A Japanese Mirror

by Ian Buruma

  ‘You’re mine for ever now!’

  ‘Yes … I’m yours, only yours!’

  ‘Finally we’re one … ’

  Despite the government’s attempts to ban love on the stage, and the aesthetic and social resistance against it in the licensed areas, love actually became an increasingly popular subject in Edo-period fiction, particularly during the nineteenth century. What is interesting is that the so-called ninjobon (human feelings stories) written by such authors as Tamenaga Shunsui (1790–1843) feature the same social stereotypes as Chikamatsu’s plays: feeble, effeminate men and strong maternal prostitutes. In the ninjobon love always entails sacrifice by the women. One has the impression even that sacrificial mother-love is the only alternative to impersonal eroticism; when a man is not a tsu, a sensual connoisseur of play, he is a pampered weakling dependent on his lover and passive as a child.

  A good example of the latter is Tanjiro, the young hero of Tamenaga Shunsui’s story, Colours of Spring: The Plum Calendar (Shunshoku Umegoyomi), written in 1832. There are two women in Tanjiro’s life: a geisha called Yonehachi and a prostitute named O-Cho. A salient detail of the hero’s early life is that he was adopted and raised in a brothel. O-Cho and Yonehachi are fiercely jealous of each other. In one typical scene both ladies vow to marry him and take care of him for the rest of his life. At another point in the story Tanjiro takes money from O-Cho, is officially kept by Yonehachi, and has an affair with a third geisha. The episode ends with all three women happily pampering him. To ask what these wordly-wise women could possibly see in such a man is to misunderstand the nature of maternal love: they love him because he is a weak and presumably pretty boy; and he loves prostitutes for the same reason.

  The kind of sentiments described above still haunt the popular imagination in our own time. Enka, the sentimental drinking songs people sing in bars, flushed with too much drink, eyes half closed in maudlin melancholy, and voices vibrating with dramatic emotion, are suffused with them. ‘Love Suicide of a Shinjuku Woman’ is one example:

  Never mind how hard my life is,

  I can take anything, if it’s for your sake

  I may be just a bar-lady, two years older than you

  I wanted to pay for your education

  But you hit me when I got home late

  You couldn’t write your novel

  You took to drinking hard

  Let us now die together, in this room

  Where I had dreams of becoming a good wife

  Tomorrow might never come

  Let me pour our last cup of tea

  Love suicide of a Shinjuku woman

  Few will have seen it in the papers

  But life was warm that night with my white arms around your neck.

  During the Edo period many writers and artists immersed themselves in a very narrow world. They spent much of their creative lives as chroniclers of the manners and mores within a delicate goldfish-bowl; or, rather, a goldfish-bowl within a goldfish-bowl, for Japan itself was almost completely isolated for three centuries. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, when Japan had finally opened her doors to the rest of the world, this bowl was shattered. What had been the elegant centre of the world became a provincial relic of the past.

  By the 1870s Kabuki had in effect ceased to be a contemporary theatre. In 1872 the greatest Kabuki actor of his time, Ichikawa Danjuro, dressed in white tie and tails as a sign of civilization, made the following speech: The theatre of recent years has drunk up filth and smelled of the coarse and the mean. It has disregarded the beautiful principle of rewarding good and chastising evil. It has fallen into mannerisms and distortions and has steadily been flowing downhill … I have resolved to clean away the decay.’19

  The ensuing fate of Kabuki theatre was ironic in the extreme: after being purified of its ‘coarser’ aspects, this theatre of outcasts and riverside prostitutes steadily became an official repository of tradition. During the Second World War it even became the expression of militarist patriotism.

  In the heady days of the early Meiji Restoration, at the end of the last century, exciting new ideas floated around about the new status of women in society and writers of fiction were encouraged to write about other women besides ladies of pleasure. The general creed was that Japan had to become ‘respectable’, ‘modern’, and above all, ‘Western’. All these aspirations – and they were no more than that – were summed up by the slogan of the age: Enlightenment and Civilization (Bunmei Kaika).

