrei Yaguchi no watashi, 1770), the wife of the warrior lord Hyōgonosuke reprimands him for planning to surrender his castle, so he ties her to a pillar. In the puppet play Gion Festival Record (1757), Yukihime attacks an enemy of her father and is tied to a cherry tree.
48. From the sixth-century Chinese poetry anthology Wen xuan.
49. Asao Tamejuro III. The clerk’s face actually resembles that of the kabuki actor in contemporary actor prints.
50. In the puppet play Commentary on the Taiheiki Loyal Retainers (Taiheiki Chūshingura kōshaku, 1776), a former warrior master repairing a storehouse wall in Yamashina, near Kyoto, is covered with mud (doro), which, to the dog, suggests a robber (dorobo).
51. Ritarō exchanges puns with his dog. The phrase “kitchen god pictures” (oenma), shouted out by street vendors, is nearly homophonous with “don’t bark!” (hoeru na). From the perspective of Mind Study, Ritaro’s frivolity indicates that he has strayed from his “original mind.”
52. Like Ritarō, Master Dōri (Master Truth) has ri (truth/reason/principle) in his name. He suggests the famous Kyoto proselytizer Nakazawa Dōni (1725–1803), who went to Edo in 1779 and helped spread Mind Study there.
53. As conceived by Shingaku, “original mind” (honshin) is the mind (kokoro) with which people are born and that is at one with Heaven. Dōni noted that his objective was to teach the recovery of the “selfless original mind” (ware nashi no honshin).
54. Citation from a solo meriyasu song called “Blossom Banquet,” in which a woman admits that she foolishly ignores the truth (dōri) in the criticisms around her, but in spite of them and the solemn warning of the evening bell, she continues to love and wait for a man who no longer loves her. Like the woman, Ritarō admits to ignoring the truth, but the song also suggests that he continues to love Ayashino.
55. Kyōden, the text suggests, still hasn’t seen the truth of Mind Study. In fact, a little more than a year after the publication of this kibyōshi, he was punished by the Edo authorities for writing about “bad places.”
Chapter 18
KOKKEIBON: COMIC FICTION FOR COMMONERS
Kokkeibon (literally, humor books) were a new type of comic fiction that emerged in Edo during the Hōreki era (1751–1764) and became a major fictional genre. Comic fiction in the wider sense had existed from the beginning of the seventeenth century, in kana-zōshi such as Fake Tales (Nise monogatari) and Today’s Tales of Yesterday (Kinō wa kyō no monogatari), which today are categorized as comic stories (shōwa). Although humorous fiction also appeared in the form of sharebon and kibyōshi in the late eighteenth century, kokkeibon was a distinct genre that arose in the mid-eighteenth century and continued into the Meiji period (1868–1911), thus lasting more than a hundred years.
The Kansei Reforms (1787–1793) had a profoundly negative effect on the popular literature of the time, particularly on the sharebon, the books of wit and fashion, a genre that was banned by an edict in 1790 and forced to change form. It was in this context that Country Theater (Inaka shibai, 1787), which until now had not been regarded as a real sharebon, received attention. Country Theater was written by Manzōtei (1756–1810), a Dutch studies (rangaku) scholar who had studied with Hiraga Gennai. Instead of describing the pleasure quarters, as the early sharebon had, Country Theater comically depicted the life of a provincial theater in a village in Echigo Province, using the same kind of dialogue-based narrative as found in the sharebon. Significantly, Country Theater referred to itself as a yabobon (boorish book) instead of a sharebon (suave book). Modern scholars have regarded this book as the beginning of a new kind of humor book (kokkeibon) and the immediate predecessor to Jippensha Ikku’s Travels on the Eastern Seaboard (Tōkaidōchū hizakurige).
The kokkeibon genre can be roughly divided into early and late. The early kokkeibon, which flourished in the latter half of the eighteenth century, centered on dangibon, or satiric sermons, which made fun of contemporary mores. The best examples are Jōkanbō Koa’s Modern-Style Lousy Sermons (Imayō heta dangi, 1752) and Hiraga Gennai’s Rootless Weeds (Nenashigusa, 1763) and Modern Life of Shidōken (Fūryū Shidōkenden, 1763). The late kokkeibon, which appeared in the early nineteenth century, began with Jippensha Ikku’s Travels on the Eastern Seaboard and Shikitei Sanba’s Floating-World Bathhouse (Ukiyoburo) and Floating-World Barbershop (Ukiyodoko) and continued into the Meiji period with the works of Kanagaki Robun (1829–1894) and others.
The early kokkeibon, as exemplified by Gennai’s dangibon, had a didactic purpose in which humor served the higher ends of social, religious, or political critique. By contrast, the later kokkeibon of Jippensha Ikku and Shikitei Sanba (1776–1822), while satiric in part, had no overt moralistic or didactic motives and were fundamentally sympathetic to rather than critical of the object of laughter. The later kokkeibon poked fun at everyday life in a fashion that almost all readers could share in. Storytellers who entertained Edo audiences with amusing tales had, as early as the Tenmei era (1781–1789), cultivated and incorporated this kind of humor in their work, and the kokkeibon of the early nineteenth century can be seen as an outgrowth of that storytelling tradition.
