Saikaku, author of the first ukiyo-zoshi, brought a rare maturity to the form with works like The Man Who Spent His Life in Love and Five Women in Love. Expressing the sentiments of the townspeople rather than the superior classes, Saikaku’s work is tinged with a gently reproving cynicism. Commenting on the easy virtues of modern women from the lower orders, he writes, “but this sort of thing, of course, never ever happens among the upper classes.” Broadsides against the Tokugawa establishment and conventional tastes were not advisable in such a political climate, but Saikaku discharged plenty of grapeshot. One characteristically cynical remark on the new materialism, of which Saikaku fully approved, is refreshing for its hostility to sentimental clichés about spring blossoms and moon-viewing: “People are not so fond of having plum, cherry, pine, and maple around the house, as gold and silver, rice and hard cash.” Nothing, however trivial, unsavoury or ludicrous, is left unexamined. The grasping, capricious, weak-willed men and women he wrote about were real people, recognizable figures from both the mundane and demimondaine world of Edo, who could for the first time see themselves reflected in the mirror of fiction.
Black Snow
Amidst the glittering indulgence and creativity, catastrophes periodically engulfed the city. Earthquakes and fires struck in 1694 and 1703. The year 1704 saw floods that were followed by outbreaks of measles, cholera and plague. On 4 October 1707 strange underground grumblings were heard and intense tremors felt. As the earth around Mount Fuji began trembling and rippling, the snow-covered volcano began to shower ash over Edo. Two days later, the sacred mountain, now enveloped in black smoke, erupted. As fire and lava belched from its cone, the sky above Edo turned bright red. Grey ash and black cinders fell uninterruptedly on the city for the next two weeks, transforming buildings and cityscapes. The city was so dark that people were obliged to carry lanterns during the daytime. Temples and shrines were crowded with people praying for divine intercession.
Inevitably, the shogun’s poor administrative skills, corruption and malfeasance were blamed for disasters wreaked by disgruntled gods. As the earth shuddered the city’s confidence cracked, and with it grew an uneasy premonition of Edo entering uncertain times.
The Ripening City
1707-1868
If public morale was slipping, so were Edo’s moral standards, such as they were. Passers-by on summer evenings, mystified by the loud laughter issuing from the residence of Tanuma Okitsugu, an influential minister to the shogun, were scandalized when they heard the explanation. The Tanuma family, it transpired, had built a sumo hall in their spacious residence, where they amused themselves watching naked women wrestling. Licensed gambling swept through the city at this time, ruining many a wealthy merchant or young Edokko. Temples, organizing fundraising lotteries, were partly to blame for the slide in morality.
Between 1771 and 1787 major fires, crop failures, famines, floods that inundated the lower reaches of Edo and volcanic eruptions endorsed the view that the times were sorely out of joint. Predictably, the city’s misfortunes were attributed to the anger of the gods. In this climate of despair Buddhism and Confucianism lost much of their authority. The famine of
1787 was especially harsh, obliging many people to survive on dogs, cats, grass and tree bark. Some citizens of Edo, preferring death to starvation, drowned themselves in the Sumida. Further crop failures and drought, together with exasperation against the government for its mishandling of shortages, led to severe riots.
The Edo period is often portrayed in Japan as a period of peace and stability, but the last 150 years of Tokugawa rule witnessed over 200 urban riots, over a quarter of them during the last ten years of rule by a single family that had held sway for two and a half centuries, deriving its legitimacy not through popular support or royal heredity, but force.
The novelist Bakin left a realistic account of the incidents that followed the riots. The ransacking of the house of a wealthy rice merchant in Kojimachi on the night of 20 June of the famine year sparked the impulse to pillage shops and private homes. Further attacks took place in broad daylight. Once discovered, sacks of rice were split open, strewn across the streets and viciously fought over. Officials who tried to calm the crowds were threatened or beaten up. Hunger and hysteria warped into hallucination. At one point a rumour spread that the devil was leading a particularly savage group of looters. The riots continued for a full month until the arrival of relief boats carrying rice.