  Old traditions die hard, none the less, no matter how many castles are torn down to appear advanced and progressive. This is as true of fiction as it is of prostitutes. Lefcadio Hearn wrote in 1895 that:

  as a general rule, where passionate love is the theme in Japanese literature of the best class, it is not that sort of love which leads to the establishment of family relations. It is quite another kind of love – a sort of love about which the Oriental is not prudish at all – the mayoi, or infatuation of passion, inspired by merely physical attraction; and its heroines are not the daughters of refined families, but mostly hetarae, or professional dancing girls.20

  If this was true of ‘literature of the best class’, it was so much more so of less elevated genres. And by and large it is still true, despite the appearance in fiction, film and theatre of other types of women, too. As works of art the ladies of pleasure may have lost much of their traditional refinement. But they are still very important, as social life still takes place largely outside the family home. They are by no means always prostitutes, but in so far as they still offer, for a price, romance, as well as maternal solace, they are figures of a common fantasy. Moreover, one feels that many Japanese artists are still often searching for another goldfish-bowl on the fringes of society, a world within a world: and it is here, in the ‘water business’, that they frequently find it.

  There are two authors in particular, both born in the late nineteenth century, who exemplify the half-traditional, half-modern attitude to prostitutes still shared by many Japanese: Nagai Kafu and Higuchi Ichiyo. Kafu, as he is always known, was one of the great eccentrics of his time. Almost his entire life was spent in the company of strippers, prostitutes, geisha and chorus-girls. Born into a respectable family of landowners and bureaucrats, he became professor of French literature when he was only 31 years old, establishing himself as a superb translator of Baudelaire and Verlaine, as well as publishing many essays and short stories. But a few years after all these honours came his way, he turned his back on them. He professed to hate writers, journalists, academics, relatives – everybody, in fact, except a number of female entertainers with whom he had relationships which were generally as short-lived as they were presumably passionate.21

  Kafu had a romantic, elegiac imagination which led him into a life-long chase of the ever-shortening shadows of the Edo period, mostly to be found among the demi-monde of prostitution. His life, beginning in 1879 and ending messily in the solitude of his rented room in 1959, neatly encompasses the period during which modern Japan was built. Thus his images of strippers and prostitutes are reminders of the past as well as increasingly vulgar symbols of Japan as it has become.

  According to the critic Kato Shuichi, writing about the Meiji period, ‘the alienation of the artist drove him either into a nostalgic yearning for the culture of the Edo period, or into an infatuation with the West’.22 Kafu went through both stages. In 1903, under pressure from his father, who disapproved of his son’s nocturnal habits, Kafu sailed off to the U.S.A., bound for the doubtful pleasures of Kalamazoo, Michigan.

  Kalamazoo was hardly to his taste. He felt more at home in the opium dens and brothels of New York’s Chinatown. In Leaves From a Journal of a Western Voyage (Sayu Nishisho), published in 1917, he wrote of the ladies he encountered there: ‘I do not hesitate to call them my own dear sisters. I do not ask for light or help. I only await the day when I, too, shall be able to offer myself to a grain of opium.’ And about the place he wrote: ‘A monotonous Oriental
melody was constantly repeated. Overcome by the stench and the heat I stood for a while and thought ah what harmony, what balance! Never before had I heard the music of human degradation and collapse so poignantly …’23 He went on to say: ‘I love Chinatown. It is a treasury of The Flowers of Evil. I only fear that the so-called humanitarians will one day tear down this world-apart-from-the-world …’ (Notes on Chinatown, Chinatown no Ki, 1907.)

  Although shades of a second-rate Baudelaire are to be heard in this romantic straining by the youthful Kafu, one can also detect the voice of the typical man of Meiji: ‘world-apart-from-the-world’ – the smelly sanctuary where everything is in harmony, just as it was in the licensed quarters of Edo; he had caught a glimpse of his ideal goldfish-bowl.

