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CHAPTER IV. THE PICARESQUE NOVEL

A NOVEL OF THE PEOPLE

In the seventeenth century a bourgeois culture, free from Chinese influence, arose in Japan. The popular literary form was fiction. Fiction in Japan 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 sacred tender faces only the perfect images of the men who had shared her pillow in the past. We rest uncertain whether the confession of her sins is really a sincere one; rather we get the impression that she took delight in deceiving other people. The last phrase of the book—"I may have lived in the world by selling my body, but is my heart polluted?"—leaves us doubtful as to her sincere conversion. She retired to a religious cell, not because she found God or because she longed for salvation, but simply because she had exhausted all the pleasures of the world.

The realism of this book, its implied social criticism, the lively amoral character of the protagonist—her lust for life, physical intensity, and rebellious nature—all of these suggest the natural approach to the picaresque novel which appeared in Europe at about the same time.

As generally happens in the picaresque novel, Saikaku's story is told by the heroine with realistic detachment as if she were speaking of somebody else doomed for a wretched end.

Saikaku also wrote moralizing novels: Buke Giri Monogatari (Tale of Virtuous Conduct) and Nijushi Fuko (Twenty-four Examples of Unfilial Behaviour). He even tried detective stories in the manner of old Chinese tales of judicial trials. His Honcho Oin Hiji (Records of Trials Held beneath a Cherry Tree) is the most famous example and continues to be popular even today.

Saikaku was the great fiction writer of the Genroku era (1688-1704), just as Basho was its poet and Chikamatsu its playwright; the three are the dominant figures of a remarkable intellectual revival which George Sansom calls a "modest renaissance."

In Japan, Saikaku sometimes has been compared with the author of The Tale of Genji. Although it is probably an exaggerated comparison, to a Western reader Saikaku is certainly one of the most interesting Japanese writers; he is the possessor of a powerful realism, intellectual freedom, irreverence, and independence from conservative themes and canons of traditional writing.

Ogai Mori observed that Saikaku does not confine himself to eroticism, like Casanova, and that he ascribes to eroticism an aesthetic significance, like Boccaccio. We should say today that Saikaku's erotic novels are tempered with a feeling of humanism.

Howard Hibbett, in the interesting article "Saikaku and Burlesque Fiction," compares Saikaku to Daniel Defoe, as both were first to deal in detail with the economic life of the people of their time. Saikaku gives us a vivid, picture of Japanese bourgeois society in the second half of the seventeenth century, and Defoe has written of the English middle class under Queen Anne.¹ There are also resemblances between Saikaku and Boccaccio, from their erotic streaks to the loose methods of constructing their works.

Saikaku has been compared with Rabelais: both have a strong, colourful humour of popular vein, the same buffoonery, the same burst of laughter. Both men act the double role of fool and sage. Both feel the same pithy pleasure of living by the flesh and by the mind. There is in their books a force of nature, a deep energy, a healthy joviality and confidence in life; but the novels of Saikaku are woven in sentimentality (the life of the heart is the thread of the plot) while Rabelais tells no sentimental stories. Woman as a centre and source of sentimental life is not known to French literature until the second half of the seventeenth century. Rabelais has been considered by many the best incarnation of French genius; hardly could we say the same of Saikaku as regarded by the Japanese. He may be more akin to Abbé Brantôme, author of Femmes Galantes, who, one century before, displayed the same gallantry, dissipation, ardour for all aspects of love, and psychological realism—though with more depth of analysis and finer wit.

Kiseki Ejima (1667-1736)

Saikaku's most remarkable successor was Kiseki, who explored the picaresque novel in new and interesting ways. He was especially preoccupied with portraying types from the floating world—the dissolute characters which we know already from the books of Saikaku. But Kiseki has portrayed new characters in his love stories of the licentious quarters of Kyoto, Osaka, Edo, and provincial towns. His stories, bringing a new vitality to the picaresque novel, became very popular. He borrowed from Saikaku, but he had less brilliance, less imagination and originality.

In Keisei Iroshamisen (The Courtesan's Amorous Shamisen), Kiseki gives a lively and realistic description of the world of pleasure; this work was followed by Keisei Kintanki (Courtesans Forbidden to Lose Their Temper), which was the most successful. In the latter he tried to shock his readers by combining the scandalous stories of the world of pleasure with witty Buddhist theological digressions.

We have already seen in Saikaku's works how the courtesan and actor were the principal personages of the "floating world, and that they had a social importance unimaginable in the West. A very serious historian, Sir George Sansom, writes:

There was a strict hierarchy among courtesans, whose ranks and appellations were solemnly observed. They were treated with forms of great respect, attended by richly dressed waiting maids and hedged about by an elaborate ritual. From time to time they made public progress through the streets of the quarter, in stately processions, which were eagerly witnessed by thousands of spectactors from all parts of the city.²

Kiseki also was certainly under the influence of the picture-books of the ukiyo-e school when he wrote novels containing psychological portraits: Seken Musuko Katagi (Characters of Worldly Young Men) in 1715, Seken Musume Katagi (Characters of Worldly Young Women) two years later, and finally the best after three more years, Ukiyo Oyaji Katagi (Characters of Old Men of the Floating World).

