by Steven Moore
During the 17th and 18th centuries, hundreds of other novels were written in Korea, but they sound like routine and derivative romances, adventure stories, family sagas, and war novels. Critics sometimes single out for exception Showing Goodness and Stirred by Righteousness by Cho Songgi (1638–89) and the anonymous The Tale of Lady Pak, but while the latter has been translated into French (1982), neither is available in English. If nothing else, this period seems to have been a busy time for the novel—as shown in Lee’s History of Korean Literature (pp. 261–87)—unlike in Korea’s truculent neighbor to the east.83
JAPANESE FICTION
Japan was the first Far Eastern country to produce a significant body of novels—hundreds were written between the 10th and 14th centuries—but the last to join the early modern era, due largely to centuries of incessant warfare and self-imposed isolation. When the Japanese resumed writing fiction in the early 17th century, the initial results were trivial booklets (zoshi): derivative tales modern in setting but medieval in method, parodies of the classics, fictional travelogues, ghost stories, and collections of anecdotes, many of them written by and for the demobilized samurai class. Even later, when Japanese writers started producing more ambitious novels, they dismissed them as gesaku—“playful compositions,” entertainment written for money, not to be taken seriously as art. For a round-eyed outsider, evaluating the Japanese fiction of this period is handicapped by the paucity of translations, as though even scholars don’t consider much of this fiction worth translating. Nevertheless, there are a few works that illustrate the millennium-long tendency of Japanese writers to keep the novel novel.
The earliest work that might pass for a novel is the episodic Tales of the Floating World (Ukiyo monogatari, 1666) by a Buddhist ronin (masterless samurai) named Asai Ryoi (1612?–91?). Ryoi was aware that the traditional Buddhist trope of “the floating world” (ukiyo)—meaning the sad, fleeting impermanence of things—had recently been turned upside-down: if we’re here today, gone tomorrow, it’s all the more reason to seize the day, not rue its brevity, or so believed the new class of pleasure-seekers made up of “courtesans, actors, jesters, rakes, and dandies, offensively rich shopkeepers, their spoiled sons and daughters, and their vain, luxurious wives.”84 In the preface to Tales of the Floating World, Ryoi’s narrator redefines ukiyo:
When we live in this world, we see and hear the good and the bad in all things; everything is interesting, and we can’t see more than one inch in front of us. It’s not worth the skin of a gourd to worry about it; fretting just causes indigestion. So cross each bridge as you come to it; gaze at the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms, and the bright autumn leaves; recite poems; drink saké; and make merry. Not even poverty will be a bother. Floating along with an unsinkable disposition, like a gourd bobbing along with the current—that is what we call the floating world.85
The gourd image is echoed in the name of the protagonist, Hyotaro (hyo = gourd), a rich young profligate who enjoys sneaking off to the pleasure district of Kyoto for fornication and gambling until he runs out of money. He becomes an advisor to a corrupt official intent on fleecing the populace, and eventually winds up a lay priest. The novel contains a good deal of social criticism, directed not at prostitutes but at wastrels like Hyotaro and especially at government officials who prey on farmers and peasants.
But the novelist most closely associated with the floating world genre (ukiyo-zoshi) is Ihara Saikaku (1642–93). Born into a prosperous family of Osaka, he had the leisure to devote himself to writing, specializing in haikai—linked haiku poems that combined classic poetic themes with the concerns of the newly emerging merchant class. After his wife died in 1675, Saikaku shaved his head like a monk and began wandering throughout Japan, teaching haikai and experimenting with prose pieces and puppet theater. In 1682, he published the first major Japanese novel of this period, The Life of an Amorous Man (Koshoku ichidai otoko), a startlingly modern work in a style called haibun, which converted the imagistic qualities of haiku into narrative form. With its sudden shifts from poetic locutions to current slang, its unconventional grammar, and the elliptical nature of haiku (which suggests rather than states), this style made great demands on its first readers, but thanks to its racy subject matter they turned it into a best-seller nonetheless, as would happen with the ultraliterary illicit Lolita. Saikaku’s disciple Saigin called it tengogaki—“wild writing.”86
The story-line is simple: Yonosuke—short for Ukiyo-nosuke, “Man of the (Floating) World”—is born to a wealthy man and his ex-courtesan wife, and as early as age seven begins to experience the sexual urges that will dominate his life. After losing his virginity to the proverbial girl next door, the boy moves in with some relatives in Kyoto and begins pursuing every girl and woman within reach. Soon he is visiting the red-light districts with older men and making the acquaintance of the glamor girls of “the flower and willow world.”87 At age 15, Yonosuke adds members of his own sex to his expanding circle of partners, and for a while even works as a pimp for these “flyboys.”88 Yonosuke’s exasperated parents apprentice him to various trades, all of which he neglects in favor of his insatiable sexual curiosity, so at age 19 he is disowned by his father. Without money or connections, Yonosuke shaves his head and becomes a monk, which doesn’t last long. Ripping his sacred robe into dishrags, he embarks on a number of schemes and scams to stay alive and meet more women, a degrading life that lasts for 15 years. Just when he’s hit rock bottom at 34 (the same age at which Saikaku lost his wife), Yonosuke learns his father has died and, in a reconciling gesture, has left an enormous fortune to his missing son.