When a major fire broke out in 1806, Dutchman Hendrik Deoff, an eyewitness to the conflagration, managed to escape to a field where he could safely observe the scene. “I have never seen anything so terrible in my life,” he wrote: “the horror of this sea of flames was increased by the crying and moaning of the women and children as they fled.”
Despite the intermittent disasters, the unpredictability of life in Edo and a festering sense of grievance against the authorities, the arts were flourishing. The people of Edo had become besotted with their own culture, the kind of self-infatuation that invariably leads to decadence. By the end of the so-called Bunka-Bunsei period (1803-1830), from the late eighteenth to first quarter of the nineteenth century, Edo had established itself as the undisputed cultural centre of the country.
Exquisite cloths were produced by embroiderers and dyers, finely worked boxwood combs and fragrant wooden pillows, chests, sliding doors, screens, pipes and stencils of intricately patterned fabrics called komon were made by craftsmen. Urban culture flourished through an expanding system of commercial distribution. Design catalogues made by artists like Katsushika Hokusai allowed the public to choose and order prints. To the alarm of the authorities, the merchant class continued to rise above its allotted station in life. The samurai, whose swords and family heirlooms were often to be found deposited in the pawnshop, were losing their authority. In an effort to curb the ostentation, a series of new edicts against luxury were introduced under the shogun Ienari. Prohibitions included the production of ornate combs, the wearing of coral ornaments, restrictions on the giving of elaborate wedding presents, limits on the production of hagoita (battledore rackets decorated with images of popular actors) and dolls. Women were prohibited from visiting hairdressers, and mixed bathing at public bathhouses was banned. Efforts to tighten up censorship followed. The Edokko seem to have taken the restrictions in their stride, belittling draconian legislation with humour.
Kabuki Ascendant
Kabuki was elevated to an even more exalted level in Edo society than it had already enjoyed, reaching its peak in the nineteenth century. Playwrights could still be punished, though, for presuming to challenge the policies of the government. One actor, Onoe Baiko, was manacled for appearing without a sedge hat covering his face; Nakamura Utaemon found himself in jail after attending a sumo match, while Ichikawa Danjuro VII, making no secret of his flamboyant lifestyle, was exiled.
For those wanting to address reality, to infuse their plays with emotions an audience could understand, it was safer to turn to subjects that were apolitical in content. The Edo-born playwright Kawatake Mokuami, described by scholar Donald Keene as “one of Japan’s greatest dramatic geniuses”, left behind some 300 plays, blood-chilling dramas revolving around an underworld of thieves, gamblers, extortionists and womanizers. The appeal of plays like this was enhanced by the settings, the thrill of recognition at seeing representations of places like the river banks of Fukugawa, or the statues of the Gods of Good Fortune at Taiso temple near Shinjuku.
Eschewing the all too familiar setting of the Yoshiwara, Mokuami, in his play Kozaru Shichinosuke, tells the story of a dissolute rogue who seduces the maid of a daimyo, forces her into prostitution and proceeds to live off her income. He then murders a priest, only to find out that he was the maid’s brother. Overcome with remorse, he asks her to kill him, but when she refuses they enter into a double suicide pact; in Mokuami’s darker, more realistic world, however, the couple are arrested and cheated of a more honourable death, the customary climax of traditional Kabu
ki plays.
