A Japanese Mirror

by Ian Buruma

  The manners and mores of the Edo-period brothels were inspired by and often a direct imitation of Heian court life. Prostitutes borrowed the names of noble ladies in ‘The Tale of Genji’.10 Guidebooks to the prostitutes’ quarters, such as the Togensho compiled in 1655, were written in the classic style of the Genji as well as other famous traditional works. Though bordering on satire, this kind of publication exuded an atmosphere of high aristocratic taste.

  Of course it was all an elaborate fantasy, for there were basic differences between the decadent life of the Heian aristocracy and the pleasure areas of the Edo period. For one thing, the latter were in a true sense democratic. This seems paradoxical in an age which left little room for class mobility. In fact playing in the brothels and theatres was one of the few ways in which people could free themselves from the stifling class restrictions of their time. Not only were the licensed areas patronized by all classes, from samurai down to lowly merchants, much to the annoyance of the government, but the plays performed there were a pastiche of society itself.

  In the theatre, outcasts – actors were forced to live in ghettoes – acted the parts of swaggering samurai and elegant court ladies. They would dress up in the most outrageous finery, outdoing the aristocracy in sheer brilliance. In short, they broke one of the most serious taboos of their time by imitating the style of a higher class. The pleasure quarters were literally a stage where people could act the parts forbidden to them in daily life. This was almost subversive in a society based to such a large extent on the style of outward appearances. These actors have been described as religious scapegoats, breaking taboos in order to purify them.11 One of the traditional functions of the feast, after all, is the ritual breaking of taboos.

  The aristocracy of the brothels consisted mostly of peasant girls who would paint their dark skins white as a sign of nobility and cover up their rustic accents with an artificial language based on the polite forms of the Kyoto dialect, full of flamboyant phrases and elaborate verb-endings.12 One had to be well versed in the manners and mores of the brothel, even as a customer, or else be ridiculed as an ignorant bumpkin, which to the Edo playboy was a fate worse than death.

  It was far from easy to win the favours of a high-class tayu. She had to be courted, and just as in the Heian court, this was a matter bound by strict rules of etiquette. A clumsy provincial, ignorant of the rules, stood as little chance with a tayu as his modern counterpart would with a top fashion model.

  The guidebooks, described earlier in this chapter, were to initiate the common man in these complex rules, as well as to titillate his vicarious fancies. Even when they later turned into a purely literary genre, the so-called sharebon, they never quite lost their didactic function. The authors of these books, particularly popular during the eighteenth century, were often intellectual members of the samurai class, and connoisseurs of brothel life. The ideal of every dandy in those days was to be a tsu, a man of savoir faire, an aficionado of brothel etiquette. So obsessed were they with the minutiae of low-life elegance that their books are almost unintelligible today.

  The typical sharebon story usually revolves around a tsu and a bumpkin, often posing as a tsu. The comedy is always at the expense of the bumbling boor who does not know the rules. But just knowing them is not quite enough either. This is the moral of a famous work entitled The Rake’s Patois (Yushi Hogen), published in 1770 and written by a gentleman signing himself as ‘Just An Old Man’ (‘Tada no jiji’). It is about a father taking his son to a brothel for the first time, a not unusual initiation into the pleasures of adult life. The father, a flashy bore, proudly flaunts his intimate knowledge of brothel manners. The son is gentle, modest and polite to the courtesans. Needless to say, it is to him and not his blustering father that one of the girls extends the honour of spending the night in love. A real tsu knows how to please the prostitutes.

  The market for erotic guidebooks is far from exhausted: a modern book called A Textbook for Night-Life (Yoru no Kyokasho) became a best-seller. It carefully and patiently informs us just how to disport ourselves in night-clubs, bars and ‘cabarets’ (cheap night-clubs) without making a fool of ourselves. This is the way, for example, to hold a conversation with a bar-hostess:

  Everybody resembles someone else. This is particularly true of hostesses who use the same make-up techniques as actors and entertainers. Now, when you meet a hostess for the first time, you don’t just blurt out that she looks like a certain famous singer. Everybody does that. What you do, is talk about that singer in the most glowing terms, how sexy she is and so on. Then, as nonchalantly as you can, you let it slip how much your hostess resembles the star.

