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FOREWORD

THE LATTER half of the 17th century is a significant age in the history of Japanese literature, for it was in this age that the townspeople, who could boast of neither rank nor birth, came to hold the hegemony of literary activities.

Japanese 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, in a sense, symbolized the bourgeoisie of the time: lusty, but not hypocritical; aggressive, but not gloomy; coarse, but not affected. No wonder the book enjoyed a wide circulation. Encouraged by its success, Saikaku wrote several more works of which the central theme was Jove, which are now known as his amorous stories.

It may be proper to point out here that his so-called amorous stories are not to be taken as mere idle talks on love-hunters and wanton women. We may say that in them is hidden an inevitable resistance in disguise against the unnatural fetters put on humanity by feudalism.

The moral codes prescribed by Japanese feudalism laid all the restraints imaginable upon people in almost every phase of life. For instance, according to the moral code then current, a boy and a girl ought not to be seated side by side after their seventh year. Under such conditions, neither sex could be expected to develop proper manners toward the other. A boy had to become a too strict moralist, consciously evading the society of girls, if he was to be praised as an ideal boy; and a girl had to be too shy to say any words except “ Yes, sire,” or “Yes, madam,” if she was to enjoy the name of the incarnation of female virtues. But human nature could not long be kept suppressed under such restraints. And Saikaku triumphantly proclaimed humanity free from all the restraints of feudal morals. In the light of modern times, his ‘amorous stories’ may seem too wanton and too erotic. Wanton and erotic they are indeed, but when we stop to consider the age in which they were written, we can see that they were a sort of declaration of humanity against the despotism of feudal morals. In a sense his ‘amorous stories’ are a japanese version of Boccaccio’s Decameron. In Yonosuke’s amorous adventures, for instance, we can hear a cry of human resistance against the feudal fetters. It may appear far-fetched to argue that Saikaku consciously criticized the feudal world by the series of ‘amorous stories’; none the less they were the products of a rebellious spirit against feudalism.

A born townsman, Saikaku could not overlook the queer, unnatural customs to which the warrior class was bound-especially vengeance and sodomy. Modern readers may be perplexed as to why the latter was regarded as a virtue rather than a vice. But this is no place to dwell upon it; there must have been many complicated reasons. For one thing, a young warrior could not fall in love with a girl without being criticized as being too soft. On the contrary, he was openly allowed to love a boy who was his social equal and was not yet of age. When once this relation of love between the two was announced, others had to respect it and the two had to be mutually faithful at the risk of their honor, sometimes even at the risk of their lives. This peculiar type of love then current among the warrior class attracted Saikaku’s interest and in 1687 his Mirror of Sodomy was published.

Vengeance was another feudal virtue that attracted Saikaku’s interest. If a warrior’s father or elder brother or uncle was killed, he had to search all over the country to discover the murderer and take vengeance on him. Stories of successful vengeance taken after many years of hardships used to be told with admiration. But the truth was that not every case of vengeance was successful, and many of them brought misery to all concerned. So in the idealized vengeance stories current in feudal times it was inevitable that the truth was more or less distorted. Then Saikaku began to write. Born townsman, he could not compromise with the current morality and in the Tradition of Chivalry or Records of Vengeance, published in 1687, he reported all varieties of vengeance successful and unsuccessful, admirable and unreasonable, pathetic and cruel. It is notable that he dared to describe the darker aspects of vengeance in an age when it was eulogized as the very flower of chivalry.

But so far, the materials taken up by him were not good enough to show to the full his genius as a townsman writer. Only when he turned his writer’s eye on the life of his fellow townsmen and started writing what are now known as ‘townspeople stories’ could he give full play to his unique genius. His ‘townspeople stories’ are quite significant in the history of Japanese literature in that they were the first literary works in which the main characters were anonymous. Yet, although the people described in these books were men of low birth and no rank, because the economical hegemony was in their hands, they were mighty giants. In The Everlasting Storehouse of Japan, published in 1688, Saikaku boldly declares: “Genealogy is nothing to a merchant. What is important to him is money. Even if he comes of the highest family of the land, if he is a poor tenant of a back street, he is no better than a beggar.”

The newly-risen bourgeoisie knew very well what was the source of their power, why they could have an overwhelming influence in the world though lacking either family lineage to boast of or any military power to rely on. The secret of their power was money and nothing else. With money they were everything; without ‘it they were nothing. So they clung to money desperately. How to increase it, however foul or dangerous the means might be, was the greatest concern that occupied their thoughts day and night. One of them was reluctant to walk fast, even on an emergency call to express sympathy after a fire: he feared he would work up an appetite and have to eat too much, which would mean a waste of money. Another, who was a tea-dealer, adulterated new tea leaves with used ones. All these strugglings of men that centered around money Saikaku described with a very realistic touch.

Despite all these frantic efforts, however, not every body could become rich. On the contrary, nine persons out of ten were destined to be failures. Especially was this true when the market was established and its shares were divided definitely, once for all, among existing merchant princes; there was then little room left for any empty-handed adventurer to aspire to wealth. Saikaku rightly wrote in Saikaku’s Last Fabrics, published in 1694, the year after his death: “Contrary to former times, this is an age in which money begets money. Today it is the man of common ability with capital, rather than the man of rare ability with no capital, who gains profit.” Indeed, in the train of a handful of shining successes there were always a host of failures groping aimlessly in the dark. And for such a realistic writer as Saikaku it was all but impossible not to pick them up in the spotlight of his works. Thus during the last stage of his career he produced a series of masterworks in which the main characters were the petty misers and failures of the world, and This Scheming World (Seken Munasanyo), published in 1692, is one such masterwork.

In structure This Scheming World is one of the most consolidated of all his works. Most of the stories are told as incidents or episodes relating to New Year’s Eve, when in those days it was the custom to balance all debits and credits for the year. On this particular day of the year, the drama of life came to a climax: there were tragedies, comedies, farces and other human incidents that could not be classified into any of the regular categories of stage-plays. The players were of the nameless masses. They were not in the least aware that they were involved in a drama; they were so intent on tiding over this day of days that they were all the more pathetic for it. And Saikaku portrayed them with so life-like a touch that even though three centuries have already passed since the days of Saikaku, it seems as if they were our contemporaries.

Modern readers, especially European and American readers, who are accustomed to reading works written strictly according to the pattern of modern short stories, may criticize Saikaku as lacking ‘system.’ It is true that he lacks system in the modern sense of the word. But then it must be taken into consideration that he was a writer of the 17th century, when even in Europe the pattern of short stories had not yet settled down. In a sense Saikaku’s stories resemble the random chats of a worldly-wise man. Now he talks of this, then he talks of that. His talk lacks ‘consistency.’ Nevertheless we can picture from his description ‘real men of flesh and blood characterized by common human weaknesses and frailties.

Had he lived longer, Saikaku might have written more works on the life of the masses, but unfortunately even as he wrote This Scheming World his health was already declining, and one year after its publication, in 1693, he died. He left us a short farewell poem, composed perhaps on his deathbed, the gist of which is:

“The span of human life is destined to be fifty years, which is rather too long for a man such as I. Nevertheless I was allowed to enjoy the sight of the moon of this world for two more years.”

His tomb may be found in the Seiganji Temple, Osaka.