This was the heyday of great actors like Kodanji IV, Danjuro VII and Koshiro Matsumoto V, an individual said to be inordinately ugly but able to overcome the audience’s revulsion with performances of transcendent artistry. In the refracting mirror of the stage, rogues became saints, the physically deformed became dashing heroes. Costume, makeup, the consummate skills of the best actors and the haunting corners of the half-lit stages all lent themselves to artifice and illusion. An actor playing the role of a beautiful young wife in a classic Kabuki play of this period, The Ghost of Yotsuya, a portrait by the author Tsuruya Namboku IV of Edo at its cruellest and most decadent, could reduce an audience sweltering in the summer heat of the enclosed theatres to blood-frozen silence as the poison administered by her husband turned the heroine’s youthful face into a hideously aged mask. This is what happened in the summer of 1825 when the play was first produced at the Nakamura Theatre. Enhancing the illusion were the crude forms of illumination that plunged parts of the stage into total darkness and half-shadow. Followed by an eerie green flame, a skilful actor could appear to float as his costume brushed the stage. In its maturity, Kabuki managed the improbable feat of being both melodrama and art.
A combination of a series of theatre fires and the growing permissiveness of actors and audiences led to the transfer of theatres to the Saruwakacho district of Asakusa, then still very much on the outskirts of the city. This did not stop Edo from idolizing its actors, elevating them in the very manner of exaggeration that typified the Kabuki theatre itself to living deities. When death took them, they were accorded the highest honour an actor within the stratified society of Edo could expect to receive. The streets were thronged with mourners paying their respects. A. B. Mitford visited Saruwakacho during its heyday, noting in his Tales of Old Japan how when “two actors called Bando Shuka and Segawa Roko, both famous players of women’s part, died at the same time, the people of Yedo mourned to heaven and to earth; and if a million riyos could have brought back their lives, the money would have been forthcoming.”
Modest vaudeville houses sprang up at this time, providing a stage for up-and-coming storytellers, magicians and other popular entertainers. The long comic narrative known as rakugo, invariably ending with a clever punch-line or witty pun, began to appear at this time. These monologues, which could go on for an hour or more, were enormously popular. Variety halls, known as yose or yoseba, where professional rakugo storytellers and the hereditary lines of performers they established could perform, opened. Tickets for these alternately serious, edifying and comic monologues were cheap. They had to be, as the audience was made up largely of the residents of the downtown areas whose language and settings were mirrored in the stories.
Master storyteller and former comb-maker Sanshotei Karaku established Edo’s first commercially successful rakugo hall. Something very similar to the improvisational style of rakugo was developed into a comic literary prose form by Shikitei Samba, a writer whose roots were in the downtown merchant quarter of Edo. In keeping with the city’s commercial spirit and in the time-honoured manner of the amateur wit, Samba’s writings often included comical advertisements for shops, including the one he owned himself, a thriving apothecary.
In the same tradition of aspiring men of literature who nonetheless had to make a living was the comic writer Ryutei Rijo, a craftsman who repaired palanquins and created ornamental designs in ivory, bamboo, silver and coral. An accomplished ballad singer, shamisen player and author of the comic novel Eight Laughing Men, he exemplified Edo’s natural blend of trades, crafts and arts. Samba’s irreverent and very funny book, Ikkiyoburo, managed to find its way into print at this time. A series of conversations set in the public bathhouses of Edo, it was one of the last yellow books to be published, as the works of writers like Tanehiko and Bakin began to appear. These were closer in subject and form to real novels. Bakin was the most prolific writer of the day, collaborating at times with the great bohemian genius Hokusai, whose illustrations helped to sell the books. Bakin’s house stood at the foot of Kudanshita at a time when the district still had many rural features. Bakin’s spring, as it was known, was a nearby watercourse used by the author to prepare his writing brushes.
Woodblock Art
A by-product of the decadence that fed the ripening of Edo was the efflorescence of woodblock art, which reached a degree of perfection at this time. Among the great practitioners of the ukiyo-e print were Kiyonaga, Harunobu, Sharaku and Utamaro. Utamaro’s portraits of women in the pleasure quarters, his use of colour, form and style in serialized works like A Collection of Reigning Beauties are matchless. A typical Utamaro beauty, languid and willowy, is sensual but attainable. Unlike Harunobu’s prints of beautiful, eroticized women in faintly unreal settings, Utamaro’s subjects have a plausible sensuality, suggested by intimate, even slovenly touches such as dishevelled clothing, exposed breasts or hair in casual disarray.