Kiseki declared that the purpose of the first of these books was to add to "the advancement of filial piety." This assertion by Kiseki appears rather cynical. Morality served the satirical vein of Kiseki as conveniently as it had served Saikaku.

Ikku Jippensha (1765-1831)

About a half century later, Ikku Jippensha wrote Hizakurige (Shank's Mare). This is still nearer the spirit of the Western picaresque novel than the works of Saikaku or Kiseki. It is one of the best works of humorous or satirical fiction. Shank's Mare is the story of the adventures of Yajirobei and his friend Kitahachi on a long journey along the Tokaido from Tokyo to Kyoto. Yaji, as the first traveller is more familiarly called, had squandered his fortune, abandoned his wife, and run away from his creditors. Kitahachi was once a strolling actor and later the apprentice to a merchant. The book is the description of the leisurely journey of the two heroes, who enjoy the beauties of the landscape, taste the famous local delicacies, visit the temples of renown, and observe different customs and manners along the road. Shank's Mare is both a guidebook and a book of adventure. Ikku produced several sequels dealing with travel in Japan; his works comprise 311 diverse books. Shank's Mare is impregnated with a lively humour, one comic episode following after another.

The personalities of the two heroes are developed, through a great number of incidents revealing their vigour, vulgarity, hot tempers, foolishness, and disarming naïveté. The farcical humour gives the book its predominant tone of gaiety as it is woven into many imaginative comic episodes and unusual situations. This chain of funny situations, without relief of a different note, makes the book monotonous at times and even tiring; as it contains no contrasts, it shows no diversity.

According to a popular legend (and contrary to contemporary writers who say that he was the dullest of companions), Ikku was a man of gay spirit and humour, and a great practical joker. The last prank in his life gives an idea of the many contained in his book. It is said that when his faithful disciples mournfully prepared his funeral and when the Buddhist cremation of his body began, fireworks suddenly exploded: he had concealed them in his death-robes as the last hilarious joke for his friends. This anecdote gives an idea of the tremendous vivacity of Ikku's spirit.

THE PICARESQUE NOVEL AND UKIYO-E PAINTING

The amazing variety and vitality of the floating world, ukiyo, not only influenced the writers, but also had a deep fascination for a number of artists. Both novelists and painters alike took this world as the subject for their works. Moronobu Hishikawa, the initiator of the ukiyo-e school and author of One Hundred Women of Japan and Pictures of Japanese Occupations, as well as Sukenobu, author of Studies of One Hundred Women and many other picture books, searched for their subjects in this tumultuous, gaudy, popular world of pleasure. Liberty in the realms of sex made this epoch the most pornographic in Japanese literary history. This, however, did not mean dissolution of morals, but an intense vitality and joie de vivre. Above this sensational wave of eroticism, though, a great art was created which imposed itself later on the cultured and aristocratic classes. It is one example where great art was imposed from the lower layers of society. Later, when the Westerners came to Japan, they found that the valuable art produced there for more than a century was not the lifeless, repetitive art of Chinese-style painting, but the strongly imaginative, colourful, and realistic art of ukiyo-e wood-block printing.³

THE PICARESQUE NOVEL IN JAPAN AND IN THE WEST

There was a genre in Europe at about the same time which showed surprisingly strong resemblance to this ukiyo-zoshi literature—the Western picaresque novel. It appeared first in Spain in the sixteenth century, after a phase of idealist literature. It was related to a bourgeois movement that disrupted the feudal social structure, leaving a great number of people unemployed and lazy after the colonial conquests and wars ended. The Spanish hidalgos, ruined and disillusioned, were coming back from the Americas to find a new society, in which money was more important than honour and expediency ridiculed their dreams of grandeur.

This phenomenon of the appearance of a new literary genre in Japan and in Spain, originating in the rise of a capitalist society, is most interesting and can open new horizons for comparative literature. The similarities of social structure are reflected in similar ways in the new literary forms despite the fact that Japan was then completely closed to foreign influence.

The picaresque novel introduces a strong realism, often in caricature and always charged with practical details; it uses a simple expression, a rather primitive conception of life, and shows a sincerity that comes close to social satire. The description is vivid and direct, and spiced by a rather bitter humour.

The protagonist of the picaresque novel is an antihero: he despises society and its conventions; he is an anarchist by nature, disregarding the law; he is cynical and insensible to misfortune; he is an opportunist, always taking advantage of mishaps.

The social factor has a prime role in this form of novel, with its predominant popular atmosphere. The form and type of nihilist philosophy of the picaresque literature are also unique. Construction in all these novels is disconnected, with inserted episodes extraneous or unnecessary to the plot. There is a certain deformation of reality: defects are magnified, and the dominant traits of the characters are exaggerated to strengthen the particular caricature. But the characters are always real; the plot is based on an immense collection of fact and detail that enforces their realism. The social types chosen, the depraved atmosphere, and the nature of the plot express a conception of life in which the dominant tone is hazards, bitter experiences, and the inconstancy of men and things.

