Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900

by Shirane, Haruo, ed.

  Putting Out the Light, Love Begins

  AGE SEVEN (VOL. 1: SEC. 1)

  Blossoms scatter soon after they bloom, and people grieve. The moon, too, always sinks down behind the mountains. Near Mount Irusa in the province of Tajima,2 in a silver-mining settlement, lived a man who came to be known as Yumesuke, Man of Dreams. Weary of making money, he put aside his worldly duties as a mine manager and moved to Kyoto, where he dreamed, asleep and awake without reserve, along the double path of female and male love.

  Yumesuke drank hard with Nagoya Sanza3 and Kaga no Hachi,4 two of the most wild, free-roving warriors around, and the three and their followers showed their closeness by wearing robes with seven lozenge crests on them. Long past midnight, they would head back north across the Modoribashi Bridge5 on First Avenue on their way home from the Misujimachi licensed quarter dressed in outrageous fashions that reversed the styles men usually wore when they visited the district. Sometimes the friends made themselves up as beautiful young men waiting for older male lovers; sometimes they dressed as Buddhist monks in black, long-sleeved robes; and sometimes they wore wigs of long, unkempt hair. The bridge was famous for spectral sightings, but these three were true ghosts if there ever were ones. But the friends listened to this and similar attributions as calmly as the medieval warrior Hikoshichi, who never even flinched when the woman he carried on his back revealed herself to be a demon. The friends assured the great tayū that they wanted nothing so much as to feel the women’s teeth on their bodies unto death.6

  The men’s passion grew stronger with every visit to the quarter until finally they bought out the contracts of three of the most famous women there, Kazuraki, Kaoru, and Sanseki.7 They gave the women retirement villas in wooded areas outside Kyoto at Saga, Higashiyama, and Fujinomori, where they could live quietly and privately. But the lovemaking continued, and one of the women gave birth to a baby boy. His parents named him Yonosuke, Man of the World. There’s no need to go into the details. They’re familiar enough to those who know about these things.

  The child’s parents loved him deeply. They amused him by clapping his tiny hands for him or gently rocking his small head, which rapidly took shape. In the frost of the Eleventh Month of the boy’s fourth year, they performed his first hair-binding ceremony, and at the following New Year’s, he put on his first formal divided skirt. Later, when he caught smallpox, his parents prayed fervently to the smallpox god, who left the boy scarless.

  Yonosuke passed through his sixth year and entered his seventh. One night that summer he woke on his pillow and pushed it away. Soon the silence was broken by the sound of the metal latch on the sliding door of his bedroom. Then the latch opened, and there were yawning sounds. The night attendants in the next room knew immediately what was happening and followed the boy. One of them lit a candle in a holder with a long handle and walked in front of Yonosuke as he stamped down the wooden floor of the long corridor.

  In the deep-shadowed northeast corner of the large house, the Demon Gate—through which ghosts were believed to come and go—spread the leafy branches of some low barberry trees planted there to ward off harmful spirits. Then, from nearby came the sound of piss trickling down onto freshly strewn pine needles in a pot. Later, as Yonosuke washed his hands in the wood basin, the attendant, worried that the head of an iron nail might be sticking up from the rough, split bamboo floor, moved her candle so that she could light it more brightly.

  “Put out the light,” Yonosuke said. “Come closer.”

  “Please allow me to protect your feet,” she protested. “How could I possibly let you walk in darkness?”

  Yonosuke seemed to understand and nodded. But then he added, “Don’t you know? They say ‘Love is darkness.’”

  The other attendant, a bodyguard with a short sword, was standing nearby. She heard what Yonosuke had said and blew out the candle. When she did, Yonosuke tugged on her long left sleeve and anxiously asked, “Isn’t that strict old nurse around here somewhere?”

  It was almost too funny for the women to bear. He still had a boy’s body, but he was beginning to feel the real thing, as in the ancient myth of the first two primal parent gods as they stood at the bottom of the Heavenly Floating Bridge, knowing they had to give birth to the cosmos but unsure of how to do it.8 Later the maids recounted everything to the boy’s mother. It must have been the beginning of a great joy for her.

  Yonosuke—preceded by his personal attendant and followed by his bodyguard and nursemaid, carrying a candle—goes to the privy with the lattice window (lower left). The corridor takes the form of a bridge, suggesting the mythological Heavenly Floating Bridge that connects the world of the gods to that of humans. The illustration is attributed to Saikaku. From the 1682 edition.

  Yonosuke daily grew more aware of the “thing” inside him. He had no actual lovers yet, so for the moment he collected alluring portraits of beautiful women. Soon he’d put so many into his book cart that it was a complete mess. He refused to show them to anyone, however, and he protected the door to his room—to which he now gave the elegant name Chrysanthemum Chamber—as closely as a guard at a road barrier in a romantic old tale. No one, he ordered, was to enter it unasked.

