Looking back on the history of love, its emotional wrenches, physical contortions and logistical nightmares, one understands the growing inclination in our own time not to bother with it.
How far back should we go? To the gods? Japan itself, legend tells us, was born of the happy coupling of a god and goddess — a good beginning.
To prehistory? Did the hunter-gatherers of 10,000 B.C. love, in any sense of the word meaningful to us? There’s no knowing. Their remains include countless figurines of pregnant women — fertility symbols, scholars speculate — but no love poems.
Japan’s first love poem (if such it is) is attributed to the Emperor Yuryaku (418-79). It opens the eighth-century anthology “Manyoshu”: “Maiden, picking herbs on this hillside, / I would ask you: Where is your home? / Will you not tell me your name?”
That’s nice. Gently and tenderly, it suggests feelings too deep for words. How did the maiden respond? We’d give much to know.
Now the story darkens. Japan’s first famous lover is the courtier-poet Ariwara no Narihira (825-80), whose “Tales of Ise” recount his own erotic adventures. They are varied to the point of including an episode with “someone a year short of a centenarian, hair disheveled and white.” She’d been languishing for want of love; when word reached Narihira, his sympathy, if not his passion, was aroused. He wrote of himself, “It is a general rule in this world that men love some women but not others. Narihira did not make such distinctions.”
He made no distinctions at all, it seems. To fall in love with an imperial concubine was to play with fire. But, “In love with you,” he wrote her, “I have lost all sense of hiding from men’s eyes. If in exchange for meeting you, is death so great a price to pay?”
Death, perhaps not; the undying torment of hopeless love, maybe. For deliverance he “summoned exorcists and mediums” — in vain: “However much he gave himself over to the chanting of the exorcists and dancers, he was never for an instant free from thoughts of her, and his passion instead became stronger than ever before.”
Word got out; he was banished and the girl “locked up in a windowless tower,” condemned to sigh helplessly as Narihira, journeying night after night to the tower grounds from his place of exile, “(played) upon his flute with great feeling (and sang) a doleful plaint in his melodious voice.”
Japan’s most notorious beauty ranks also among the greatest of poets. Ono no Komachi (c.825-c.900) was passion personified. “My breast pounds,” she wrote, “a leaping flame / my heart is consumed in fire.” Is anything in the human lot more wretched than love unfulfilled? “So lonely am I / my body is a floating weed / severed at the roots.” One can at least dream: “I slept only to have him... / had I known it was a dream / I should never have wakened.”
Beauty is tragic — for those who possess it and those who pursue it. A certain nobleman courted her. As haughty as she was beautiful, she offered herself on one condition: that he visit her, chastely, 100 nights running. On the 99th night he died. Komachi lived on — and on; one tradition has her wandering, old, withered, hideous and homeless — a “floating weed” indeed — haunted by the soul of the man she’d tormented, her one solace “to pray for life in the worlds to come.”
Years pass, times change, peace gives way to war. Lovers are warriors now, and sing in a different key. Two military clans — Heike and Minamoto — battle for supremacy. “Tales of the Heike” is the literary classic the clash spawned.
We’re in Year One (and only) of the Genryaku Era — 1184. Minamoto Kiso Yoshinaka, cousin of the future shogun Minamoto no Yoritomo (ruled 1192-99), is fighting his last battle, hopelessly outnumbered. But death is what a Japanese warrior lives for. “Kiso and his 300,” the “Tales of the Heike” relate, “fell upon their 6,000 opponents in the death fury, cutting and slashing...” The 300 are reduced to five — among them Tomoe Gozen, Japan’s most famous female samurai, Kiso’s “warrior wife.” To her beauty are added qualities Komachi, 300 years dead, would never have claimed, or dreamed of: “So dexterously did she handle sword and bow that she was a match for a thousand warriors.”
Kiso bids her escape: “How would it be if in his last fight he died with a woman?” Tomoe’s reply: “Ah, for some bold warrior to match with, that Kiso might see how fine a death I can die!” So saying, she flung herself into the battle. Her fate is unknown.
For 400 years Japan was at war. It ended finally, and the peace that set in around 1600 endured. What could take war’s place? Commerce and love, both infused with a passion that defied the most elementary common sense; defied, in fact, no less than the warrior ethos had, the self-preservation instinct itself.
Chronicler of love par excellence is the novelist Ihara Saikaku (1642-93). His novel “Five Women Who Loved Love” could as easily have been titled “Five Men Who Loved Love” — loved it to death, quite literally, for love such as theirs defied an uncompromisingly severe social code enforced by the new peacetime regime with merciless rigor.
The first tale is of one Seijuro and his lover, Onatsu. There had been many before her. Playboy son of a rich merchant in a port town on the Inland Sea, Seijuro exceeded all bounds: “The (local) women of pleasure numbered 87, and there was none he had not known.” His father, disgusted, disinherits him at last. Resolving to mend his ways, he secures employment in a merchant house and actually does reform — he “no longer (had) an appetite for love.”
All would have gone well had the master of the establishment not had a younger sister named Onatsu — but “such,” as Saikaku is so fond of saying, “is the way of the world.”
This is the first of three parts on love and loyalty in Japan. Michael Hoffman’s latest book is “Cipangu, Golden Cipangu: Essays in Japanese History.”
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