Five Women Who Loved Love

by Ihara Saikaku

  Ihara Saikaku was born in this city in 1642. Nothing is known about his early life and very little even about his later years. His wife died young, leaving him with a blind daughter, who also died within a few years. It is said that Saikaku’s grief led him to place his affairs in the hands of an assistant, but instead of retiring to some religious sanctuary as might have been expected, he devoted himself to travel and writing. We may judge from his novels that his journeying about Japan in those early years provided him with a rich store of information from which to draw for local color and charming incidents. His knowledge of places, peoples, and things was, for a novelist, probably equal to that which the famous actor Sakata Tojuro expected of his own profession: “The art of an actor is like a beggar’s bag and must contain everything, whether it is important or not. If there is anything not wanted for immediate use, keep it for a future occasion. An actor should even learn how to pick pockets.”

  Saikaku first won literary recognition as the leading disciple of Soin, a writer of haikai (seventeen-syllable epigrammatic verses linked into long poems) who headed the liberal Danrin school of poetry. As the chief exponent of this school in Osaka, Saikaku was influential in the movement to free poetry from rigid adherence to conventional forms, to enlarge the scope of its subject matter, and to have it read in a natural style. His predilection for commonplace themes, drawn from the daily life of the people, won for him the contempt of the famous poet Basho, who found Saikaku’s verse vulgar and uninspired, but it made him enormously popular for a time in Osaka. Saikaku was especially famous for his marathon poetry-performances before assembled friends and admirers. At the age of thirty-six he is said to have composed sixteen hundred haikai in a single performance, a feat which put this kind of versification for the first time into mass production on a competitive basis. Three years later his record output for a single day went up to three thousand, and finally, at the age of forty-three, Saikaku put on a day-and-night exhibition which resulted, it was claimed, in the composing of 23,500 of these versified epigrams. On such occasions Saikaku had judges standing by to count and record the haikai he composed. Moreover, the nickname which he acquired, Ni-man Okina (Twenty-thousand Old Master), suggests that people in his own time thought him capable of this spectacular accomplishment.

  These public orgies seem to have exhausted for the moment Saikaku’s appetite for expression in the limited, if not inflexible, haikai form. He turned now to writing fiction, finding this medium perhaps better suited to the development of his subject matter because it permitted a far wider range of expression than did epigrammatic verse. In these same years Saikaku also tried his hand at playwriting and at recording his observations on theatre people of his time, especially the personal charms of young actors and amusing details of their private lives. But it was the novel which gave full scope both to his rich poetical imagination and to his talent for realistic observation of the life of his time.

  Saikaku’s first novel, Koshoku ichidai otoko (A Man Who Loved Love), tells of a man who roamed around the country, working at all sorts of trades, and making love to thousands of women and hundreds of young boys. It is considered by many Japanese as his most realistic novel, while Women Who Loved Love is thought more imaginative and poetic. The former is likened to The Tale of Genji, some even saying that Saikaku used Genji for his model. But whatever Saikaku may have owed to earlier literature, including tales of the Floating World (ukiyo-zoshi), which were popular in his own time, he did much to create a type of literature new to Japan, and at the same time to give the common people an equivalent for the Genji in terms of their own experience. The hero of his first novel was as handsome and accomplished a lover as Prince Genji, but instead of luxuriating in the magnificent surroundings of the court, he found his pleasure where Saikaku’s readers looked for theirs—in teahouses, brothels, bathhouses, theatres, and the homes of commoners. The heroes and heroines of his other romances, including Five Women Who Loved Love, bear much less resemblance to people in Murasaki’s Tale of Genji, yet we often find them aping the latter. When some young bucks of Kyoto spend an evening at a teahouse, passing judgment on the beauty and dress of the girls who come by, they do in their own way what Genji and his friends did in discussing the virtues and desirability of various court ladies. When a girl comes upon her sleeping lover, she finds his body perfumed with a scent named after Genji’s only son. Even the brothel women have “Genji names,” taken from those given to the emperor’s ladies. Nevertheless, there is one respect at least in which this Floating World differed strikingly from the society of Genji—it was more open and varied. Where Murasaki and her circle had made the court their whole world, Saikaku and his friends thought to make the whole world their court.

  Not all of Saikaku’s novels concern the love of men and women, as do the two already mentioned. But much of what he had to say in other novels is suggested in these. There is, for instance, the matter of men who loved men, which became the subject of a later series, the Nanshoku okagami (Mirror of Manly Love). By Saikaku’s time pederasty had become fairly widespread in Japan. Its origins have been traced back to the Heian period (ninth and tenth centuries A.D.), when the growth of monasticism made it common among Buddhist monks, who were forbidden the company of women. A homosexual relationship developed between master and disciple, the older monk acting as teacher and guardian in return for the love and devotion of his younger partner. During medieval times this custom spread to the warrior class, where it fitted into the order of feudal loyalties. Obedience and service on the part of a younger man were exchanged for the favor and protection of an older one, and their love was solemnized by an oath of faithfulness to each other for life. In the early Tokugawa period prohibitions were placed on this practice by the shogunate, but it continued to flourish in places where the latter’s influence was too weak to enforce compliance, some of them places where an individualistic and warlike tradition was still strong and men scorned the love of women as effeminate. Satsuma was one of these, and the last of Saikaku’s five women had to win her Satsuma man away from the love of young boys.