Rejuvenated and refinanced, Yonosuke decides to devote the rest of his life to enjoying the finest courtesans in Japan. The second half of the novel charts this rake’s progress through all the teahouses of the floating world: sampling the fleshy wares of every city, falling in and out of love, buying some courtesans out of their contracts, marrying the greatest one, and breaking hearts until his fifties. “Willingly racked by love, by the time Yonosuke was fifty-four, his notebooks show he had slept with 3,742 women and 725 men.”89 In the final chapter, at age 60, Yonosuke realizes his life of pleasure will condemn him to hell, but rather than repent, he builds a ship christened Yoshiiro maru (the SS Lust, Keene waggishly translates it)—outfitted with the clothing of his ex-lovers, rigged with braids of hair women had offered him, and stocked with aphrodisiacs—and gathers some like-minded friends, convincing them to join him on a quest for the mythical Island of Women in the east. They set sail in the tenth month of 1682—the month The Life of an Amorous Man was published—and are never seen again.
Among the aphrodisiacs are 200 copies of the Tales of Ise, the last of several references in the novel to the 10th-century uta monogatari featuring the legendary lover Ariwara no Narihiri (825–80). Saikaku clearly intended his outrageous work to be a modern, parodic update of that delicate work; Yonosuke occasionally glimpses the “tears in things,” but unlike Narihira he is neither a poet nor a courtier. Similarly, Saikaku’s decision to divide his novel into 54 chapters is an homage to The Tale of Genji—there are several references to the Shining Prince within the novel as well—and the occasional reference to the medieval Tale of Saigyo has a likewise self-deprecating function: Yonosuke’s lifelong pilgrimage to all the whorehouses of Japan is a travesty of the monk Saigyo’s visits to the holy places of the island. Literature, like history, often repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce; Yonosuke is a farcical Narihira, Genji, Saigyo. Although there is an undeniable exuberance to Saikaku’s novel as the merchant class revels in a counterculture devoted to art and sensuality, “a ribald escape from the gloom of Buddhism, the rigid codes of official Confucianism and the draconian laws that governed sexual morality,”90 there is also a sense of cultural degradation as Saikaku registers how far Japan has fallen from the glory days of the Heian era. An early chapter opens:
It was a time when the precious blooms on Mt. Oshio were about to scatter and m
en’s hearts were moved by a delicate sense of regret. But it was an age, too, when dandyism had become a fad. Swordmanship appealed to the young, with emphasis on style, not skill. The blade was drawn from its scabbard with a dramatic flourish, in the manner of Kembo, master faddist of his line.91 . . . All young men in the social hierarchy of Kyoto took to this new-fangled mode, discarding age-old customs.
If delicacy of feeling had become a thing of the past, dandyism brought in its wake a rough, reckless spirit. Men visited the blossoming plum trees in Kitano or the wisterias in Otani, not to admire the flowers but to crush them in their hands. They saw the smoke erupting majestically from Mt. Toribe and thought no more of it than the smoke issuing from the bowls of their slender tobacco pipes. Most of all they found it egregiously silly to let their servants carry their water gourds. They carried these themselves. (43–44).