  There was also no doubt a ‘nostalgie de la boue’ involved in Kafu’s romantic reveries. The young bourgeois reacting against his family of earnest bureaucrats and industrious businessmen. His father, who was both a progressive businessman and a strict Confucian moralist, insisting on filial obedience, represented everything that Kafu loathed; like the period itself, he was stuffily old-fashioned and crassly modern at the same time.

  There was another reason for Kafu’s self-imposed isolation amongst the prostitutes of his city. One must take into account the often suffocating nature of Japanese society with its relentless pressures to conform. This is as true of literary circles, if not more so, as of a bourgeois family. Isolation is often the only way to achieve the necessary distance between oneself and society. Kafu’s solution to the alienation of the artist was indeed similar to that of Baudelaire and other so-called ‘decadents’ in late-nineteenth-century France. He chose the marginal ‘world-apart-from-the-world’ as a kind of exile. In the brothels and teahouses he could be anonymous. He would be left alone there, something which is quite easy to achieve in London or Paris (where it is also tolerated more), but well-nigh impossible in huge, but provincial Tokyo.

  He even entertained fantasies of being part of this world, in the same way as his literary heroes of the Edo period had been. In Strange Tale from East of the River (Bokuto Kidan), written in 1937, the narrator, a writer much like Kafu himself, becomes a frequent visitor to a certain prostitute called O-yuki. He pretends to be a writer of ‘secret books’, thinking that ‘women who live in the shade feel neither hostility not fear, but rather affection and pity when they encounter men who must shun the public gaze.’ He goes on to compare O-yuki to ‘the geisha at the lonely wayside station who did not hesitate to give money to a gambler and smuggler … ’

  In the same story, the writer explains his fascination for prostitutes:

  In Tokyo, and even in the Occident, I have known almost no society except that of courtesans … I might here quote a passage from Unfinished Dream [a novel by Kafu himself]: ‘He frequented the pleasure quarters with such enthusiasm that ten years was as a day; for he knew only too well that they were the quarters of darkness and unrighteousness. And had the world come to praise the profligate as loyal servant and pious son, he would have declined, even at the cost of selling his property, to hear the voice of praise. Indignation at the hypocritical vanity of proper wives and at the fraud of the just and open society was the force that sent him speeding in the other direction, toward what was from the start taken for dark and unrighteous. There was more happiness in finding the remains of a beautifully woven pattern among castaway rags than in finding spatters and stains on a wall proclaimed immaculate. Sometimes in the halls of the righteous droppings from cows and rats are to be seen, and sometimes in the depths of corruption flowers of human sympathy and fruits of perfumed tears are to be found and gathered.24

  This is the true voice of Kafu, spiced just a little with Baudelairean hyperbole. The ‘quarters of darkness and unrighteousness’, of ‘castaway rags’ and ‘perfumed tears’ were a refuge from the growing vulgarity and stifling conformity of a rapidly industrializing Japan which was starting to resemble Detroit and Birmingham more than old Edo.

  It was a refuge from his age and his immediate social environment. Like Chinatown, the Yoshiwara or red-light area east of the River Sumida offered him a last glimpse of a kind of harmony that would be lost for ever.

  There was a sad, plaintive harmony in the life and scenes of the Yoshiwara, like that of Edo plays and ballads … But time passed, and the noise and glare of the frantic modern city destroyed the old harmony. The pace of life changed. I believe that the Edo mood still remained in the Tokyo of thirty years ago. Its last, lingering notes were to be caught in the Yoshiwara. (Housefly in Winter, 1935)25

  Kafu loved his native city, Tokyo. It is hard to detect a similar depth of feeling for his women. His attitude seems entirely traditional, in so far as the women in his stories are either mothers, or dolls. Men play with them, or else are fed by them, just as Jukichi in Flowers in the Shade (Hikage no Hana, 1934), who is kept by a succession of ladies of doubtful occupations, one of whom, O-Chiyo, he actually forces back into prostitution. Men such as this (remember also Tanjiro in The Plum Calendar) are not so much pimps as male mistresses tickling maternal fancies.

