Yoshino’s guests completely forgot the time until the dawn sky began to brighten. Then at last, they began to declare they’d better be getting back home. As the women left, they offered their deeply felt advice to their host.
“Yonosuke,” one said, “how could you even think of separating from Yoshino? You must never, never let her go.”
“Even to other women,” another said, “she’s incredibly interesting to be with.”
“She’s so warm and gentle and intelligent, she’d make an excellent wife for any man in any position.”
“There isn’t a single woman among all thirty-five or -six of us who compares with her. Please pardon us all. You really ought to marry her.”
The women did their best to smooth things over, and soon Yonosuke and Yoshino were rushing to complete preparations for a wedding in front of all their relatives. Casks of saké and cypresswood boxes of cakes and delicacies sent as gifts piled up like mountains. As decoration, they placed a stand in the center of the room with a model of the Mountain of Eternal Youth that rises in the Eastern Sea. At the end, everyone chanted together from a nō play: “Delighting in the rustling of the wind in twin pines growing old together.” Finally Yoshino sang, “Until you are a hundred and I am ninety-nine.”
Aids to Lovemaking: Sailing to the Island of Women
AGE SIXTY (8:5)
Twenty-five thousand kanme of good silver. More than twenty tons of it. Yonosuke’s mother had urged Yonosuke to use as much of his dead father’s money as he wanted. For twenty-seven years, day and night, he’d abandoned himself with women. He’d traveled great distances to every licensed quarter in the land, seen every one. His body was worn down by love, and since he had no wife or children, nothing held his mind any longer to the impermanent floating world. Yonosuke had thought deeply about this and realized the way of physical love that his soul had been following was actually a path winding through the forty-nine days after death between this world and the next. Still, it was hard for him to leave behind forever the burning house of material forms and human desires that people call the physical world.
The next year would be his sixty-first. Already. His feet faltered; his ears barely heard even the creaking of wobbling cart wheels; and he leaned on a mulberry cane. He definitely wasn’t what he’d once been. And he wasn’t alone. White frost now covered the hair of the women he’d loved, and wrinkles crossed their foreheads. Surely there wasn’t a day the women didn’t feel upset by how they’d changed. Even the little girls I used to carry on my shoulder under great parasols at festivals, he realized; they’re already attracting men and making families. The world itself is change. How many times have I heard that? Still, could things really have changed this much?
Yonosuke had never done anything that would justify reciting last-minute prayers for rebirth in the Pure Land paradise. After he died, he knew perfectly well, he’d be food for hungry demons. A change of heart, sudden piety—well, entering the Buddhist path wasn’t that easy. No, he wouldn’t worry about whatever miserable end was coming. He’d spent practically his whole fortune, and he took the remaining six thousand silver coins and buried them in the hills east of Kyoto. On the site he placed a rock quarried in Uji22 and planted morning glory vines that would climb up it. Into the rock he carved a poem he’d written: “Lit at dawn and sunset, these morning glories bloom above the shining of six thousand silver coins.” At least that’s what people in the greedy human world said for some time. But none of them knew exactly where it was.
Then Yonosuke gathered around him seven friends of like mind, and he had a ship built on Enokojima, a small island in Osaka Harbor that local people referred to as Penis Island. He christened it Yoshiiro maru, the Ship of Good Desire. Its scarlet silk crepe pennant was made from an underskirt that the great tayū Yoshino had left behind for Yonosuke long ago. For bunting and curtains, Yonosuke sewed together and hung up robes given to him as remembrances by other performing women who now were dead. The baseboards of the cabin were papered with pages from evaluation books comparing the virtues of famous quarters women, and the hawser was made by braiding together lengths of hair that women had offered to Yonosuke.