  It is perhaps as a reward for her success that Saikaku lets this girl, alone among his heroines, enjoy a happy ending to her story. The others all die, commit suicide, or enter a nunnery, but she and her lover are brought back in triumph for a marriage in her father’s home, where there is wealth enough for her mate to dream, still, of buying up all the theatres in Japan with all their pretty male actors. It is a story suggestive of many things: for one, that in Saikaku’s time the theatre was a stronghold of homosexual love. Saikaku speaks also of Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines as favorite haunts of homosexuals, but the all-male theatre probably did more than any other institution to promote the love of men for men and make it seem less unnatural to society as a whole. When women were barred from the acting profession for having combined it with another, less seemly calling, handsome young men in women’s roles became the idols of both sexes in their audience.

  What drew Saikaku to this subject was not simply the realistic writer’s desire to mirror his society or describe impartially the varieties of love practiced in his time. Such a cool detachment would have been quite spurious with him, for Saikaku’s sharp objectivity implied no dulling of his human sympathies or his moral sensibility. Nor could he delve into the inmost secrets of human life only to expose them to ridicule or snickering prurience. Saikaku was obviously fascinated by the variety and complexity of human love, but, retaining always a sense of its intrinsic dignity, of love in its most exalted form as leading to self-denial rather than self-gratification, he is both a discriminating and compassionate judge of his fellow men. Thus it is not the sensual aspects of homosexual love that he takes up, but the theme of heroic devotion or base disloyalty.

  There is another kind of love which, as we might expect, figures even more prominently in Saikaku’s writings: the love of money—of riches generally, but in particular of coined money, which was a new object of love in those day
s and worth writing about in itself. In the Eitai-gura (Treasury for the Ages) he says: “It is not plum, cherry, pine, and maple trees that people desire most around their houses, but gold, silver, rice, and hard cash.” The whole book is devoted to showing how men went about satisfying this desire, as is another, Seken mune-zanyo (The Calculating World). While Five Women Who Loved Love is written mostly about people enjoying the pleasures of an already-earned wealth, two of its heroes have to think about acquiring it, and we know from them something of what Saikaku thought was essential to the making of money: frugality, persistence, a ready mind for figures, mastery of the abacus, a pleasant manner, honesty, and imagination.

  Most of these virtues had not been made much of before. The businessmen’s creed was new and Saikaku was its first publicist in Japan. It was developed largely by a class of merchants and moneylenders, called kamigata-mono, who had become active in the Kyoto-Osaka region during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These were the men whose resourcefulness, we are told, created the merchant guilds (za) in Japan, the free ports, free markets, the use of gold and silver as legal tender, paper money, and bills of exchange. Among them were some who had gone abroad in search of fortune and, when ordered home by the shogunate, had brought back to the port cities a new sense of freedom, an acquaintance with other ways of life, and especially a better knowledge of trade and money-handling. From them, we may imagine, the people of these cities learned to look outward and ahead, rather than inward and back as did the framers of the Tokugawa seclusion policy.

  To them also Saikaku must have owed much of his curiosity about the world and his taste for the exotic. Long ago exoticism had captured the Japanese mind, during the first flush of Buddhism and Chinese learning, but it later languished in a medieval dungeon of introspection and antiquarianism. Saikaku was one of those who brought it back to life in literature. He was fascinated both by the great variety of wealth in his own country and the innumerable treasures of foreign lands. The known world was, indeed, hardly enough to satisfy his thirst for the exotic. He followed the map to its limits when he had a dissolute company of pleasure seekers play “naked islanders such as are mentioned on maps of the world.” And when he came to the end of this book, to the treasure of a man from the Ryukyus, Saikaku could not be happy with such precious gifts as the silks of China and jewels and incense wood of the Indies. He had to have wonders from a Taoist paradise and the palaces of the gods.

  Saikaku’s enormous appetite for the wonders of the world earned for him the additional nickname Oranda Saikaku (Holland Saikaku). This did not mean, so far as we know, that Saikaku had any special acquaintance with the Dutch, who were then the only foreign traders allowed into Japan, or that he was in fact a student of Dutch learning. Rather it meant that people thought him unconventional enough to have a taste for things foreign or strange. The epithet was probably first applied contemptuously by persons who wanted to brand him as a nonconformist.

  The heart of his nonconformity was not, however, his exoticism. It was his adherence to the way of the townspeople and his belief that, in the cities at least, successful businessmen were the real aristocrats, while high birth and military prowess counted for little. This belief is expressed in one way by what he says in the Treasury for the Ages: “It makes no difference whether a man is of humble birth or of fine lineage. The geneologies of townspeople are written in dollars and cents. A man who traces his ancestry to Fujiwara Kamatari [a noble of the highest court rank] but who lives impoverished in the city will be worse off than one who leads a monkey through the streets to earn his living.” And the same belief is expressed in another way in Saikaku’s stories of the warrior class, such as the Buke-giri monogatari (The Warrior’s Sense of Duty). Though ostensibly written to popularize the way of the warrior, these stories leave a final impression of the warrior class as useless, misguided, and worthy of sympathy rather than admiration.

