Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900

by Shirane, Haruo, ed.

  “Please let me be frank,” he finally said. “Even in relationships I begin myself, money’s out of the question. I won’t be able to give you even one new sash. And after we’ve known each other a short time, if you start inquiring whether I know any dry goods dealers and ask me for two rolls of ordinary silk or a roll of crimson silk, I just won’t be able to promise you that. I’ve got to make that absolutely clear right from the beginning.”

  How insensitive and mean, I thought to myself, to say an arrogant thing like that to someone he wants to make love with! There was no shortage of nice men in the capital, and I decided I’d have to look somewhere else.

  It was the rainy season, and just then a soft rain began to come down. Suddenly it became very quiet outside. A sparrow flew in through the window, and the flame in the lamp went out. Taking advantage of the darkness, the man threw himself on me and grabbed me tightly. He was breathing heavily as he forced himself on me, and as he began, he took some expensive tissue paper out of his robe and placed it near the pillow. After he finished, he slapped me gently on the small of the back, apparently thinking I’d enjoyed it. He even sang an old wedding song, saying he’d love me till I was a hundred and he was ninety-nine.

  What an idiot, I thought. You have no idea how fragile life is. Do you really think life is an old song and you’re going to live to be ninety-nine? You said some pretty disrespectful things just now. You won’t last even one year. Pretty soon you’ll have a sunken jaw and be walking with a stick. And then you’ll leave the floating world altogether.

  I made love with the man day and night. When he lost his desire, I strengthened him with loach broth, eggs, and yams, and we continued. Gradually, as I expected, he ran dry. It was pitiful to see him shivering in the Fourth Month of the next year, still wearing thick winter robes when everyone else had changed into early summer things. Every doctor he’d seen had given up on him. His beard was long and unkempt; his nails lengthened unclipped; and he had to cup his hand to his ear in order to hear. At the slightest mention of an attractive woman, he turned his head away with a look of endless regret.

  A Stylish Woman Who Brought Disaster (3:2)

  Kickball has long been a sport for aristocratic men and warriors, but I discovered that women play it, too. At the time, I was working as the outside messenger for the wife of a daimyō domain lord in the lord’s main mansion in Edo.87 My job was running errands and dealing with people outside the women’s quarters, and once I went with the lord’s wife to their third mansion in Asakusa,88 where she sometimes went to relax. In the large garden inside the mansion, azaleas were beginning to bloom, turning all the small fields and hills a bright crimson. Nearby I saw some waiting women wearing long divided skirts of a matching crimson. Their long sleeves were fluttering and swaying as they played kickball inside a high, rectangular fence. They lifted the deerskin ball almost noiselessly with special shoes, and using only their feet, they strained to keep it moving in the air for as long as they could. They were extremely good and used the Multiple Cherry, the Mountain Crossing, and other difficult kicks. I was amazed that women were doing this. It was the first time I’d seen anything like it.

  Earlier, in Kyoto, I’d been quite surprised to see court ladies practicing indoor archery, but people at court said it was quite natural. The women were following a venerable tradition begun in China by the imperial consort Yang Guifei.89 Still, I’d never heard of women in Japan playing football in all the centuries since it was first played here by Prince Shōtoku.90 But the wife of a domain lord is free to do any thing she wants. How magnificent she was!

  At the domain lord’s mansion in Edo, four serving women (right), wearing special pants and leather shoes for football, play inside a high, cage-like structure. The lord’s wife (left), sitting with her hands on her knees, watches the game. Since only women are present, the hanging bamboo blind is raised. Three of the wife’s attendants sit outside on a low porch. The painting on the sliding door to the right shows a white heron in a river under a willow, and the painting to the left depicts bush clover.

  Later, as evening approached, a strong wind began to blow, bending the trees in the garden. The kickers had a hard time controlling the ball, which wouldn’t spin and constantly swerved off course, and soon everyone lost interest in the game. The lord’s wife had just taken off her kickball robes and put them away when her face suddenly took on a fierce expression as if she’d remembered something. Nothing her attendants said cheered her up, so finally they stopped speaking and tried not to move or make any noise. Then a lady in waiting named Kasai, who’d served for many years, spoke up in an obsequious tone of voice. Her head moved back and forth and her knees trembled with excitement.

  “Tonight,” she said, “please honor us by holding another jealousy meeting.91 Until the tall candle burns itself out!”

  The lord’s wife’s face suddenly took on a pleasant expression. “Yes,” she said. “Yes indeed!”

  An older woman named Yoshioka, the head waiting woman, pulled on a brocade-tufted cord that ran along the wall of a corridor. At the far end a bell rang, and soon even the cooks and bath maids appeared and sat without the slightest hesitation in a circle around the lord’s wife. There must have been thirty-four or thirty-five women in all. I also joined them.

  “You may speak about anything at all,” Yoshioka told us. “Don’t hold anything back. Confess something you yourself did. How you blocked another woman’s love for a man and hated her. How you were jealous of a man going to see another woman and spoke badly of him. Or the pleasure you felt when a man and woman broke up. Stories like these will bring great joy to our mistress.” This certainly was an extraordinary kind of meeting, I thought, but I couldn’t laugh, since it was being held at the command of the lord’s wife.

