of democratic thinking.
We have mentioned the loose construction of Saikaku's novels, some of which are like a series of independent episodes put together; we have seen the amorality and callousness of the protagonist in The Life of an Amorous Woman and the biting satire against the society of the time. It is not openly expressed, but strongly instilled in the portraits of the country lord, the priest, the jealous lady, the respected nobleman, and the callous people who exploit old and wretched prostitutes. Now and then, as in the Western picaresque novel, Saikaku adds a note of wisdom: "A beautiful woman... is an axe that cuts off a man's very life"; "There is naught in the world so strange as love; A wife is someone on whom one gazes all one's life, yet it is just as well if she be not too beautiful."4
Saikaku naturally keeps his ties with the old Japanese tradition. Some phrases are still redolent of the old poetic classicism, as when he describes a heroine so beautiful that the moon in its mid-month glory regarded her with envy."5
We could take the points of resemblance with Spanish picaresque novels still further. We know that Saikaku wrote renga, a form of linked verse. Once he wrote as many as 23,550 pieces in a day, a sensational feat that has never been surpassed."6 To compose as many renga as possible in a given length of time (a practice called yakazu-haikai) was regarded as an ascetic exercise. Similarly, the Spanish picaresque novel has been interpreted by Herrero García, in his Nueva Interpretatción de la Picaresca, as "a pseudo-ascetic production," like "a sermon in which the proportions of the composing elements are altered." Catholic preaching often makes use of humour just as the Japanese author of a novel writes in the serious tone of a moralist.7
Ikku's Shank's Mare also resembles the picaresque novel. The popular atmosphere of the book, the choice of two rogues for its heroes, the pithy wit, biting satire, and wide gallery of popular characters—all are signs that this Japanese narrative of wandering adventure and ribaldry belongs to the same fictional world.
The picaresque novel has not been exhausted in our time. After the dramatic novel of Dostoevskian taste and the art novel introduced by Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, the picaresque novel marks a triumphant counteroffensive, a renovated realism of disabused heroes in which humour replaces objectivity, wit replaces straight narration, and the colourful fait-divers takes the place of social problems.8
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