The first half of the novel especially is filled with similar signs of degeneration: nuns and priestesses engage in drug-dealing and prostitution, fishermen’s wives whore around while their husbands are at sea, religious ceremonies turn into orgies at night, and inns are filled not with traveling aristocracy but with the dregs of society (who would never have been mentioned in a Japanese novel before this):
The showman from Nara with a monkey on a leash, the frightful freak from Nishinomiya who exhibited himself as a “barbarian,” the romantic hand-to-mouth idler who posed as a mendicant priest and chanted Buddhist sutras for a few coppers, the wayward monk with an eye for sensuous pleasure, the ubiquitous peddler of gewgaws—all were there. And all were fly-by-night actors on the seamy stage of life, existing precariously from day to day and spending their day’s earnings in one night of unrestrained fun. All that remained in their possession the next morning were their shabby stocks in trade, their battered fans, and their straw traveling hats. (61–62)
The rootless existence of Yonosuke and such characters is well-served by the novel’s episodic structure, the lack of narrative continuity dramatizing the loss of cultural continuity during this liberating period.
One loss that Saikaku doesn’t seem to mourn is that of institutional religion. Yonosuke’s skepticism toward religion is not depicted as a character flaw, and the sacrilegious fact the 3,742 women he has bedded is the traditional number of gods in the Japanese pantheon suggests Saikaku held the same contemptuous view of the state religion that most educated men did. As Ivan Morris notes,
In Saikaku’s time the Buddhist priesthood was largely sunk into lethargy and uncreativeness and had ceased to be an inspiring force in the artistic or intellectual life of the country. Its main function, indeed, was to minister to the dead; the aura of the crematory hung heavily over the temples. . . . The priests themselves were frequently corrupt and cynically unmindful of their vows. Comfortably ensconced in their “worldly temples” (sekendera), many of them not only partook of flesh, but violated their vows of celibacy by secretly indulging themselves with boys or women. (36)
As a result, The Life of an Amorous Man is the first Far Eastern novel in which the characters don’t seem like prisoners of their culture, but free agents. They have some wiggle room to reject parts of it, to make their own choices, and even though they make some sleazy ones, there’s a vitality about the society depicted here that feels very modern: Saikaku could be describing the Japan of 1982 rather than 1682. At its best (in the second half of the novel), the floating world was an aesthetic event, hosted by elegant demimondaines, whose guests sang, danced, drank saké and rice wine, recited poetry, went on cherry blossom-viewing excursions, listened to music, watched the moon, and laughed by lantern-light until retiring for a night of sex. When in Nagasaki, Yonosuke notes the grim contrast between Japan’s pleasure houses and those of the Dutch traders (the only Christians allowed in the country at that time): “Foreigners, he was told, kept to their own brothels. Trade was brisk there, for—or so the natives said—they were of a tough breed. But their prostitutes were never exhibited to public view. Everything was done secretly, night and day, as if it were a shameful thing and must be hidden and its existence denied” (227). Saikaku may look back in regret at some things, but he ends his novel with his protagonist looking forward to new delights, to more beautiful, talented women. We’re probably meant to laugh at the idea of a 60-year-old man and his geriatric cronies loading up with Viagra and porn for a pleasure cruise to Hawaii, but his medieval counterpart in a novel would have ended up squatting before a statue of Buddha in some drafty mountain hut mumbling lines from the Lotus Sutra. Whether or not you agree that’s progress, The Life of an Amorous Man is a sardonic appraisal of a culture in upheaval, wildly written in a genre undergoing a similar upheaval.
Saikaku followed this with the first of a dozen thematic collections of short stories he would publish over the next 30 years, which many critics consider superior to his novels.92 He wrote a second, minor novel in 1685, Wankyu issei no monogatari (The Tale of Wankyu the First)—based partly on a true story and partly on a popular Kabuki play—about a rich merchant who blows his fortune on a courtesan, goes crazy, and commits suicide, which has been translated into French (1990) but not into English. It contains a darker view of the floating world, one that characterizes his only other significant novel, The Life of an Amorous Woman (Koshoku ichidai onna, 1686). Superficially this resembles The Life of an Amorous Man in that it tracks a sensualist from childhood to old age, but differs in that it’s a first-person confession and lacks the earlier novel’s reckless lust for life: after a wayward youth and a period of degradation, Yonosuke enjoys a charmed life, but for the female protagonist of the later novel, it’s a downward spiral into degradation almost from page 1.