The galley was filled with stamina-stretching foods. Loach, a kind of carp, swam in boat-shaped tubs of fresh water, surrounded by stores of burdocks, yams, and eggs carefully preserved in earth and sand. Into the hold were placed fifty large jars of Kidney Combustion Pellets and twenty crates of Women Delighter Pills, both powerful herbal aphrodisiacs for men. They also took aboard 250 pairs of metal masturbation balls for women, 7,000 dried taro stalks to be soaked in warm water and used by pairs of women, 600 latticed penis attachments, 2,550 water-buffalo-horn dildos, 3,500 tin dildos, 800 leather dildos, 200 erotic prints, 200 copies of The Tales of Ise, 100 loincloths, and 900 bales of tissue paper.23
Checking, they found they’d forgotten many things. So then they brought aboard 200 casks of clove-oil lubricant; 400 packets of hot-sliding pepper ointment; 1,000 roots of cows-knee grass for inducing abortions; 133 pounds each of mercury, crushed cotton seeds, red pepper, and imported amaranthus roots for the same purpose; as well as various other lovemaking aids and implements. Then they loaded great numbers of stylish men’s robes and diapers.24
“You know,” Yonosuke said, “we’ll probably never get back to the capital again. So let’s drink some parting cups of saké.” Six of the men, astounded, asked exactly where it was he intended to take them and why it was they weren’t ever going to return.
“Well,” Yonosuke replied, “we’ve seen every kind of quarters woman, dancing woman, or streetwalker there is in the floating world. Look around you.
Yonosuke and his friends sail to the legendary Island of Women, with Yoshino’s petticoat at the prow. Yonosuke sits on the upper deck beneath a flag bearing his crest, a wild pink.
There are no more mountains anywhere to block any of our hearts’ horizons. Not yours, not mine. Our destination’s the Island of Women. The one with only women living on it.25 There’ll be so many women there, well, all you’ll have to do is just reach out your arms.” At that the men were delighted.
“You may exhaust your kidneys and vital fluids,” Yonosuke continued, “and get yourself buried there, but, well, what of it? All of us here happened to be born to live our whole lives without ties or families. Really, what more could we ask for?”
The men finally found fair weather at Izu, at the southern tip of eastern Japan. From there, following the winds of love, they sailed out into the ocean at the end of the Tenth Month, the Godless Month, in 1682, and disappeared, whereabouts completely unknown.
[Saikaku shūjō, NKBT 47: 39–41, 129–132, 212–214, translated by Chris Drake]
SAIKAKU’S TALES FROM VARIOUS PROVINCES (SAIKAKU SHOKOKUBANASHI, 1685)
Saikaku’s Tales from Various Provinces, published in 1685, is a collection of five books, the last major prose fiction Saikaku himself illustrated. It contains thirty-five short stories about strange and unusual events in various provinces. In the preface, Saikaku writes, “The world is wider than we can imagine, and I went to many provinces looking for story material.” After briefly describing some amazing people he has encountered, Saikaku concludes, “In my opinion, humans are spooks. There’s nothing you won’t find somewhere in the world.” The half-humorous term “spooks” suggests a transformation, as if humans were capable of being or turning into an infinite number of shapes. The majority of these stories deal with small happenings that have large consequences, as if nothing could be so strange as ordinary human life. Saikaku consciously draws on contemporary oral comic storytelling, but unlike the written story collections of his time, he does not simply pretend to transcribe oral legends or narrative performances but makes it obvious, as suggested in the title, that he is writing his own creative revisions of motifs and figures already known to readers. The story translated here is typical in that an artifact from one context bursts into another, distant one, in which it is interpreted in new w
ays that turn out to look foolish but that contain their own local reversal.
The Umbrella Oracle (vol. 1: sec. 4)
Believing that mercy is the most important thing in the world, the monks at the Kakezukuri Kannon Temple in Kii Province26 hang out twenty umbrellas beside the road to help those in need. Someone donated the umbrellas long ago, and to this day the temple replaces the oiled paper on them every year and puts them out for passersby. If it begins to rain or snow, anyone at all is free to take one and use it on the way home. All the borrowers are honest people, and they return them when the weather clears.
Not a single umbrella had ever disappeared until the spring of 1649, when a villager from Fujishiro27 borrowed an umbrella and was walking home on the shore road along Waka Bay and Fukiage Beach. A very strong divine wind began blowing from the direction of the nearby Tamatsushima Shrine,28 and one hard gust took the umbrella with it up into the sky and out of sight. The borrower was horrified, but there was nothing he could do to retrieve the umbrella. Carried by the wind, it crossed the entire Inland Sea and finally landed far to the west in the village of Ana29 in the mountains of Higo Province.30
The villagers here had long lived in isolation with virtually no knowledge of other areas. The world is a big place, and even Buddhism had never spread this far. The villagers were astounded by the umbrella. It was the first one they had ever seen. The wise elders conferred, but none of them had ever heard of anything like it in all their years.