  Soon they opened a wooden door with a painting of a weeping willow on it and brought out a life-size doll that looked exactly like a real woman. The artisan who made it must have been a master. It had a graceful figure and a face more beautiful than any blossom in full bloom. I myself am a woman, but I was entranced and couldn’t stop gazing at it.

  One by one, each woman spoke what she felt. Among them was a lady in waiting named Iwahashi92 who had a face so classically unattractive it invited disaster.93 No man would want to make love with her in the daytime, and she hadn’t slept with a man at night for a very long time. In fact, during all that time she hadn’t even seen a man. Now she ostentatiously pushed her way through the other women and volunteered.

  “I was born and raised in Tōchi in Yamato,” she said, “where I also married and lived with my husband. But that damn man started making trips to Nara. Then people began to tell me he was seeing the daughter of one of the lower priests at the Kasuga Shrine94 there. She was exceptionally beautiful, they said. So one night I secretly followed my husband. My heart pounded loudly as I went, and when he arrived, I stood nearby and listened while the woman opened the small back gate and pulled him inside.

  “‘Tonight,’ the woman says, ‘my eyebrows kept on itching and itching. No matter how hard I rubbed them. I just knew something good was going to happen.’ And then, with no shame at all, she calmly rests her slender little waist against his.

  “I couldn’t bear any more of that and ran right over to them. ‘Hey,’ I shouted, ‘that’s my husband!’ I opened my mouth wide to show her my blackened teeth and prove I was married, and before I knew it, I’d bitten into her as hard as I could!” Then Iwahashi fastened her teeth around the beautiful doll and refused to let go. The way she did it made me feel that right there in front of me, with my own eyes, I was seeing exactly what had happened that night long ago. I was terrified.

  The jealousy meeting had begun. The next woman walked very slowly out in front of us as if she hardly knew where she was. She was a typical woman who lets her emotions run away with her. I don’t know how she was able to say the things she did.

  “When I was young,” she confessed, “I lived in Akashi in Harima Province
.95 My niece got married and took in her husband as part of her own family.96 What a tramp he turned out to be. And a complete lecher! He slept with every single maid and with the helping women, too. It was perfectly obvious—they were dozing off all the time. My niece tried to keep up appearances, you know, so she let things go and didn’t criticize him. Inside, though, she was very upset at not being able to do anything. So every night I would go and try to help her. I got someone to nail iron fasteners to her bedroom door, and after asking my niece and her husband to go inside, I’d shout, ‘Please sleep together tonight!’ Before I’d go back to my own room, I’d lock their door from the outside.

  “Soon my niece was looking thin and exhausted. She didn’t even want to see her husband’s face any more. ‘If he keeps on like this,’ she told me, ‘I’m not going to live much longer.’ Her body was shaking when she said that. She was born in the year of the fiery horse,97 so she should have caused her husband to die young, but he was the one who was wearing her down. She got very sick because of that despicable man and his endless urges. I’d like to make him do it again and again right now with this doll here. Until he falls over dead!” She hit the doll and knocked it over, and then she screamed at it for some time.

  Then another lady in waiting named Sodegaki got up. She was from Kuwana98 in Ise Province. She told us she’d been a jealous person even before she got married. She was so jealous of her parents’ maids she wouldn’t let them put on makeup or use mirrors when they did their hair or put white powder on their skin. If a maid had a pretty face, she forced the woman to make herself look as unattractive as she could. Stories about how she acted got around, though, and people began avoiding her. No men in her hometown or for miles around would think of marrying her. So she came all the way to Edo to look for work.

  “Hey, beautiful doll,” the woman yelled. “Yes, you’re so very, very smart, aren’t you. You even know how to make another woman’s husband stay overnight at your house!” Then she began to disfigure the innocent doll.

  Each woman tried to speak more jealously than the rest, but none of their stories satisfied the lord’s wife. When my turn came, I went directly to the doll and pulled it down onto the floor. Then I got on top of it.

  “You!” I said. “You’re just a mistress. But the lord likes you, so you act as if you’re more important than his wife, sleeping with him on the same long pillow just as you like without thinking anything about it. Listen, you, I’m not going to let you get away with it!” I glared at the doll, ground my teeth, and acted as if I truly hated the doll from the bottom of my heart.

  What I’d said turned out to be what the lord’s wife herself had been thinking. “Exactly,” she said, “exactly!99 Let me tell you about this doll. You see, the lord treats me now as if I hardly existed. He’s had his beautiful mistress from the domain brought all the way here to Edo, and he doesn’t think about anyone but her day and night. It’s very sad being a woman—complaining does no good at all. But I did have this doll made to look like her. At least I can cause pain to it.”

  Before the lord’s wife had finished, something strange happened. First the doll opened her eyes and extended her arms. She looked around the room for a while, and then she seemed to stand up, although by that time no one was watching closely anymore. All the frightened women were scrambling away as fast as they could. Then the doll grabbed the front of the lord’s wife’s outer robe and wouldn’t let go. I only barely managed to separate them. After that, nothing more happened.