  Once, while Yonosuke was folding paper into origami, he presented one of his creations to a maid, saying it was the fabled double bird, half male and half female, that flew in the form of two lovers in one body. He also folded paper into blossoms and fastened them to a limb. This he also gave it to the maid, declaring it to be the legendary linking limb that grew between two lover trees, connecting them so closely that they shared the same grain and became one.

  In all that Yonosuke did, this was the one thing he never forgot. He tied his loincloth privately, refusing to let any of the maids help him, and he carefully knotted his waistband by himself in front and then slid it around to the back, the way grown men did. Remembering the artful scents used by the amorous prince Niou in The Tale of Genji, he wore pouches of fine incense on his body and also scented his sleeves. His stylish appearance put adult men to shame, and he moved the hearts of the women who saw him.

  When he played with friends his own age, Yonosuke hardly noticed the kites they sent up into the sky. Instead, he asked questions like “When people talk about ‘building bridges to the clouds,’9 do they mean that in the old days up in heaven there were men who actually traveled at night like shooting stars to their lovers’ houses?” Or “The oxherd star can meet the weaver woman star on only one night a year.10 How does he feel if rain clouds cover the sky that night and they’re kept apart?” The farthest points of heaven made Yonosuke grieve.

  Willingly racked by love, by the time Yonosuke was fifty-four, his notebooks show he had slept with 3,742 women11 and 725 men. After resting against the edge of a well wall with the girl next door, Yonosuke went on to drain every drop of vital fluid from his kidneys.12 It is amazing to think that he ever lived that long.

  Yonosuke shows a precocious desire for life, companionship, and lovemaking. At nineteen, he becomes a monk but quickly forgets his meditations and travels, poor and without connections, from one end of Japan to the other, meeting women of many classes and professions. After a near-death experience and an unexpected inheritance, he is transformed into a big spender whose job it is to give his fortune to the leading tayū in the major licensed quarters. The first chapter of the fifth book, translated next, opens with a requiem waka poem written by the noted Kyoto ash merchant and aesthete Sano Jōeki (son of the famous sword polisher Kōeki), who fell in love with Yoshino, one of the most famous tayū of the seventeenth century, and bought out the remainder of her contract in 1631, when she was twenty-six. They married and lived happily until 1643, when Yoshino died. Readers were expected to discern the overlap of the two times and two men, Jōeki and the younger Yonosuke. “Honored” indicates that Yonosuke has changed from a vagabond into an “honored visitor” to the quarter, and Yoshino comes to be called “honored wife.”

  Afterward “Honored
” Is Added to Their Names

  AGE THIRTY-FIVE (5:1)

  After the great tayū Yoshino died, a bereaved man wrote this poem: “She turned the capital into a village without blossoms—now Yoshino blooms in the other world.”

  Near and far, people remembered Yoshino as a truly outstanding woman. She was talented in every way and fully lived up to her name, which she took from Mount Yoshino with its endless clouds of cherry blossoms.13 There had never been a tayū like her before. Above all else, the depth of her feeling was beyond compare.

  On Seventh Avenue in Kyoto stood the workshop of a lowly smith of daggers and knives who used the grand-sounding title Kinzuna, lord of Suruga. One of his apprentice smiths had seen Yoshino at a distance in the Misujimachi licensed quarter and had fallen in love with her. Unable to express his love, the apprentice turned over and over in his mind an old poem: “A guard blocks my secret path to my love—may he fall right asleep night after night!”14 Night after night, the apprentice himself worked furiously, beating out fifty-three short sword blades in fifty-three days and saving fifty-three monme in silver coins, enough to buy an audience with Yoshino, who was a performer of the highest rank. He waited and waited for a chance to meet Yoshino, but finally he was forced to give up his fantasy that he could, like an ancient Chinese king, simply order a carpenter to build him a magical ladder to the clouds. Down on the ground, cold rain fell on his sleeves—bitter tears of true love that he swore to the gods were not false.

  The apprentice had the day off for the Bellows Festival on the eighth of the Eleventh Month, when all forges were extinguished and purified with prayers before being relit. In the afternoon he discreetly made his way once more to the licensed district. There, someone heard the apprentice lamenting the fact he had enough money yet couldn’t arrange an audience with the great Yoshino because of his low social position as a manual worker. This person told Yoshino about the apprentice, and Yoshino, moved by the strength of the man’s feeling, pitied him and secretly called him to her.

  As their conversation became more intimate, the nervous apprentice began to shake. He was so awed by Yoshino that he no longer knew what he was doing, and tears ran down his smudged face. “You can’t imagine how grateful I am,” he told Yoshino. “I’ll never forget this, no matter how many times I’m reborn. Meeting you is the only thing I’ve been thinking about for years, and now it’s finally happened.”

  The overwhelmed apprentice got up to leave the room, but Yoshino took hold of his sleeve and stopped him. Then she blew out the lamp. Without even undoing her sash, she put her arms around him. “Please,” she said, “do as you wish.”