Then one man with a smattering of learning spoke up. “I counted the bamboo ribs,” he said. “There are exactly forty. The paper isn’t ordinary, either. I now tremble to speak a holy name, one known everywhere in the outside world. This object is the manifest body of the great sun god31 from the inner precincts of the Ise Grand Shrine, which is surrounded by forty outer shrines. It has flown all the way here to us.”
Oiled-paper umbrellas hang outside a temple wall for local people to use. Two passersby cover their heads as it begins to rain. The illustration is attributed to Saikaku. From the 1685 edition. (From SNKBZ 67, Ihara Saikaku shū 2, by permission of Shōgakukan)
When the villagers heard that, they were filled with awe and immediately purified the umbrella with saltwater and placed it on a clean new straw mat. Everyone in the village went up into the surrounding mountains and felled trees for timber and cut long grass for thatching. Soon the shrine to the Ise god was completed. As the villagers began to worship before it day after day, the umbrella’s divinity became increasingly apparent. By the time the summer rains came, the shrine was repeatedly giving off portentous sounds.
Finally an oracle was delivered: “The area in front of the divination cauldrons is filthy. This summer you have neglected to keep it clean, and it is teeming with roaches. Even the inner sanctum has been defiled. Henceforth you must rid the entire province of roaches. Not a single one must remain. And I have a further request. You must send a beautiful young woman to serve as the shrine shaman. Otherwise, before seven days have passed, rain as thick as cart axles will fall with such force not a single human among you will remain alive.”
The frightened villagers met to discuss the oracle. They gathered the prettiest young women in the village and tried to choose who would serve. None of the women was married, and they wept loudly. “How could we possibly survive that?” they protested. They’d noticed something peculiar about the umbrella’s divine shape when it was folded up.
A widow known for her passionate nature came forward. “It is, after all, a divine command,” she said. “It’s not something we can refuse. Let me go instead of these young women.”
And so the widow went to the shrine. There she waited the whole night for the god, but it did not show the slightest sign of affection. Her anger grew, and finally she stormed into the inner sanctum and took hold of the umbrella. “So,” she said, “you’re nothing but a nice-looking body!” Then she ripped it apart and threw it away.
[Ihara Saikaku shū 2, NKBZ 39: 78–80, translated by Chris Drake]
FIVE SENSUOUS WOMEN (KŌSHOKU GONIN ONNA, 1686)
Ihara Saikaku published Five Sensuous Women in the second month of 1686, at the age of forty-four, shortly before the appearance of Life of a Sensuous Woman and four years after Life of a Sensuous Man, his first ukiyo-zōshi. (Saikaku’s name is not given on the cover of Five Sensuous Women, perhaps because of the controversial nature of the actual scandals it deals with.) Five Sensuous Women belongs to Saikaku’s books on “love” or “sexual desire” (kōshoku), but here he moves away from the licensed quarters, which had been at the heart of Life of a Sensuous Man and his previous works, to explore the world of illicit love among ordinary women in urban commoner society.
Late-seventeenth-century Tokugawa society regarded marriage primarily as a means of bonding two houses and ensuring the welfare of its descendants. Love affairs between individuals outside the institution of marriage were strictly forbidden, and adultery by a woman was often punished by death. In Five Sensuous Women, Saikaku evokes the lives of five merchant-class women who broke these strict rules. One married woman runs away with a clerk from her father’s store; two commit adultery; one starts a fire in order to meet the man she loves; and another abandons her family and goes off to seduce a monk. The consequences are severe. Two of the women are executed for their offenses; one commits suicide; and the fourth goes crazy. Only one of the women, in the last story (which, by convention, was usually celebratory), is able to live happily with her man.