  And even O-Chiyo is more a puppet than a human being. There was one thing Kafu insisted on in his heroines, however: the talent to invoke nostalgia, to remind him of the past. It is as if he could not experience anything as being real if it lacked a literary precedent. His favourite adventures, literary as well as real, tended to remind him of Kabuki plays. And his favourite kind of woman, such as O-Yuki in A Strange Tale from East of the River, is a ‘skilful yet inarticulate artist with the power to summon the past’.

  This is how he describes O-Yuki, meeting the male protagonist for the first time, sheltering from a rainstorm (in itself a well-worn cliché of Edo-period romances):

  She stood up and changed into an unlined summer kimono with a pattern printed low on the skirt – it had been draped over the rack beside her. The undersash in fine reddish stripes, was knotted in front, and the heaviness of the knot seemed to balance the almost too large silver-threaded chignon. At that moment to me she was the courtesan of thirty years before.26

  The prostitute, however lowly, played much the same role in Kafu’s imagination as she had for centuries in the Japanese arts: she was an ideal, a mirage, a kind of conductor for aesthetic reveries. Her personality was much less important than the atmosphere she invoked; her hairdo and kimono more important than her face. She reminds one in fact of those courtesans in the woodblock prints Kafu loved: of those women without faces, or, more correctly, those women who all share the same face: a vague sketch, just enough for a dream.

  Higuchi Ichiyo, the first important female writer Japan had seen for centuries, was less of a dreamer. She was born in 1872 and died, tragically, just twenty-four years later, of consumption. This early death, reminding one most poignantly of the evanescence of all earthly things, would most likely have secured Ichiyo’s place as a romantic Japanese heroine even if her literary talents had not been as great as they were.

  Unlike the voyeuristic Kafu who always made sure he lived in more salubrious quarters than those he frequented at night, Ichiyo actually lived on the border of the Yoshiwara. This was not so much a matter of choice – she obviously never played at being the Edo brothel-creeper – as of several financial disasters in her family which compelled her to live in not-so-genteel poverty. None the less, she turned her misfortune into a virtue and wrote about the world of prostitutes in a way that has not yet been rivalled.

  She was as disillusioned about the world she saw around her as Kafu. But she never let nostalgia for the old world cloud her judgment. Kafu was a romantic, Ichiyo was more an elegant cynic in the style of Saikaku, whose writings had a profound influence on her work.27 Her own life as a woman in an age that promised emancipation without really following it through, may have had something to do with this. She wrote in her diary that ‘in this floating world of ours no one cares about anybody else. I used to believe in people. I actually thought it was possible to improve the world
. But I was too naive, I deceived myself. Time and time again those I trusted disappointed me and now I don’t have much faith in anything.’28

  She never thought of prostitutes as reminders of the good old days. To her they were symbols of broken dreams, but they were real people too, with individual personalities, something that Kafu’s ladies never were. Her most famous story of the pleasure quarter is called Takekurabe, variously translated as Growing Up and Child’s Play. It was written in 1895 and later made into a superb film. The story is about several children growing up around the Yoshiwara, ‘where lights flicker in the moat, dark as the dye that blackens the smiles of the Yoshiwara beauties’. Her ironical descriptions of the quarter do not attempt to disguise its sordidness:

  It’s one thing to see a woman of a certain age who favours gaudy patterns, or a sash cut immoderately wide. It’s quite another to see these barefaced girls of fifteen or sixteen, all decked out in flashy clothes and blowing bladder cherries, which everybody knows are used as contraceptives. But that’s what kind of neighbourhood it is. A trollop who yesterday went by the name of some heroine in ‘The Tale of Genji’ at one of the third-rate houses along the ditch, today runs off with a thug …29

  One of the main characters in the story is a young girl called Midori, ‘a winsome girl, exuberant, soft spoken’. Her elder sister was purchased by a prestigious brothel of the quarter and her success ensures that Midori is never strapped for pocket money. In and out of the brothel all the time, Midori soon learns the ways of the floating world, but in the beginning it all seems like innocent fun, child’s play really, with her friends, Shota, leader of the main-street gang and Nobu, the son of the priest.