  The practised tsu, then as now, like the courtesans, would affect an aristocratic nonchalance. He would stick to the formal rules of behaviour, but in a slightly off-hand way, never visibly doing his best. This is the kind of elegance the Japanese call iki, variously and never quite accurately translated as ‘dashing’ or ‘chic’.13 Iki is helped by the patina of age and hard-won experience. It is also visible in the details of dress: the nonchalantly-tied sash of a kimono or a bold design just bordering on vulgarity. Iki is a way of playing around with the rules without ever quite transgressing them. It is an aesthetic directly derived from life in the brothels.

  There was, however, one rule of the demi-monde which could not be broken; and this was more or less the same as in the Heian court: the play had to remain exactly that – romance, not sex, was the forbidden fruit in these quarters.14 It was thought to be highly uncivilized, uncouth even, to fall in love. The courtesan, after all, had to remain a work of art, a fantasy without a real personal identity. ‘A sincere courtesan is as rare as a square egg’, was a popular expression in the Edo pleasure quarters.15 This was not meant as a put-down, it simply meant that courtesans were artistes.

  Prostitutes and actors were the fashion-leaders and super-stars of their time. Consequently the successful actor could be quite wealthy and even mix with the high and mighty. But they were also at the bottom end of the social hierarchy. The Yoshiwara, the biggest old licensed quarter in Tokyo, now filled with garish massage parlours, is still flanked on one side by the ghetto for burakumin, religiously polluted outcasts comparable to the Indian untouchables. In a sense consorting with outcasts might have given people a liberating frisson. Indians made love to temple girls for the same reason. But when play became personal and serious it was a direct threat to the class system. There was also the danger that falling for a courtesan would lead to financial ruin, a serious crime in an increasingly mercantile society.

  An example of how seriously the government took the dangers of social pollution is the Ejima–Ikushima affair. Ejima (1681–1741) was a high-ranking lady-in-waiting. She had been the secret mistress of a celebrated Kabuki actor named Ikushima for nine years before they were both arrested at a drunken after-theatre party. This had the unfortunate result of making their affair public and everybody involved was severely punished: some with death, others, like Ikushima, with banishment to an isolated island. His theatre was razed and all other Kabuki theatres were closed for three months.

  Play, but not love. That at least was the ideal. But was it always like that in real life? To what extent were the women of the pleasure quarters really living dolls? Surely the affected nonchalance of even the most elegant dandies and courtesans had its limits. No matter what the rules of the fantasy were, they were still human beings. Clearly sometimes people must have fallen in love and spontaneous feelings were sometimes expressed, despite the social dangers; not all was flippant repartee. The tension between forbidden feelings and fantasy, between acceptable sensuality and illicit love, in brief, between play and reality, was an important theme of popular drama and fiction in pre-modern Japan. While abiding by the rules of their frivolous games, the courtesans and their merry-making paramours had to face one totally unfrivolous question: how to live in Tokugawa society without losing one’s humanity.

  Perhaps the majority of writers of f
iction gave this little thought at all, for they rarely went deeper than the elegant surface of artificial eroticism. But two writers, both living in the seventeeth century, did, in their own rather different ways: the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725) and the poet and novelist Ihara Saikaku (1642–93). Chikamatsu was the son of a samurai and Saikaku (he is always known by his first name) was born into a family of merchants. Neither was strictly a man of Edo, for they lived in Osaka and Kyoto respectively at a time when Edo was little but an up-and-coming provincial town. But both are still considered to be the greatest writers of fiction of the Edo period and both reflect the mentality of many Japanese towards prostitutes even to this day.

