You’d never know, reading the stories and poems of 17th-century Japan, that the country was closed. In, there was no getting out; out, no getting in, death to violators. That was the law of the land, laid down by the ruling Tokugawa shogunate in 1637 as a barrier against European imperialism and change in general. Time itself was frozen, that the Tokugawa might rule forever. It must at times have seemed they would. Two and a half centuries is a long time. The beginning of the end came in 1854, when the U.S. Navy’s “Black Ships” forced an opening. The Edo Period (1603-1868) was breathing its last.
Few countries have ever been so tightly bolted against the outside world. You’d expect, somewhere in the voluminous literature of the period — for 17th-century Japan was highly literate by world standards — a hint, if only faint and understated for fear of censorship, of claustrophobia.
It’s not there, either in the masses of popular novels churned out by a nascent publishing industry nor in the kabuki and puppet plays staged in such riotous profusion by nascent and burgeoning theaters, stoking the emotions they portrayed and portraying the emotions they stoked. Many moods come and go, from ecstasy to despair, lust for love to lust for money, love of life to the fevered pursuit of death when love led there, as it often did. At its best and at its worst, whether a gift or a burden, life was intense, a desperate snatching of pleasure known to be fleeting, if not deadly — and if deadly, so be it.
Most fleeting of all was the pleasure of love, damned by a regime that saw passion as a threat to social order, a capital crime when it overflowed the rigid class system. No wonder novelist Ihara Saikaku (1642-93) called it “a journey to death.”
Never mind. His characters love on — too engrossed in their own lives, deaths, joys, suffering, fates, to even notice, let alone resent, the bars of the Tokugawa cage. Claustrophobia came later, in the mid-18th century and on into the 19th, when European ships came calling, though only to be turned away; European science began to be studied, if only in secret by tiny intellectual coteries; and, slowly but surely, the outside world came into view, increasingly sharp, now beckoning, now menacing. Saikaku’s 17th-century contemporaries knew little of it and cared less. Outside world? What outside world? Japan was the world, as boundless as the human soul — which was very boundless indeed.
Two of many doomed travelers on Saikaku’s “journey” are the clerk Moemon, “honest and extremely frugal, so much so that he completely neglected his personal appearance,” and Osan, whose breathtaking beauty seems rather wasted on her good but prosaic husband, a Kyoto “almanac maker” with more of an eye for business than beauty. What would a woman like her see in her husband’s clerk, Moemon, so unprepossessing and so disinclined to love?
It starts with a household servant girl falling unaccountably in love with Moemon. When he spurns her, Osan, in a spirit of playful mischief, not dreaming anything would come of it, dons the servant girl’s clothes and, with charms the poor servant can’t match, lures him to her bed, intending to make a fool of him, and so it would have ended had she not inopportunely fallen asleep. Waking up to find she’d been ravished in her sleep, “overcome with shame at the realization of her undoing,” Osan resolves to “abandon myself to this affair, risk my life, ruin my reputation, and take Moemon as my companion on a journey to death.” It is a rebirth for both of them. It quite makes a new man of Moemon.
The impassioned couple flee, barely surviving, enduring privations of all kinds, only to be caught due to a freakish mischance having nothing to do with them. Their conviction is summary, a foregone conclusion. Tokugawa law was clear: “Persons such as those who commit adultery with their master’s wife or with their teacher’s wife: Death for both the man and the woman.” “They were paraded through the crowds,” Saikaku tells us, “along the way to Awataguchi (Kyoto’s execution ground), where they died like dewdrops falling from a blade of grass.”
Love is a vast subject in any age. The Tokugawa shoguns did their best to narrow it. They confined it to licensed yūkaku (pleasure quarters). Every town of any size had one at least; those of Edo, Osaka and Kyoto were famous. The women of the brothels would be called sex slaves today. Language was different then and accorded the best of them honor and respect. They were courtesans, artists — “highly trained and educated performers,” writes Haruo Shirane in “Early Modern Japanese Literature,” “skilled in such arts as music, dance, poetry, calligraphy, tea ceremony and flower arrangement.”
Many are the tales told, by Saikaku and others, of the pleasure quarters. One of Saikaku’s is of the queenly Yoshino. She appears in a novel titled “Life of a Sensuous Man” — Yonosuke by name, whose erotic adventures begin at age 7. Age 35 finds him the peerless Yoshino’s principal client, determined to buy her out and marry her regardless of his family’s outrage. “Leave it to me,” says Yoshino in effect — and entertains his assembled relatives with such grace and elegance that admiration rains down on her from all quarters. Here, too, is a kind of rebirth.
There were courtesans and courtesans. The monkish haiku poet Matsuo Basho (1644-94) encountered two on his most famous journey, chronicled in “Narrow Road to the Deep North.” In a rough rustic inn in desolate country along the Sea of Japan coast, he overhears talk in the next room, from which “I gathered that they were women of pleasure from a place called Niigata” — nowhere near Yoshino’s exalted level — on a pilgrim to Japan’s holiest Shinto shrine at Ise.
“The next morning,” Basho writes, “they came up to us (Basho and his companion) as we departed. ‘The difficulties of road,’ (they said), ‘not knowing our destination, the uncertainty and sorrow — it makes us want to follow your tracks. We’ll be inconspicuous. Please bless us with your robes of compassion, link us to the Buddha’” — take us with you, in other words.
Nothing doing, says Basho. The reader suspects betrayal of the enlightenment he seeks. “We sympathize with you but we have many stops on the way. ... The gods will make sure no harm comes to you.”
The encounter inspired one of his most famous poems:
Under the same roof
women of pleasure also sleep —
bush clover and moon.
Basho’s loss of innocence, perhaps.
The Saikaku tale we left hanging in Part 1 begins bleakly but ends, if not triumphantly, hopefully enough at least to raise our spirits before we plunge into tragedy next month in Part 3.
A Kyoto wife and mother, her husband’s business floundering, starvation looming, hires herself out as a wet nurse. Her husband and infant daughter must manage as best they can. The parting is sad; it’s a loving family. “The man (felt) he had no reason to go on living”; “the baby refused to stop crying.” The neighbor women come over to help: “They taught the man to boil rice flour into gruel ... (and) feed it to the baby through a bamboo tube with silk tied around the end that was the same size as the mother’s nipple.”
It would not do. Better destitution together than security, however tenuous apart. “I haven’t touched the money” he’d received for his wife’s services. “He ran out of the house” to give back the money and bring his wife home. It was New Year’s Eve. “They were still crying when the year changed” — tears of joy only the wretched can know.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.