Lazarillo de Tormes, published anonymously in 1554, is the first example of the picaresque novel, and one of the most remarkable. An autobiographical tone prevails: the narrator with cynic realism and cold detachment tells about the most shocking adventures or describes the most moving scenes. A protagonist moves through all social classes and describes diverse people, but judges with disdain, often with a superior indifference. The priest, the nobleman, and the tramp are the main social types in this novel. Its popularity continued into the seventeenth century.

Lazarillo is followed by a rich production of picaresque novels. Among them, Guzman de Alfarache by Mateo Alemán (1547-1614); Marcos de Obregón by Vicente Espinel (1550-1624); El Diablo Cojuelo by Luis Vélez de Guevara (1579-1644); and, most important of them all, El Buscón by Francisco de Quevedo (1580-1645). The last works written in the vein of the picaresque appeared in the middle of the eighteenth century. La Vida de Torres Villarroel, although a biography, has been considered by some as a picaresque work due to the nature of the hero's personality and his adventures. After El Buscón the picaresque novel declined and took the characteristics of a novel of adventure.

It is curious to note that, like in the novels of Saikaku, there are also picaresque novels in which the central character is a woman. Examples are La Pícara Justina (1605) by Lopez de Ubeda and La Hija de Celestina (1612) by Jerónimo Salas Barbadillo, both belonging to the seventeenth century. In the latter, the destiny of the protagonist, Elena, reminds us of Saikaku's The Life of an Amorous Woman in several respects. She also loses at twelve her "first flower; she is a beautiful, voluptuous, dangerous woman; she also has noblemen and a priest as lovers; she has a period of brilliant prosperity and she falls down to shame and misery, being condemned to be hanged; here also "the way of the flesh" brings the character to a wretched end.

The picaresque novel, originating in Spain, passed into France with Lesage (1668-1747), The Spanish picaresque novel had great success in all of Europe and was translated into several languages, but it was with Gil Blas, a masterpiece of French literature, that it became universal literature. Gil Blas is more polished and has a French refinement and gentleness absent in the rude humour and gross vulgarity of Spanish rabble, but it lacks the letter's popular vigour and rebellious impudence. Lesage wrote still other novels in the line of picaresque themes, Le Diable Boiteux and Estebanillo González, in which he is less inventive, being still too near to the Spanish sources of inspiration.

In England Defoe (1660-1731), with more genius than Lesage, has written Colonel Jacque and Moll Flanders in the picaresque vein; in this last novel have been pointed out similarities to Pícara Justina. Defoe, like Saikaku, was the spokesman for the commercial bourgeoisie. In The Complete English Tradesman and in The Complete English Gentleman, Defoe expounded on the social forces which elevate tradesmen to the governing class, on the value of commercial activity, and on the importance of economy in the social organization. He described this new class, its strength, its realism, and its respect for the concrete. But still nearer the Spanish picaresque novel is Tobias Smollett (1721-71), who translated Don Quixote and Gil Blas. He profited from this experience by writing the Adventures of Roderick Random and, the best of his works, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751).

French and English writers brought new types into the picaresque novel, created fresh characters recruited from their national scene, and introduced the new social atmosphere of their respective countries and epochs.

The comparison between Western picaresque novels and those of Saikaku and Ikku comes naturally to mind. Both picaresque heroes and the heroes of Saikaku, Kiseki, and Ikku are deprived of any moral sense; their preoccupation is to take advantage of the rich, to dupe them and take their money; they are mean, selfish, and ruthless. The rich are not better; they spend enormous sums for mere vanity or for satisfying their base pleasures, and are greedy and heartless in what concerns others. The novels of Saikaku, just as the European picaresque novels, unveil chiefly the ugly and the evil side of human nature.

In Japan, as in Europe, the picaresque novel is generally constructed as a ficti-tious autobiography. The rise and fall of the protagonist alternates instead of following a regular line to glory or decadence; the incidents in the hero's life are varied and unexpected, but Le always faces them with a smile and a resigned philosophy.

Both the Western picaresque novel and that of Saikaku contain a deep sympathy for the wretched poor people; but this sympathy is not expressed directly because the fundamental antiromantic nature of this literature did not allow it. Probably Saikaku never intended to be a social reformer as some Japanese critics today imply. Although he never used a note of social protest, it is evident in many passages of his books that he regretted the state of the poor of his time. The fact that he was so deeply interested in describing their lives and the appalling social conditions shows that he felt the injustice of social inequalities: "When we compare these folk with those who live in a more prosperous state, their lives seem wretched and pitiful indeed." His moral interest—very significant in writers of novels like those mentioned—is shown in his moralizing themes. Saikaku's criticism of bourgeois and popular society and rejection of the aristocratic tradition shows some aspects 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