  Saikaku, the merchant’s son, is the typical townsman with the morality of a ribald shopkeeper. As long as business keeps ticking over and the bills are paid on time, what one does with the rest of one’s time is nobody else’s business. Saikaku’s stories, unlike those by writers following the aristocratic tradition, are mostly about people who have to work for a living. Typically money itself plays a progressively important part in his work. Once he wrote that ‘money is the townsman’s pedigree, whatever his birth or lineage. No matter how splendid a man’s ancestors, if he lacks money he is worse off than a monkey-showman.’16 His most famous picaresque novel was The Life of an Amorous Woman (1686) upon which Mizoguchi based his classic film ‘Saikaku Ichidai Onna’, literally ‘The Life of a Saikaku Woman’ but generally know in the West as ‘The Life of O-Haru’. The story, written in the first person as a parody of a Buddhist confession, is about a highly educated young lady of noble birth called O-Haru, who ends up as a common street-walker hiding her ruined looks in the dark. When she fails to attract men even then, she retires as a Buddhist nun. But she calls her lonely retreat ‘Hut of Fleshly Pleasures’ and she still ties her kimono sash in front in the rakish way of a courtesan. And as she relates her story of degradation to two male visitors, she burns sweet incense reminding them more of teahouses than temples.

  It is interesting to compare the original O-Haru, Saikaku’s version that is, and O-Haru in Mizoguchi’s film. The original story is a tale of self-indulgence. Saikaku was too cynical and too much a man of his times to paint her as a victim of society – though, unlike most of his contemporaries, he had no illusions about the darker side of prostitution. Just like most of his amorous characters, O-Haru is no better than she ought to be. Several times in the story she has the option of settling down to a life of bland respectability and each time she chooses the more appealing life of debauchery. It is, as they say in the porno industry, in her blood.

  One story, in particular, shows the difference with Mizoguchi’s film treatment. Saikaku relates how O-Haru, exhausted by the brothel life, seeks employment as a respectable house-maid, pretending to be innocence itself. But soon she cannot stand hearing ‘the screens rattling’ every time her ardent employer makes love to his wife and she seduces him on a day of religious observance, ‘making him forget all about Buddhism’. The story ends with O-Haru running through the streets of Kyoto, stark naked, singing ‘I want a man! Oh, I want a man!’

  Mizoguchi’s O-Haru, on the other hand, is the tragic victim of a succession of brutish, lecherous males. She is the one to be seduced by her boss in the most degrading manner, and running around the streets naked, mad with desire, would have been unthinkable for his angelic heroine, even had it been allowed by the censors. While Saikaku’s story pokes fun at the Buddhist confession tale, Mizoguchi ends his film with O-Haru going from door to door as a seriously repentant nun. Saikaku’s cynical mockery has been replaced by the melancholy resignation of a true Buddhist.

  Saikaku’s Life of an Amorous Woman is a satire, not of society itself – that would have been far too dangerous – but of the absurdity of people in search of pleasure, ever more pleasure. The irony is a universal psychological truth: the further one carries one’s sensual pursuit, the more elusive satisfaction proves to be. Saikaku’s characters come alive through their very weakness. But Saikaku never shows contempt. They may be frivolous, self-indulgent fools, but they are unmistakably human fools.

  Mizoguchi’s faithful script-writer, Yoda Yoshikata, who wrote the film script of O-Haru, has often said that the Japanese title for the film should not have been ‘Life of a Saikaku Woman’ but ‘Life of a Chikamatsu Woman’. There is much to be said for this. Mizoguchi’s ambivalent moralism comes much closer to the spirit of the great samurai’s son. Chikamatsu Monzaemon was more of a moralist than Saikaku. Members of the warrior class despised the business of money making, though some were to prove remarkably good at it. The way Chikamatsu made his living, as a playwright for the plebeian puppet theatre, was considered shameful indeed. This cannot but have contributed to an attitude of ambivalence. Although he lived amongst the merchant class and wrote about their affairs, with some compassion even, he was never quite one of them: he remained an outsider. His tone is quite different from Saikaku’s amused cynicism. His plays, written in the romantic yet realistic style favoured by the Osaka merchant class, are often dramatizations of rather pathetic love affairs between clerks and prostitutes, usually based on newsworthy contemporary scandals. These affairs are often sordid and the characters insignificant, simple-minded even, especially the men: clerks, shopkeepers or lowly traders making a mess of things. But in the end they manage to rise above their banality; they seem dignified even, often by saving their honour in the classic samurai way, by killing themselves. The most important thing, however, is that love does transcend mere sexual infatuation: it may destroy its proponents in the end, but it is real, not just play.

