This Scheming World. Ihara Saikaku
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literature had long stood far out of reach of the common people. It was either an elegant accessory or a refined pastime of the upper class. Lady Murasaki, for instance, well-known for her Tale of Genji, was a gentlewoman who served in the house of the great aristocrat Fujiwara Michinaga. She and her contemporaries who represented the literature of the early 11th century were either aristocrats or those who lived in a close relationship with them. Their works were appreciated with admiration by people of the upper class, but the nameless masses had nothing to do with them. Today they are esteemed by all Japanese as the valuable legacy of their ancestors, and that with good reason. Nevertheless they were, so to speak, delicate flowers cultivated in the elegant green house named aristocracy.
Why this was so is rather plain to see. A literary work cannot be conceived without regard to its readers. Of course it is true that it is the result of the writer’s genius, but at the same time, because it must answer the needs of the readers of the time, it necessarily reflects its general characteristics. If the common people have little interest in literature, it is quite hopeless to expect a writer to rise from among them and write for their own sake. The Japanese common people of early times were too illiterate and too poverty-stricken to find any interest in the appreciation of literature; hence it is no wonder that they produced no literature of their own.
Then came the downfall of the aristocrats who exercised political superiority, and the rising class of warriors took their place. The new age is generally called the mediaeval age of Japan, in which the outstanding feature is the establishment of feudalism. With it the creative energies of the aristocrats ran dry and the new type of literature that succeeded the older one was more sober and grave, though less delicate and less refined, reflecting the characteristics of the warrior class that patronized it. Such was the general character of the so-called mediaeval literature of Japan that flourished from the 13th to the 16th century. Still, strictly speaking, it was not yet the literature of the common people.
The new tide swept in with the opening of the 17th century. The civil wars fought by feudal lords against one another which devastated the whole country for about two centuries were at last checked by Tokugawa Ieyasu, and the government established by him at Edo (present-day Tokyo) succeeded in maintaining nationwide peace for the following two and a half centuries, till in 1868 it gave place to the Imperial Government. The period under the reign of the Tokugawa Government is generally called the Edo Age, so named after the seat of government.
Whereas peace deprived the warriors of their creative energy as well as of their adventurous spirit, it brought life to the townspeople. Not only the economical upper-hand, but also the cultural leadership of the country came to be held by them .a remarkable and unprecedented development in Japanese history. What is of particular significance from the viewpoint of the history of literature was that there arose a new mass of readers chiefly composed of townspeople. Their view of life was coarser and, let it be said, even vulgar, but more positive and livelier than that of the upper class. To meet their expectations a new type of literature must needs be created, which would be produced by none but a spokesman of their own. This spokesman they found in Saikaku.
Saikaku was born in 1642 in Osaka, a great center of business, and died there in 1693. His given name was Togo and his family name Hirayama. Ihara Saikaku is his pen-name. It is known to us that his wife, whom he loved dearly, died in 1675 at the age of twenty-five. In the preface to his One Thousand Haikai Verses, published in 1675, he relates that her death was a great shock to him, and that on the seventh day after her death he composed in her memory “one thousand haikai verses impromptu from morning till evening and made a clear copy of them with his own hand, for he believed he could express his love and grief the more by doing everything by himself.”
Two years later, in 1677, he retired from business. It must have been partly because his wife’s death left him weary of worldly pursuits. Anyway, he settled his business on one of his clerks and lived the rest of his life as freely as he pleased, travelling much and enriching his stock of information about the world, of which later he made such effective use in his works.
He had begun his literary career as a poet by composing haikai when he was yet a boy of fifteen. His many years’ devotion to poetry established him as a figure in the world of haikai. But his style was revolutionary in both a good sense and a bad, for it was quite novel, lively and vigorous, and not infrequently, it might be said, indecent. It was the general opinion of his day that the composing of haikai should be one of the proper accomplishments of a cultured man and so its themes likewise ought to be proper. But Saikaku boldly took up such a theme as a voluptuous widow:
Oh, that cute costume of hers!
She has her hair cut short
But fire still burns within.
Or a bankrupt merchant:
He sells the house away
Where once was kept a mistress.
Or a poor fool of the gay quarter.:
O that’ I were re-born
To share the nightly bed
With the highest courtesan.
Such a bold innovation of his could not escape bitter criticism. The orthodox haikai poets called him’ Holland Saikaku,’ by which they meant to criticize his showy heterodoxy. Heterodox or orthodox, Saikaku’s vitality could not be content with the narrow, stereotyped compass allotted to the ‘elegant verbal art.,
His burning energy also found vent in the composition of as many haikai verses as possible in a single day. In 1684 he set the Thames on fire, so to speak, by composing as many as 23,500 verses in a single day and night.
Needless to say, a piece of literature ought to be appreciated for its quality rather than for its quantity. A single verse composed after a whole day of labor can outshine a thousand verses composed at random. In this respect it may be said that Saikaku was something of a heretic. But we must also recognize that it was this very nature of his that made him a fitting spokesman for the townspeople of his day.
As has been already pointed out, a prominent feature of the 17th century was the rise of the city dwellers as an influential class. In a word, it was the century when the bourgeoisie rose to power. Thanks to nation-wide peace, the products of even the remotest provinces were brought to market in Edo and Osaka; and the greater the volume of goods brought to market, the greater the wealth amassed by the merchants. Even the feudal lords, whose ancestors had won their territories with the sword, had to rely on these merchants for funds to run their local governments. Nominally, merchants were placed at the bottom of the social hierarchy, but actually they were kings.
The townspeople who rose to sudden eminence, having no cultural tradition of their own, were naturally coarse and vulgar in their tastes; yet in point of life and vigor they were paramount. In the days of feudalism, when too many restrictions twisted and suppressed humanity, the newly-risen bourgeoisie insisted on giving as full expression as possible to life, and Saikaku reflected perfectly their philosophy of life in his works. He .could not bear literature that aspired to transcendental beauty at the sacrifice of humanity with all its merits and demerits, virtues and vices. “Man is lusty. All right. I will picture him as such. Man is greedy. Very well. I will depict him as such. Above all else I will picture the world of men and women as it actually is.’’ Such was his attitude. After all, his genius lay more in the world of realistic fiction than in the world of verse.
In 1682 he published his first memorable work, The Life of an Amorous Man. It is memorable not only as his first story book but also as the first book ever written in Japan by a townsman about the life of a townsman. It is in the form of a record of the love-life of a certain Yonosuke. At the early age of seven he woos a maid who waits on him. After that he makes love to different women of some kind or other every year: to a wife, to a widow, to an inn maid, to a prostitute, to a courtesan, till he becomes sixty years old. Then, weary of the ordinary lovelife of the common world, he sets sail for the Isle of Women, never to return, together with congenial spirits, who vow that it is just what the sterner sex wants and that they will not regret it even if they spend their lives exhausting their virility there.
Yonosuke,