  Perhaps because of this incident, a few days later the lord’s wife fell ill and began to speak deliriously of terrible things. The waiting women thought she must be possessed by the doll’s soul. If they didn’t stop the resentful doll, it might cause even more serious harm, so they secretly decided to get rid of it. In a far corner of the mansion they burned the doll so completely that nothing at all remained, but they showed their respect and buried the ashes in a formal grave. After that, people began to fear the burial mound, and they claimed that every evening they could clearly hear a woman’s wailing voice coming from inside it. The rumor spread beyond the mansion walls, and the lord’s wife became the object of widespread ridicule.

  Word of the affair eventually reached the lord, who was at his second Edo mansion with his mistress from his home domain. Astounded, he started an investigation and ordered the outside messenger to report to him. Since that was my job, I had to appear. I couldn’t hide what I knew, and I related everything about the doll, just as it had happened.100 The people who heard me clapped their hands together in amazement.

  “There’s nothing as nasty as a woman’s vengeance,” the lord told his aides. “I have no doubt at all that very soon my mistress won’t be safe from my wife’s avenging soul. Her life is in danger here. Explain the situation to her and have her return to the domain.”

  When the woman appeared and sat nervously on her knees before the lord, I saw she was far more graceful and beautiful than the doll had been. I was a bit proud of my own looks, you know, and we both were women, but I was so overwhelmed I could hardly bear to look at her. Such great beauty, I thought to myself, and yet the lord’s wife, out of jealousy, is trying to kill her with curses. The lord declared that women were fearsome creatures, and he never again entered the women’s quarters of his main mansion in Edo. His wife became a virtual widow while her husband was still alive.

  I had to watch all this and try to take messages between them. Soon I grew very weary of my job, prestigious as it was, and I submitted my resignation. It was accepted, and I returned to Kyoto feeling so disappointed with the world I thought I might become a nun. Jealously is something you must never, never give in to. Women should be very careful to resist it.

  Ink Painting in a Sensual Robe (4:2)

  The first standards for sewing court women’s elegant robes were laid down in the eighth century during the reign of Empress Kōken,101 the forty-sixth ruler in the imperial line. After that, clothes in Japan became quite attractive. Even today, when women sew a silk robe for an aristocrat or a warrior, they’re extremely careful. The first thing they do is count the exact number of needles in the pin cushions. Then when they’re finished, they count them all over again to make sure not a single one has been left in the robe to do any harm. They’re meticulous about every detail and purify themselves before they begin. A woman who’s having her period isn’t even allowed to enter the sewing room.

  I was good at sewing, and without really intending to, I became a seamstress in one of the big daimyō mansions in Edo. I made an effort to live with a calm mind, just the way I was supposed to, and I forced myself to abstain from the pleasures of love. I enjoyed the bright sunlight coming through the southern window of the sewing room in the women’s quarters of the mansion, and from time to time I rested my eyes from the needlework and gazed at the green leaves of irises that had been placed there in a pot of water.

  All the seamstresses contributed a little money, and when we took our rest, we would drink delicious Abe tea and eat jam-filled buns we’d ordered from the Tsuruya store in Iidamachi. None of the seamstresses working for the mansion got more than a pittance, but we didn’t think bad thoughts, and we had no real worries to weigh on us. Living together, with no men, our hearts were as clear and unbounded as the cloudless moon above us shining down on the warrior mansions in the Yamanote heights.102 I felt we were like buddhas living freely and joyfully in perfect enlightenment beyond worldly desire and attachment.

  Then one day I was asked to finish an inner robe for the lord’s son. It was pure white silk, and on the inner lining was a painting so finely done that, well, it must have been brushed by an extremely skilled painter. In it, a man and woman, completely naked, were making love. The woman was showing all the beautiful skin she had, and her heels were raised high in the air. She was so totally involved she was bending the ends of her toes. I stared at the couple, entranced. They no longer looked like painted figures, and I was sure I could hear soft, sweet word
s coming from their unmoving lips. I began to feel dizzy, and my mind rose and swirled like mist. For some time I just sat there, leaning on my needle box.

  I’d remembered once more what it was like to want a man. I didn’t touch my leather thimble or my spool that day, and I forgot about sewing the robe. My mind began to wander, and soon I was overcome by longing and imagining. That night I could hardly bear to sleep alone. All those wonderful nights I’d hoped would never end, well, they still continued on, unending, inside me. I relived experience after experience from the past, and even though they all were from my own mind, their sadness moved me to cry as I remembered real loves, and I laughed all over again at those that weren’t so real. But true loves or false, all those men were precious to me. It grieved me deeply to think that as soon as I loved a man, he grew so dear to me that I caused him to make love too hard or to drink and eat too much. I completely ruined some men’s careers and made others die much too young.

  I couldn’t count the number of men I’d known, even the ones with whom I’d had special relationships. Many women know only one man their whole lives. Even if they divorce, they don’t look for a new husband, and if their husband dies, they leave the world behind and become nuns. They’re able to control their desire and live decently, enduring the change and their separation from their beloved husbands. I, on the other hand, how pathetic I’d been, endlessly pulled along by one strong desire after another. I made up my mind that this time I absolutely would not to give in.