The artist spent a good deal of his life in the pleasure quarters, and in one print we see him, clearly in his element, sitting on a verandah at night surrounded by women, raising a cup of sake to one of them as she leans closer. He wears a slightly rakish black kimono, dotted with white spots; two yellow circles are visible on each shoulder, one reading uta, the other maro. Best known for his portraits of courtesans, the artist was interested in women in all their forms, depicting not only the coveted beauties of the pleasure quarters, but peasant women, weavers, dyers and women scouring Edo Bay for shellfish, or cutting mulberry leaves for silkworms.
Utamaro’s The Twelve Hours of the “Green Houses”, a series of twelve prints depicting in fluid lines a day in the life of a Yoshiwara courtesan, are unsurpassed in their elegance and veracity. The series was published to great acclaim in 1794. A “green house”, in its original Chinese connotation, was a nobleman’s pavilion, a tall structure where kept women lived. In Utamaro’s usage it stands for the more privileged strata within the pleasure quarters of the Yoshiwara. Though not precisely a realist, the artist was able to express psychological moods and nuance through portraits arranged around the twelve-hour zodiacal clock in which the twenty-four hour day is divided into twelve two-hour sections. In the person of Tsutaya Juzaburo, Utamaro had found an imaginative publisher of ukiyo-e and fine quality books by new writers and artists. With Tsutaya’s encouragement, Utamaro began working on beautifully illustrated works like the 1786 Edo Sparrow picture book.
Almost nothing is known or verifiable about the life of Sharaku - except for the extraordinary fact that during an intensely creative period amounting to less than ten months in 1794, the artist produced his entire body of known work. The 145 extant prints are almost exclusively portraits of Kabuki actors, an immensely valuable record of the times. The mystery of Sharaku’s life and death has never been solved.
Born in Edo in 1760, Ando Hokusai worked tirelessly until the very end of his life, dying at the age of 89, but not before he had published some 30,000 sketches and over 500 books. A man of boundless energy, he took the common people of Edo as his subjects: the peddlers, merchants, shop-girls, litter-bearers, monks, beggars and courtesans. Mount Fuji, standing in the background of many of his prints, forms the central subject of his Thirty-Six Views of Fuji.
Though fully aware of his gifts, he never lapsed into complacency, seeing himself as a student on the path towards an attainable mastery. Sixteen years before his death he wrote:
I have slowly learned about the pattern of the grass, the trees, the structure of birds and other animals like insects and fish, so that when I am 80, I hope to be better. At 90, I hope to have caught the very essence of things, so that at 100 I will have reached heavenly mysteries. At 110, every point and line will be living.
Sharp-tongued and cantankerous, Hokusai was by nature a showman whose creative energy drove him to some unusual exhibitions of his skills. These “performances” brought a breath of fresh air to the city. On one occasion, using a barrel and broom as inkpot and brush, he astonished onlookers by
painting a colossal portrait of the Indian saint Daruma in the precincts of Gokoku-ji temple. When the shogun Ienari got wind of the event he had Hokusai brought to Asakusa’s Denpo-in temple for a demonstration of his powers. The result was an early example of performance art. Turning up dressed in his usual rags, he strode proudly to the centre of the temple’s great hall, carrying a box whose contents were concealed from the gaze of the shogun and his retinue of officials. Proceeding to unroll a long sheet of paper, he painted two blue parallel lines representing water along its surface. He then opened the box and out stepped a rooster. Swiftly painting its feet red, he placed the bird on the paper, where it strode up and down, its feet leaving imprints resembling scarlet autumn leaves. Bowing respectfully to Ienari and his astonished retainers, the artist declared, “I have created a landscape for Your Gracious Excellency. It is called Red Maples along Tatsuta River.”
Tokyo: A Cultural and Literary History (Cities of the Imagination Book 34) Page 9