  At Yoshino’s touch, the lower part of the man’s body moved uncontrollably. But his anxiety continued. Even as he began to undo his cotton loincloth, he whispered, “Someone’s coming” and tried to stand up again. Yoshino pulled him back to her.

  “Unless we make love,” she said, “I’m not going to let you go, even if I have to wait here all night and the sun comes up. You really are a man, aren’t you? You’re not going to climb up on Yoshino’s belly15 and then go back empty-handed, are you?” She pinched the man’s sides, stroked his thighs, massaged the back of his neck, and caressed the small of his back.

  At dusk Yoshino arranged two pillows, and they lay down together. Then at last, around the time the ten o’clock bell was booming outside, somehow or other, after many twists and turns, she managed a successful conclusion. And later, before she sent the apprentice back, she formally exchanged parting cups of saké with him.16

  The performance house17 protested strongly. “What you did,” they said, “was outrageous.”

  “But tonight I’m meeting Yonosuke,” Yoshino said. “He knows about things, and he’ll understand me. I won’t hide anything from him. And none of you needs to worry, either. He won’t blame anyone.” As they went on talking like this, the night deepened. Then a voice came up from the entrance: “We’re honored by Suke’s18 arrival.”

  Yoshino talked with Yonosuke and explained everything, including how she’d made love earlier. “You acted like a perfect tayū,” Yonosuke said. “Now I’ll never let you go.”

  Hurriedly, Yonosuke went through the proper negotiations that very night and bought out the remainder of Yoshino’s contract. He had decided to make Yoshino his wife.

  Yoshino was sensitive and refined, but she’d also learned much about the world outside the quarters, and her intelligence never ceased to amaze people. She had always been fervent in her prayers to be born in the Buddhist paradise in the next world, and later she joined the same Flower of the Law19 temple to which Yonosuke belonged. She thought of his feelings in everything she did and even gave up smoking her pipe for him.

  Yoshino and Yonosuke talk while Yoshino’s assistants attend them.

  The relationship greatly displeased Yonosuke’s relatives. Shocked that Yonosuke planned to marry a former woman of the quarter, they refused to meet him or recognize her as being in any way related to them. Yoshino grieved, and finally she proposed to Yonosuke that they separate, “. . . or, at the very least, that you put me in a villa somewhere and just come to see me from time to time. They’ll relent as long as you don’t formally make me your legal wife.” But no matter how hard Yoshino pleaded, Yonosuke refused to consent.

  “Well, then,” she said, “I’ll just have to deal with your relatives myself.”

  “And just how do you plan to persuade them?” Yonosuke asked. “They refuse to listen even to the Buddhist monks and Shintō priests I’ve been sending to see them.”

  “Well,” Yoshino said, “first you write to each of them very politely. Something like, ‘Tomorrow I will proceed to separate myself from Yoshino and send her back to her home. Therefore I earnestly pray that you think of me once more as you always have.’ And then you send around a circular invitation saying, ‘The cherry blossoms in the garden are at their peak. I beg the kind attendance of all the gentlewomen.’ Your women relatives aren’t really opposed at all.”20

  And they weren’t. That day all of them, without exception, came to Yonosuke’s mansion, riding in fine enclosed palanquins. Soon they were sitting formally in rows in the great guest room built on a framework of pillars that projected out from the slope of a hill which, in the space of the large garden, seemed as high as a mountain. How long it had been, they all exclaimed, since they’d been able to look out over it! When Yoshino saw that the saké had been going around for a while and the women were feeling relaxed, she appeared in the great room wearing a serving woman’s blue green wadded cotton robe with a red apron and a folded kerchief on top of her head. She carried a plain-wood tray heaped with thinly cut slices of dried abalone arranged in portions for each guest to eat with her saké. Going first to the oldest woman there, she got down on her knees and bowed low, pressing her hands to the floor.

  “Please allow me to speak about myself,” she said very politely. “I am a performing woman who once lived in the Misujimachi quarter. My name is Yoshino. I realize I am unworthy to appear in such esteemed company as this, but today I have been allowed to go back to my mother’s home, and I would like to leave you with a parting memory.” Then she sang a song from long ago:21

  Common, oh, common

  common, oh, common

  reel of mulberry thread

  winding on and winding

  turning the past into the present—

  ah, would that it could!

  All who heard her felt as if their souls were about to leave their bodies.

  Later Yoshino played her koto, a kind of zither, recited waka poems, and performed the tea ceremony with utter grace. She arranged fresh flowers in artistic designs, showed the women how to adjust the weights in a mechanical clock, fixed the hair of the young girls, played go, a kind of checkers game, with them, and performed on her bamboo mouth organ. She also told stories about mortality and faith in the Lotus Sutra and even gave advice on balancing household accounts. In everything, she took great care to see
that the women enjoyed their time with her. Yoshino directed the whole entertainment by herself, and she would no sooner go into the kitchen than the women would call her out again.