In Five Sensuous Women, Saikaku creates a tight structure based on five volumes (five women in five places: Himeji, Osaka, Kyoto, Edo, and Kagoshima), each with five sections. Saikaku’s recent involvement, in 1685, in writing five-act jōruri puppet plays for the noted chanter Kaganojō is evident in the emphasis here on tragedy, the employment of stage conventions such as the michiyuki (travel scene), the focus on dramatic scene and dialogue, and the use of sekai (established world) and shukō (innovation), in which an established story is given a new twist or interpretation. Indeed, like many of Chikamatsu’s contemporary-life plays (sewamono), Five Sensuous Women draws directly on recent scandals (one as recent as the year before its publication), with which his readers were familiar through contemporary ballads (utazaemon), popular songs (hayariuta), and hearsay. Saikaku entertained his audience by presenting a new version of a well-known incident while retaining the basic facts.
“The Calendar Maker’s Wife,” the third volume of Five Sensuous Women, which is translated here, is loosely based on a famous incident that had occurred three years earlier, in 1682. It involved a prestigious Kyoto printer who maintained a virtual monopoly on the printing and marketing of almanac calendars, widely coveted because of the yin-yang divinations and warnings given for each day. According to a contemporary ballad, Osan committed adultery with the clerk Mohei (Moemon in Saikaku’s narrative) with the aid of the maid Tama (Rin in Saikaku’s version) while her husband was away on business in Edo. Osan and Mohei escaped to Tanba (east of Kyoto) with Tama when Osan’s pregnancy became apparent, but they were finally discovered, brought back to Kyoto, and quickly tried and executed. The crime of adultery was compounded by Mohei’s violation of the strict boundary between employer and employee and by Osan’s absconding with her husband’s money. In 1683, both were crucified and then speared; the maid Tama was beheaded. Saikaku uses only the bare outlines of this incident, however, fabricating almost all the interesting details, such as Osan’s first appearance before a group of men, her substitute letter writing, the faked suicide, the story of Zetarō, and Moemon’s trip back to the capital. Only the ending, reinforced by historical fact, is never in doubt.
Before World War II, Japanese scholars stressed the tragic dimension of Five Sensuous Women, pointing out that the protagonists struggled valiantly but ultimately futilely against a brutal feudal system that condemned the pursuit of love. Saikaku is clearly sympathetic to these women’s rebellious spirit and energy in the face of seemingly inhumane laws and customs
. Late-seventeenth-century readers appeared to have an interest in lovers who could devote themselves to love despite the inevitability of death—a situation similar to the double suicides in Chikamatsu’s contemporary-life plays. Postwar scholars, by contrast, have tended to emphasize the comic elements, pointing out, for example, that Saikaku generally avoids condemning the lovers for their actions and instead focuses on the humorous nature of their amorous pursuits. Indeed, Five Sensuous Women reveals the heavy influence of haikai (comic linked verse), which generated humor and wit through parody and comic inversion. The opening scene can be read as a parody of the popular critiques of courtesans (yūjō hyōbanki) or of the famous discussion of women in the “Broom Tree” chapter of The Tale of Genji. The third section, in which Moemon and Osan visit Ishiyama Temple, opens with a michiyuki, with highly stylized language, but instead of ending with a tragic double suicide, as in the love-suicide plays, the passage finishes on a comic note, as the couple cleverly deceive their pursuers. The highlight of the fourth section is the comic figure of Zetarō, a savage country bumpkin who takes Osan as his prospective bride. At the end of the same section, the Monjushiri deity appears to Osan in a dream, warns her of her sins, and urges her to take holy vows, but in a comic inversion of the traditional revelation tale, Osan dismisses the god’s warning, claiming that Monju, whose full name (Monjushiri) is associated with buttocks (shiri), may understand the love of men for men but not that of men for women. Saikaku seems to observe the characters from a distance, with irony and detachment, often giving romantic or tragic situations a sardonic touch. His occasional moral comments were probably intended to put the reader’s conscience at ease. As in haikai linked verse, the narrative deliberately undercuts itself, establishing a serious tone only to follow it quickly with a lighthearted scene. The result is entertaining tragicomedy in haikai prose.
Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900 Page 10
