was not at all respected then, being considered fit to read only for women and children. The cultured class in China had the same derogatory attitude towards the first great Chinese novels which appeared about the same period.
Fiction in the form of ukiyo-zoshi corresponds in painting to the ukiyo-e; it depicts the floating world of the cities, the movement, colour, and drama of the gay society of rich and poor alike seeking pleasure in the bustling urban atmosphere. This fictional literature appeared in a period of Japanese history when the society was going through a fundamental change from an agricultural to a mercantile economy. Great commercial centres grew in ancient Tokyo (then called Edo) and in Osaka. The means of communication were improved. A new currency system based on gold and silver replaced rice as the standard medium of exchange and established the basis of commercial capitalism. The aristocracy and the warrior class were becoming progressively decadent, and a new class of merchants was rising in a new urban civilization.
The writings of Saikaku, Kiseki, and Ikku, all people of the common classes, introduced a new literary genre that expressed the new social changes taking place. This literature was despised by the official writers of the time, who upheld sterile classic traditions. But the new genre imposed its creations as the best of Japanese genius for ensuing centuries.
The Japanese picaresque novel is still more revolutionary than the European counterpart. In Japan, genuinely popular subjects and popular authors fought against a more rigid world of literary convention, provoking a full change in the realm of fiction. For the first time in Japanese literature the common classes supplied the characters and social atmosphere for novels. Literature was not a pretext for erotic writing and pornography. It is probably the only case in history in which we find an intellectual novel, created by the people, and not inspired or based on folklore as generally happens. It is due to the density and force of its sources that the picaresque novel constitutes one of the greatest creations of Japanese genius—from the time of The Tale of Genji to the novels of Soseki Natsume.
Saikaku Ihara (1642-93)
To Saikaku goes the credit of bringing the picaresque novel to its Highest expression. It is the economically evolved. Japan and the social conditions of the time that Saikaku so well described in his books. Love and money were his main themes. The novels dealt with the rich merchants of Osaka, the power of their money, the luxury of their houses, and the extravagance of their pleasures in the gay quarters. He wrote also of the wretchedly poor people who lived in rags and starved, the humble professions of entertainers, cheap prostitutes, impecunious samurai, mendicant pilgrims, pawnbrokers, depraved priests, beggars, pederastic actors, bathhouse girls, and panders—in short, nearly every type of person from the seventeenth-century buoyant and diversified urban Japanese society. Some of his books consist of disconnected short stories, like Nippon Eitaigura (The Way to Wealth), or even of discourses on the habits and economic situations of the social classes, like Seken Munasanyo (This Scheming World). He knew the life and mind of the enterprising merchant intimately, for whose success and wide vision he felt a sincere admiration. He knew the busy life of the "towns of pleasure," the attraction, formal etiquette, the strict and complex hierarchy of the world of commercial love.
Saikaku described the refinement and culture of high-ranking courtesans, their magnificent dress, their sometimes tragic romances; he knew everything about women's habits and hearts, their ways of walking and of making up their hair, their styles and fashions of clothing. And he knew equally well about men, their schemes for making a fortune, and their ways of squandering it. His books are full of realistic detail; some of his portraits, particularly those of women, are quite vivid. Saikaku felt a bursting joy and enthusiasm for the pleasures of life; joie de vivre flows from his pages.
The Heian writers were horrified by the ugliness of a naked body. Unforgettably dreadful is a nude form, noted Murasaki Shikibu; but Saikaku was dazzled by "observing the naked flesh and admiring the beauty of the woman's body." His writing is erotic and at times even indecent, but he shows a healthy joy in describing the strength and. mirth of physical life.
Saikaku began his career as a poet of haiku. At the age of forty he wrote, with great success at the time, his first work of prose fiction, Koshoku Ichidai Otoko (The Life of a Man who Lived for Love). Yonosuke, the hero, is the ideal man in that new capitalistic society. Could it be that Yonosuke is nearer to Don Juan than Genji?
Yonosuke is an elegant rake who begins his amorous career at eight and at the age of sixty-one deserts this world for a legendary island inhabited only by women. The book consists of fifty-four independent episodes, one for each year of his amorous life. This number corresponds to the number of books of The Tale of Genji, of which it has been considered sometimes a realistic version. What Genji represented for the aristocratic ideal of Heian time, Yonosuke pretended to be for the bourgeois society of the seventeenth century. Considered, though, as a seducer—and Don Juan is essentially a conquistador of women—Yonosuke cuts a very poor figure for himself; his main field of action is the gay quarters, and prostitutes are his easy conquest. Complacent waitresses, hussies, fishwives, harlots, and nuns were his preferred game. He had 3,742 women; the book is "a fantastic Baedeker of brothels. It seemed that he lacked the fundamental force of Don Juan: the ardent impulse to conquer, to break the barriers of virtue, prudery, and social prejudice behind which woman's soul is shielded.
Concerned with the same theme—love in the pleasure quarters of the great cities—are Shoen Okagami (The Great Mirror of Love) and the Wankyu Issei no Monogatari (Tale of Wankyu's Life). Koshoku Gonin Onna (Five Women Who Chose Love) is for the first time concerned with bourgeois love outside the pleasure districts; all the heroines except one meet a tragic end; Saikaku deals here with the conflict between love and social prejudice.
Saikaku describes two faces of the sentiment of love: the romantic love that brings disaster and death, and the joyous, physical, pleasurable love. But even in the beginning he is not romantic in his approach. His bent for the physical aspects of love caused him to write pages tinted with licentiousness and obscenity. Nevertheless, this fact must not hide from us the fundamental value of his work, a vivid account of the life of the Japanese bourgeoisie.
The best of Saikaku's books is perhaps Koshoku Ichidai Onna (The Life of an Amorous Woman), in which he draws a lively portrait of a beautiful woman whose life was "flavoured with the spice of love. She was born in an honest bourgeois family and entered the service of the court while very young. She was first seduced at the age of twelve, beginning her colorful career filled with accidents and misfortunes. Her beauty allowed her to dominate men who fell prey to her whims, although she herself was finally the victim of them. Still very young, she was the cause of one man's death. For that she was expelled from the palace. She was an intelligent, ruthless, dangerous woman who spread misfortune and hate around her. We see her, first, radiant with beauty, chosen from among 170 young beauties to be the mistress of a provincial lord; but she was deceived by the lord's impotency. We see her next as a teen-age courtesan in a house of pleasure, learning the complicated, shrewd methods for enticing men. As she became too harsh in her treatment of men, she had to change her trade; she shaved her head in the center to look like a young man, simulated a man's voice, and wore a man's loin cloth. Followed by a drum-holder and a servant with a painted beard, she went to stoke the strange appetites of a priest, whose wife she became. The priest was a disagreeable man, but in physical love he was quite the opposite of the provincial lord. Tiring of the priest, she told him she was with child and, as she expected, the priest immediately threw her out. Afterwards she seduced a heartless young man who later died of a passion for her. She became a townsman's maid, mistress of a wealthy man, seamstress, maid servant at the house of a lesbian, and later attendant in a public bath.
As she grew old, she declined in social standing and became the procuress of a courtesan's house; finally she fell to being a sordid, greedy street-walker at the age of 64. She still appeared younger due to her "fine-grained skin." As her strong lust for life abandoned her wretched body, she chose the way of Buddha, to work and pray for salvation. But even when she was gazing calmly at the five hundred Buddhas of the temple, she saw in their