The short novel uses a frame that’s worth noting: it begins in the third-person as a nameless narrator crossing a ferry overhears two young men complaining about their sex lives; one has worn himself out from overindulgence yet wishes he had more stamina so that his semen “might gush forth unceasingly like this river that flows beneath us.”93 His companion wishes he could find a country without women so that he could focus on the natural world. Curious, the narrator follows them unobserved into the hills to a hut with a sign announcing “The Cell of Love” (or “Hermitage of Voluptuousness” [Hibbett] or “Hut of a Sensuous Hermit” [Drake]), occupied by a bent-over, gray-haired woman of 70 dressed like an old-fashioned courtesan. The two young men have come to her for advice on matters of the heart and ask for her life story, which—after a few glasses of saké—she is happy to oblige them with. The narrator, like a voyeur, overhears all this and settles in for the story.
As sexually precocious as Yonosuke, this woman (we never learn her name) as a girl was sent from her home in Uji to attend a lady at the royal court in Kyoto, where she “fell prey to wanton feelings” at age 10 and began dressing much older, which catches the eye of a soldier who then has sex with her. This earns him the death penalty—fulfilling the novel’s opening line, “A beautiful woman—so the ancients say—is an axe that cuts off a man’s very life” (1.1)—and earns her a one-way ticket back to Uji. A few years later she returns to Kyoto and joins the floating world, first as a dancer, then gets engaged but blows that by seducing her fiancé’s father; is hired as a concubine to an impotent man who prefers boys anyway, then finally becomes a high-class courtesan, but over the next few years keeps descending in rank because of her bad attitude and vanity. Swearing off the life of a courtesan, she shaves her head, disguises herself as a boy, and joins a Buddhist monastery, but is exposed and becomes the wife of a lascivious priest. Escaping that mess, she then begins a series of dead-end jobs—calligraphy teacher, parlor maid, hairdresser, seamstress, companion to an old lesbian, bathhouse attendant, procuress – until by age 64 she has hit rock bottom, living in poverty and failing even as a soka (nighthawk), the lowest form of whore. In the novel’s final chapter, she wanders into a Buddhist temple and in the Hall of the 500 Disciples is startled to see “that all these statues were perfect images of men with whom I had shared
a pillow in my palmy days” (6.4). (These 500 represent only a fraction of her body count: she estimates she’s had sex with over 10,000 men.) After this sacrilegious epiphany, she decides to commit suicide, but is providentially saved by “an old acquaintance,” who provides her with a hut and convinces her to give her heart to the Buddha and spend the rest of her days mechanically “invoking the Sacred Name from morning until night” (6.4). Returning to the present, she then thanks her two auditors for giving her a chance to get her awful story off her chest.
It’s a lively if sordid tale, but it doesn’t explain how the 64-year-old convert to Buddhism became the sprucely dressed, 70-year-old sex therapist of “The Cell of Love” in the opening chapter. Apparently she repented repenting and decided to devote her golden years to warm memories of love rather than to the cold comforts of religion. This supposition is supported by the novel’s relentless mockery of Buddhism; when she shaves her head and offers her services to the priest early in the novel, she quickly learns he’s not the only randy bonze in the temple and reverts to her former religion of sex: “In the course of time I urged this one religion on temples of all the eight sects, and I may say that I never found a single priest who was not ready to slash his rosary” (2.3). Far from elevating her thoughts, the Five Hundred Disciples she beholds in the Buddhist temple at the end look like johns, and her conversion sounds like just one more bad career move for this unlucky lady. When we’re introduced to her at the beginning of the novel, she seems to be not at peace with the world, but back in the floating world of her youth: dressed as a courtesan, downing shots of saké, “she strummed upon her koto and sang a love song” before she launches into her tale. In a sense, she is still plying her trade, with the two young men as her latest customers. The reason we never learn her name? “A guest who didn’t ask the girl’s name till he took his leave was clearly a man of distinction,” she recalls from her teahouse days (2.2, trans. Hibbett), placing the distinguished reader in the role of a courtesan’s customer, who can have her for the price of the book (currently $14.95 from New Directions).