  Still, it is with the individual that Saikaku is ultimately concerned, not the substitution of one type of class-thinking for another. Even among the townspeople, whom Saikaku loves, there is no general title to admiration and success. The virtues of industry and frugality can easily be corrupted to make men over-scrupulous and stingy, as in the example of Moemon, who economized on his coat sleeves, would not buy a hat when he came of age to wear one, and slept with an abacus under his pillow to keep track of the money he made in dreams. But, somewhat like Gengobei, Moemon is one minute a ridiculous clerk and the next a daring hero who runs off with the most beautiful lady in town. Saikaku is as loath to confine his people in rigid characterization as in tight social classes. They are consistent only in their need for happiness and their weakness in pursuit of it. The reader must be quick if he is to follow the unpredictable course of human behavior and learn its secrets.

  Saikaku is not one to accommodate a Western reader’s taste for consistency in other matters, either. Time and place mean nothing to him except as they serve to create a mood. He will stop the sun in its course if he needs a sunset at the beginning and end of a picnic; he rushes the seasons to get the appropriate atmosphere for a certain scene. Sometimes people seem to be everywhere at once, and Gengobei, as a street-singer, impersonates himself as if he had already become a legend. One woman is successfully seduced while asleep, and a man spends the night with a young friend, waking to find it all a dream and his friend long since dead. Nothing is too implausible for the logic of mood and emotion.

  But his readers would probably not have held Saikaku accountable for such contradictions and inconsistencies. Many of Saikaku’s characters were already known in popular drama and song, and he was obliged to respect in some degree the associations people had with their names, to make them do some of the things for which they were already celebrated. It did not matter whether these things fitted poorly into the rest of the story; the thrill of identifying an old hero or favorite actor was enough. We should also bear in mind that Saikaku wrote Five Women Who Loved Love in some haste. It was the second of five books published within a period of only twelve months, and he probably spent little time trying to straighten out inconsistencies.

  There is another set of conventions which the Western reader may be surprised, this time pleasantly, to find disregarded by Saikaku: that deriving from what is considered the Japanese’ overdeveloped sense of politeness and discretion. Their absence in Saikaku may be due in part to the fact that his stories move too swiftly to allow for lengthy circumlocutions or polite explanations of what people do. Saikaku is customarily forthright himself—a quality which he probably shared with most other townsmen of the time—and his characters are generally direct in going about what they wish to do. In Five Women Who Loved Love this is most noticeable in the impetuosity of his heroines. They do not wait to be wooed by the men of their choice or stand by timidly while customary procedures decide their fate. In each case the heroine makes the advances, forces the issue, decides what must be done in a crisis. And when her impetuosity leads to ruin for herself and her lover, as most often happens, it is the heroine again whose unchastened spirit dominates the final scene at the execution ground.

  For Saikaku this boldness is what makes a woman great, more than her beauty. Nevertheless, his heroines are weak as well as strong, and he does not spare them the consequences of their weakness—in most cases, death. This ultimate retribution is not brought about merely to satisfy conventional morality, nor is it, on the other hand, held up as the final injustice done by society to a girl more sinned against than sinning. Death may be too extreme a penalty to pay for such offenses, but offenses they are nonetheless. To Saikaku the moral order is as hard and inescapable a fact as human passion.

  In this respect, despite the reputation he was later to acquire as a skillful teller of erotic tales, Saikaku is a keener and more effective judge of human foibles than many a writer whose purpose is more obviously moralistic. Saikaku never appears as the doctrinaire proponent of a particular moral philosophy. He does not, like the play
wright Chikamatsu, lend his talents to the movement which popularized Confucian ethics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The moral law prevails, but Saikaku cannot pretend that his heroines are easily reconciled to it. His five women remain wholly themselves—temperamental, volatile, passionate, unpredictable. Nothing is done to redeem them at the last, as Chikamatsu does with his Confucian puppets, by showing them to be good and reasonable people after all, whose sins are more the fault of circumstances than their own, and who with Chikamatsu’s approval can petulantly protest love for parents they have disgraced or loyal obedience to masters they have betrayed.

  In Chikamatsu’s “Almanac of Love” (translated by A. Miyamori in Masterpieces of Chikamatsu, London, 1926), which takes up the same theme as the third of our stories here, Osan is remorseful, not for what she has done to herself, but for having brought shame to her father and for having implicated the guiltless Tama as go-between in her adulterous affair; Moemon is not, we are asked to believe, concerned for his own life, but wishes only another chance to prove himself a loyal servant of the man he made a cuckold; and Osan’s father, who must be both a staunch upholder of the law and a loving father to Osan, tells her that he cannot give her money with which to escape the law, but that he will drop some money on the floor and there is nothing to prevent her picking it up. In the end goodness and order prevail, every Confucian virtue is accounted for, and a compromise is worked out whereby no one dies but the guiltless Tama, whose head is sacrificed in her father’s frantic attempt to have justice done and still save the guilty!