Physically, the early kokkeibon were the same size as the yomihon (about 10 inches by 14 inches), while the nineteenth-century kokkeibon were slightly smaller middle-size books (chūbon). In contrast to the early kokkeibon, which retained the monogatari (tale) format of the ukiyo-zōshi, the later kokkeibon were an extension of the sharebon genre in typographically resembling a dramatic script.
JIPPENSHA IKKU
Jippensha Ikku (1765–1831) was not born and raised in Edo. Rather, he was the son of a samurai in Sunpu, in Suruga Province (Shizuoka), served in the house of a daimyō for a short time, and had another unsuccessful stint of service in Osaka before embarking on a career as a jōruri playwright and a sharebon and kibyōshi writer. In 1802, Ikku wrote Travels in the Floating World (Ukiyo dōchū hizakurige), which, by the third volume, had become Travels on the Eastern Seaboard (Tōkaidōchū hizakurige). In addition to writing the text, Ikku drew many of the illustrations.
TRAVELS ON THE EASTERN SEABOARD (TŌKAIDŌCHŪ HIZAKURIGE, 1802-1809)
The narrative of Travels on the Eastern Seaboard centers on two protagonists, Yajirobei and Kitahachi (Yaji and Kita), who travel west from Edo, on the Tōkaidō, the Eastern Seaboard Highway, visiting the Ise Shrine, Kyoto, and Osaka. Travels developed elements found earlier in Country Theater (Inaka shibai): the middle-size book format, the description of local dialect and provincial customs, the focus on a pair of male characters, and, most of all, humor based on “boorishness” (yabo) rather than on the “suaveness” (tsū) found in the sharebon.
In short, the audience for Travels was not the kind of refined urban readers who would appreciate the sharp social critique of the earlier sharebon. Instead, it aimed at a broad range of readers. Its protagonists, Kita and Yaji, have no particular social status; instead, they are characters with whom readers of all classes could identify. Travels also had an easy-to-read style. Even though the sharebon were written in the vernacular in a dialogue format, the content was often difficult, while late yomihon such as Kyokutei Bakin’s Eight Dog Chronicles (Nansō Satomi hakkenden, 1814–1842) used a highly literary, mixed Japanese-Chinese style. Travels, by contrast, was written largely in the form of a dialogue in a local dialect, supplemented by descriptive prose that is very close to colloquial Japanese.
Travels contains fundamentally two types of humor. One is realistic, deriving from the sharebon tradition and describing, as objectively as possible, the local customs and dialects of different locales. The other type comes from the comic behavior of the two central characters, Yajirobei and Kita. The two types of humor are evident in subsequent kokkeibon. Shikitei Sanba’s Floating-World Bathhouse (Ukiyoburo) exemplifies the first type, while the humor in Cherry Blossom Calendar, Eight Laughing People (Hanagoyomi hasshōjin) by the rakugo entertainer and writer Ryūtei Rijō (d.
1841)—which describes eight comic characters failing at one silly stunt after another—is of the second type. Travels also reflects the intense interest in travel on the Tōkaidō, the Eastern Seaboard Highway, which linked fifteen provinces from west to east. The Tōkaidō had been an important route since the seventeenth century, but the expansion of commerce, the alternate attendance system, the pilgrimages to Ise, and the popularity of sightseeing trips to Kyoto and Osaka, all increased both traffic on the road and curiosity about the sites along it, as evidenced by the publication of Famous Places on the Eastern Seaboard Illustrated (Tōkaidō meisho zue, 1797), which became the definitive guide. Indeed, Travels also functioned as a guidebook that offered realistic descriptions of the customs and special products of each noted locale, including a taste of the local dialect. Kita and Yaji captured the hearts of the readers who had traveled or who looked forward to traveling, particularly as an escape from the restrictions of provincial society.
The various literary sources for Travels include two early kana-zōshi, Tomiyama Doya’s Tale of Chikusai (Chikusai monogatari,1621–1623) and Asai Ryoi’s Famous Places on the Eastern Seaboard (Tōkaidō meishoki, 1659), both comic tales of travel in which a pair of characters travel between Edo and Kyoto composing kyōka, or comic waka. One of the features of Travels is in fact the kyōka, which come at the conclusion of each scene as a way of bringing the reader back down to earth, preparing the way for the next scene, and giving the narrative a special rhythm. Ikku also used the same kinds of puns and verbal jokes found in the humorous stories (hanashibon) performed by Edo storytellers.
Another important source of inspiration was kyōgen, or medieval comic drama, with Yajirobei and Kita often acting like the comic protagonist (Tarōkaja) and his sidekick (Jirōkaja) in kyōgen. Travels, however, differed from kyōgen in its focus on food and sex. The repeated failures on the road are often related to the search for good food (especially local delicacies) or for women, two of the common pleasures of travel for men at this time, which elude them time and again. The two protagonists’ low intelligence and their ignorance of the local customs and goods cause them to lurch humorously from one embarrassing mistake to the next. But while the two characters repeatedly fail, they are quickly resuscitated and never seriously threatened.
Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900 Page 103