  One of Chikamatsu’s most popular dramas is ‘Double Suicide at Sonezaki’, written in 1703, and since made into many films. The last cinematic version, using puppets instead of actors, was made as recently as 1981. The play revolves around Tokubei, a lowly shop-assistant who falls in love with an equally humble prostitute called O-Hatsu. For this reason he refuses to marry a girl chosen for him by his uncle. Thus he has to return the girl’s dowry. Foolishly the good-natured clerk lends this money to Kuheiji, a classic villain. When he asks for it back, Tokubei is beaten up by Kuheiji’s henchmen, after which he escapes, hiding under O-Hatsu’s kimono. The villain Kuheiji then visits O-Hatsu’s brothel to enjoy her for himself. While her price is being discussed, Tokubei, hiding under the porch, grabs one of O-Hatsu’s feet and drags it across his throat. This gruesome signal is not lost on her and after everybody has gone to sleep, the lovers escape to the woods of Sonezaki carrying a razor blade which sparkles in the moonlight.

  Then the ordinary affair of the simple clerk and the prostitute becomes a real tragedy. Accompanied by the plaintive notes of the three-stringed samisen they make their last exit along the ramp (hanamichi) jutting into the audience at a right angle from the stage. While the sad victims of passion desperately hold on to each other, and the theatre claque shouts out the actors’ names, the singers at the side of the stage sing their melancholy farewell song:

  Farewell to this world and to the night farewell

  We who walk the road that leads to death, to what should it be likened?

  To the frost by the road that leads to the graveyard

  Vanishing with each step we take ahead:

  How sad is this dream of a dream!17

  What follows is a cruel scene in which he slashes his lover to death before killing himself. There was no other way out.

  The play is best seen in the puppet theatre, for which it was originally written. The puppets manipulated by the puppeteers dressed in black, suggest perfectly the hopelessness of the individual in a society where the assertion of personal will and spontaneity can lead only to catastrophe. Not for nothing are most of Chikamatsu’s heroes weak men, for it is they, rather than swaggering tough guys, who truly bring home the powerlessness of humans in the hands of fate.

  Tokubei, the insignificant clerk, is transformed by his love, even though, as is often the case in Edo drama and doubtless in
reality too, his lover is a prostitute. The only way pure love can be proved is by the ultimate sacrifice. Death is the price one pays for following one’s feelings, for not just playing.

  Self-destructing heroes and heroines are also like safety valves in a closed society. They put up a last stand for individual feelings and will, but by destroying themselves, as aesthetically and ceremoniously as possible, they ensure that order is always restored in the end.

  ‘Double Suicide at Sonezaki’, as the first of a series of romantic suicide plays, enjoyed a huge public success. The effect was comparable to that of Goethe’s ‘Junge Werther’: romantic suicide became a fashionable thing to do: together, of course, never alone. The authorities strongly disapproved. Not only was the glorification of personal feelings, specifically love, bad for public morals, but suicide was after all a privilege of the warrior class, not to be frivolously indulged in by mere tradesmen and prostitutes. And in 1736 a law was passed against love scenes on the stage.

  Dying for each other as the ultimate union, if not in this life, then at least in the next, is nevertheless still deeply ingrained in Japanese culture: pop songs celebrate it, films melodramatize it, and young girls swoon at the idea of romantic authors throwing themselves into rivers together with their loved ones.18 In a recent film, Tani Naomi, the eternally suffering porno star, played a country geisha on the run with her demented and murderous lover. Instead of running the risk of his being caught and thus being separated for ever, they decide to die together. In the end we see him hanging from a rope, still holding her brains in his hands. And while the camera lovingly pans along her mutilated corpse, their voices echo eerily in the background, as if straight from the depths of Hell: