FIVE WOMEN WHO Loved Love was written by a citizen of Osaka for the amusement of the townspeople in the new commercial centers of seventeenth-century Japan. From the few surviving records of Ihara Saikaku we know that he was not only a popular novelist but also a poet of wide reputation in his own day, a playwright and commentator on theater life, and something of a vagabond who had closely observed life as it was lived in parts of the country other than his own. Being so cosmopolitan, he was all the more truly a citizen of Osaka. The things that fascinated him in his native city he also found in others—back alleys and slums as well as gay theaters and teahouses; beggars, peddlers, and the lowliest prostitutes, along with merchant princes and famous courtesans. But in writing about them as he did, with such a rare combination of sympathy and detachment, Saikaku gave expression to a feeling of which the inhabitants of Osaka were probably more conscious than other townspeople: that they were citizens with a new importance to society and a new outlook on the world, one that showed the way to a richer and happier life than medieval Japan had known. This came to be known as the chonin-dō, “the way of the townspeople,” in contrast to bushidō, “the way of the warrior,” which has been so widely publicized in recent years that it has come to appear to many as the sole embodiment of Japanese tradition.
If Saikaku, as a spokesman for the new citizenry, did not compose a “Marseillaise” to inspire his fellow townsmen in a struggle against the old order, it is partly because fighting was one of the things that they wished to free themselves from. They were engaged together not in a class struggle but in pursuit of individual happiness—something for which little allowance had been made in the stern and unsparing life of medieval fighting men. Indeed, this was almost revolutionary in its implications for a society that had long lived as though in a graveyard, overcast by the seemingly endless tragedy of war, haunted in its literature and drama by specters of the dead, and steeped in the pessimistic view that traditional Buddhism took toward life in this world.
We must understand, however, that this “new” outlook was not just a sudden effusion of the human spirit responding to changed conditions of life and breaking clearly with its past. On the contrary, certain attitudes most characteristic of Osaka in Saikaku’s time quite plainly reflect its religious heritage as much as its newfound prosperity. Especially is this true of the theme treated in Saikaku’s first great novels: the search for happiness in love. What at first sight seems no more than the universal preoccupation of man is soon seen to have a special quality, an extraordinary intensity akin to religious feeling. These townspeople went about making love as if it were a way of life in itself, as if, amid the uncertainties of the world, love alone would endure. “In Love We Trust” might well have been the inscription on their coins, which were just coming into general circulation at that time.
There is here, no doubt, a defiant rejection of the traditional Buddhist view that all is dust and subject to corruption, that nothing escapes the universal law of change. But the protest bears a strong resemblance to one that had already come from within Buddhism itself, proclaiming salvation through loving faith in the Buddha Amida, whose abiding mercy and redemptive power alone could be relied upon to rescue men from the suffering of this world. Osaka itself had long been a stronghold of this new faith, and in the far more worldly atmosphere of the seventeenth century, though the people of that city looked increasingly to human love for happiness, it was still with the same sense of desperation and utter self-abandonment that was characteristic of Amida’s devotees. Thus, Saikaku’s heroines, forsaking the security of their homes and the “good things of life” to pursue some ill-fated affair, impress us less with their lusty relish for life than with their final unworldliness.
It is in this sense that we see a profound connection between the two seemingly disparate meanings of the word ukiyo—the Buddhist “world of sadness” and the “floating world” of fashion and pleasure inhabited by Saikaku and his friends. They knew well enough that this new world was no more lasting than the old. Still, Saikaku, who sensed most keenly the vanity and pathos of existence in the Floating World, had not less but rather still more lively an appreciation of its ephemeral attractions and the wealth of experience that this new age opened to all. Certainly the pleasures of these townsmen were richer and more varied than any known before to ordinary Japanese, for success in commerce gave them the means to develop some of their other talents and the leisure to enjoy them. The warrior class, with all its past exploits, had nothing to compare with the entertainments of the city, and the Floating World lay before their wondering eyes like Cleopatra on her barge, luxuriating in an infinite variety of goods from exotic places, an endless life of salad days, and an elusive but unchangeable charm.
Wherever one found merchants and tradesmen in those times, there were sure to be signs of this new life described by Saikaku—busy markets, side lanes lined with little shops, the dignified establishments of moneychangers, great warehouses, teahouses frequented by smartly dressed people, theaters, restaurants, bathhouses, brothels, and streets full of peddlers, panhandlers, jugglers, freaks, and dancing shows. But in Saikaku’s time, no city was the equal of his own as a paradise for townspeople. Kyoto was still too conscious of its splendid past to live as Osaka did—for the present alone. The imperial court remained, making feeble pretense at its ancient elegance, and with it an aristocracy that did much to give Kyoto society its style and tone, even if it had the power to do little else. Meanwhile, the warriors of the nation were establishing a new capital at Edo (now Tokyo), a fast-growing city with a political as well as commercial future. But under the watchful eyes of the shogunate, with a large warrior population to accommodate, and with much of its effort devoted to the building of a new city, the townsmen of Edo were not at first so free to go their own way, to create a new life and make the most of it.
Osaka, perhaps, had less of a future in the political life of the country, but this fact served in part to stimulate its growth along independent lines. The city had once seemed to have such a future, and when the Tokugawas took away their hope in it, the men of Osaka had another cause for resentment against the established order. Osaka had long been a city of commercial importance and was, along with the country at large, enjoying unprecedented prosperity when Toyotomi Hideyoshi chose it as his personal seat. There in 1583 he built the most formidable and elaborate fortified castle Japan had ever seen and planned extensive improvements in the city to make it the military, political, and economic heart of the nation. This it was indeed for the remaining fifteen years of his life. Then, not long after Hideyoshi’s death, Tokugawa Ieyasu determined to erect his new capital at Edo, where he built a castle even more imposing than Hideyoshi’s and started work on a metropolis that in time was to rival, and then outdo, Kyoto and Osaka in importance.
Ihara Saikaku was born in Osaka in 1642. Nothing is known about his early life and very little even about his later years. His wife died young, leaving him with a blind daughter, who also died within a few years. It is said that Saikaku’s grief led him to place his affairs in the hands of an assistant, but instead of retiring to some religious sanctuary as might have been expected, he devoted himself to travel and writing. We may judge from his novels that his journeying about Japan in those early years provided him with a rich store of information from which to draw for local color and charming incidents. His knowledge of places, peoples, and things was, for a novelist, probably equal to that which the famous actor Sakata Tojuro expected of his own profession: “The art of an actor is like a beggar’s bag and must contain everything, whether it is important or not. If there is anything not wanted for immediate use, keep it for a future occasion. An actor should even learn how to pick pockets.”
Saikaku first won literary recognition as the leading disciple of Soin, a writer of haikai (seventeen-syllable epigrammatic verses linked into long poems) who headed the liberal Danrin school of poetry. As the chief exponent of this school in Osaka, Saikaku was influential in the movement to free poetry from rigid adherence to conventional forms, to enlarge the scope of its subject matter, and to have it read in a natural style. His predilection for commonplace themes, drawn from the daily life of the people, won for him the contempt of the famous poet Bashō, who found Saikaku’s verse vulgar and uninspired, but it made him enormously popular for a time in Osaka. Saikaku was especially famous for his marathon poetry performances before assembled friends and admirers.
When these public orgies exhausted for the moment Saikaku’s appetite for expression in the limited, if not inflexible, haikai form, he turned to writing fiction, finding this medium perhaps better suited to the development of his subject matter because it permitted a far wider range of expression than did epigrammatic verse. In these same years, Saikaku also tried his hand at playwriting and at recording his observations on theater people of his time, especially the personal charms of young actors and amusing details of their private lives. But it was the novel form that gave full scope both to his rich poetical imagination and to his talent for realistic observation of the life of his time.
Saikaku’s first novel, Koshoku ichidai otoko (A Man Who Loved Love), tells of a man who roamed around the country working at all sorts of trades and making love to thousands of women and hundreds of young boys. It is considered by many Japanese to be his most realistic novel, while Five Women Who Loved Love is thought more imaginative and poetic. The former is likened to The Tale of Genji, some even arguing that Saikaku used Genji for his model. But whatever Saikaku may have owed to earlier literature, including tales of the Floating World (ukiyo-zoshi), which were popular in his own time, he did much to create a type of literature new to Japan, and at the same time he gave the common people an equivalent for the Genji in terms of their own experience. The hero of his first novel was as handsome and accomplished a lover as Prince Genji, but instead of luxuriating in the magnificent surroundings of the court, he found his pleasure where Saikaku’s readers looked for theirs: in teahouses, brothels, bathhouses, theaters, and the homes of commoners. The heroes and heroines of his other romances, including Five Women Who Loved Love, bear much less resemblance to people in Murasaki’s Tale of Genji, yet we often find them aping the latter. When some young bucks of Kyoto spend an evening at a teahouse, passing judgment on the beauty and dress of the girls who come by, they do in their own way what Genji and his friends did in discussing the virtues and desirability of various court ladies.
Not all of Saikaku’s novels concern the love of men and women, as do the two already mentioned. But much of what he had to say in other novels is suggested in these. There is, for instance, the matter of men who loved men, which became the subject of a later series, the Nanshoku ōkagami (Mirror of Manly Love). In the early Tokugawa period, prohibitions were placed on this practice by the shogunate, but it continued to flourish in places where the latter’s influence was too weak to enforce compliance, some of them places where an individualistic and warlike tradition was still strong and men scorned the love of women as effeminate. Satsuma was one of these places, and the last of Saikaku’s five women had to win her man from Satsuma away from the love of young boys.
It is perhaps as a reward for her success that Saikaku lets this girl, alone among his heroines, enjoy a happy ending to her story. The others all die, commit suicide, or enter a nunnery, but she and her lover are brought back in triumph for a marriage in her father’s home, where there is wealth enough for her mate to dream, still, of buying up all the theaters in Japan, with all their pretty male actors.
What drew Saikaku to this subject was not simply the realistic writer’s desire to mirror his society or describe impartially the varieties of love practiced in his time. Such a cool detachment would have been quite spurious with him, for Saikaku’s sharp objectivity implied no dulling of his human sympathies or his moral sensibility. Nor could he delve into the inmost secrets of human life only to expose them to ridicule or snickering prurience. Saikaku was obviously fascinated by the variety and complexity of human love, but, retaining always a sense of its intrinsic dignity, of love in its most exalted form as leading to self-denial rather than self-gratification, he is both a discriminating and compassionate judge of his fellow men. Thus it is not the sensual aspects of homosexual love that he takes up but the theme of heroic devotion or base disloyalty.
There is another kind of love that, as we might expect, figures even more prominently in Saikaku’s writings: the love of money—of riches generally, but in particular of coined money, which was a new object of love in those days and worth writing about in itself. In the Eitai-gura (Treasury for the Ages) he says: “It is not plum, cherry, pine, and maple trees that people desire most around their houses, but gold, silver, rice, and hard cash.” The whole book is devoted to showing how men go about satisfying this desire, as is another, Seken mune-zanyo (The Calculating World). While Five Women Who Loved Love is written mostly about people enjoying the pleasures of already-earned wealth, two of its heroes do have to figure out how to go about acquiring it, and we know from them something of what Saikaku thought was essential to the making of money: frugality, persistence, a ready mind for figures, mastery of the abacus, a pleasant manner, honesty, and imagination.
Most of these virtues had not been made much of before. The businessmen’s creed was new, and Saikaku was its first publicist in Japan. It was developed largely by a class of merchants and moneylenders, called kami-gatamono, who had become active in the Kyoto-Osaka region during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These were the men whose resourcefulness, we are told, created the merchant guilds (za) in Japan, the free ports, free markets, the use of gold and silver as legal tender, paper money, and bills of exchange. Among them were some who had gone abroad in search of fortune and, when ordered home by the shogunate, had brought back to the port cities a new sense of freedom, an acquaintance with other ways of life, and especially a better knowledge of trade and money handling. From them, we may imagine, the people of these cities learned to look outward and ahead rather than inward and back, as did the framers of the Tokugawa seclusion policy.
To them also Saikaku must have owed much of his curiosity about the world and his taste for the exotic. Ancient exoticism had captured the Japanese mind, during the first flush of Buddhism and Chinese learning, but it later languished in a medieval dungeon of introspection and antiquarianism. Saikaku was one of those who brought it back to life in literature. He was fascinated both by the great variety of wealth in his own country and the innumerable treasures of foreign lands. The known world was, indeed, hardly enough to satisfy his thirst for the exotic. He followed the map to its limits when he had a dissolute company of pleasure seekers play “naked islanders such as are mentioned on maps of the world.” And when he came to the end of this book, to the treasure of a man from the Ryukyus, Saikaku could not be happy with such precious gifts as the silks of China and jewels and incense wood of the Indies. He had to have wonders from a Daoist paradise and the palaces of the gods.
Saikaku’s enormous appetite for the wonders of the world earned for him the nickname Oranda Saikaku (Holland Saikaku). This did not mean, so far as we know, that Saikaku had any special acquaintance with the Dutch, who were then the only foreign traders allowed into Japan, or that he was in fact a student of Dutch learning. Rather it meant that people thought him unconventional enough to have a taste for things foreign or strange.
The heart of his nonconformity was not, however, his exoticism. It was his adherence to the way of the townspeople and his belief that, in the cities at least, successful businessmen were the real aristocrats, while high birth and military prowess counted for little. This belief is expressed in one way by what he says in the Treasury for the Ages: “It makes no difference whether a man is of humble birth or of fine lineage. The genealogies of townspeople are written in dollars and cents. A man who traces his ancestry to Fujiwara Kamatari [a noble of the highest court rank] but who lives impoverished in the city will be worse off than one who leads a monkey through the streets to earn his living.” And the same belief is expressed in another way in Saikaku’s stories of the warrior class, such as the Buke-giri monogatari (The Warrior’s Sense of Duty). Though ostensibly written to popularize the way of the warrior, these stories leave a final impression of the warrior class as useless, misguided, and worthy of sympathy rather than admiration.
Still, it is with the individual that Saikaku is ultimately concerned, not the substitution of one type of class thinking for another. Even among the townspeople, whom Saikaku loves, there is no general title to admiration and success. The virtues of industry and frugality can easily be corrupted to make men overscrupulous and stingy, as in the example of Moemon, who economizes on his coat sleeves, does not buy a hat when he comes of age to wear one, and sleeps with an abacus under his pillow to keep track of the money he makes in his dreams. But, somewhat like Gengobei, Moemon is one minute a ridiculous clerk and the next a daring hero who runs off with the most beautiful lady in town. Saikaku is as loath to confine his people in rigid characterization as in tight social classes. They are consistent only in their need for happiness and their weakness in pursuit of it. The reader must be quick if he is to follow the unpredictable course of human behavior and learn its secrets.
Saikaku is not one to accommodate a Western reader’s taste for consistency in other matters, either. Time and place mean nothing to him except as they serve to create a mood. He will stop the sun in its course if he needs a sunset at the beginning and at the end of a picnic; he rushes the seasons to get the appropriate atmosphere for a certain scene. Sometimes people seem to be everywhere at once, and Gengobei, as a street singer, impersonates himself as if he had already become a legend. One woman is successfully seduced while asleep; a man spends the night with a young friend but wakes to find it all a dream and his friend long since dead. Nothing is too implausible for the logic of mood and emotion.
But his readers would probably not have held Saikaku accountable for such contradictions and inconsistencies. Many of Saikaku’s characters were already known in popular drama and song, and he was obliged to respect in some degree the associations people had with their names, to make them do some of the things for which they were already celebrated. It did not matter whether these things fitted poorly into the rest of the story; the thrill of identifying an old hero or favorite actor was enough. We should also bear in mind that Saikaku wrote Five Women Who Loved Love in some haste. It was the second of five books published within a period of only twelve months, and he probably spent little time trying to straighten out its inconsistencies.
There is another set of conventions that the Western reader may be surprised, this time pleasantly, to find disregarded by Saikaku: those deriving from what some consider the excessive Japanese sense of politeness and discretion. Their absence in Saikaku may be due in part to the fact that his stories move too swiftly to allow for lengthy circumlocutions or polite explanations of what people do. Saikaku is customarily forthright himself—a quality that he probably shared with most other townsmen of the time—and his characters are generally direct in going about what they wish to do. In Five Women Who Loved Love, this is most noticeable in the impetuosity of his heroines. They do not wait to be wooed by the men of their choice or stand by timidly while customary procedures decide their fate. In each case, the heroine makes the advances, forces the issue, and decides what must be done in a crisis. And when her impetuosity leads to ruin for herself and her lover, as most often happens, it is the heroine again whose unchastened spirit dominates the final scene at the execution ground.
For Saikaku, this boldness is what makes a woman great, more than her beauty. Nevertheless, his heroines are weak as well as strong, and he does not spare them the consequences of their weakness—in most cases, death. This ultimate retribution is not brought about merely to satisfy conventional morality; nor is it, on the other hand, held up as the final injustice done by society to a girl more sinned against than sinning. Death may be too extreme a penalty to pay for such offenses, but offenses they are nonetheless. To Saikaku the moral order as karmic retribution is as hard and inescapable a fact as human passion.
In this respect, despite the reputation he was later to acquire as a skillful teller of erotic tales, Saikaku is a keener and more effective judge of human foibles than many a writer whose purpose is more obviously moralistic. Saikaku never appears as the doctrinaire proponent of a particular moral philosophy. He does not, like the playwright Chikamatsu, lend his talents to the movement that popularized Confucian ethics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The moral law prevails, but Saikaku cannot pretend that his heroines are easily reconciled to it. His five women remain wholly themselves—temperamental, volatile, passionate, unpredictable.
In Saikaku’s story, Osan’s only regrets are for herself. Her elopement with Moemon, with its elaborate hoax to make people think them dead, proves a miserable affair; she is a wretched fugitive, without the strength for flight through the wilderness, and is sustained only by Moemon’s promise of an early chance to go to bed together. Moemon returns to the scene of his crime not in the hopes of redemption but because he must hear what people are saying about him and because he is homesick for Kyoto after weeks of pleasureless life in the country. In the end, both must die—a poignant death, because they are not ordinary lovers and everyone pities their frailty—while the war between passion and prudence goes on. Reason wins no false victory; it succeeds only in showing men as they are, at their best and at their worst.
But with Saikaku the consequence of sin is not always death. Sometimes there is an alternative in the Buddhist monastery, where a ruined lover can pray for the soul of his beloved and hope to be reunited with her in paradise. The monastery is, in fact, such a ready alternative that it seems to have become simply a place for escaping from the world. It is not a place one goes to escape oneself. This is because the lover remains a lover and goes to the monastery in order to remain faithful to his love. There is little consciousness of personal sin, no estrangement from God or repentance. In death, the lovers are defiant because the world is against them; in the monastery they are resigned, confident that they will have ultimate victory over the world.
What Saikaku’s characters are more conscious of than personal sin, as others know it, is a kind of Perduring Original known as karma or inga, the chain of moral causation that conditions one’s life in accordance with one’s past actions. Strictly speaking, it was possible by one’s actions to lighten the burden or add to it, as one chose. In practice, however, the overcoming of sin and the acquisition of merit depended upon the individual’s capacity for enlightened conduct. It came to be recognized that few men were sufficiently enlightened to cope with the weight of karma accumulated through innumerable previous existences. Thereupon a savior appeared in the Buddha Amida, who had vowed that his great accumulation of merit should be applied to the salvation of all men, so that they might, without any merit of their own, share with him the pleasures of the Western Paradise. Redemption was then free for the asking, not a reward for good conduct in this life.
For this reason, when Saikaku’s lovers speak of their misfortunes as due to karma, to them it is almost the equivalent of Fate, because they feel helpless under its crushing weight. In some cases there is a further complication arising from a Buddhist superstition called shushin: a curse that falls upon someone who refuses to gratify the love of another. Thus, unequal to karma, threatened perhaps by the curse of a disappointed lover, and feeling desperately the urge to seize a brief moment of bliss in this dreary world, Saikaku’s five women plunge headlong and headstrong into love, into death, into the cloister—with the name of Amida on their lips and in their souls a faith that salvation depends on the Buddha’s love, not upon what they do themselves.
We may believe that they are real people as well as Saikaku’s creatures. We know enough about the life of his society and the celebrated cases of ill-fated lovers to recognize them as people of his own time. Yet what Saikaku has to tell us about them takes a form much different from the realistic novel to which we are accustomed. This is a work of poetry and imagination, not simply of skilled observation. Saikaku is no social scientist. He is indeed a sorcerer, whose powers are unexpectedly used to bring all of life out into the light of day, after his friends, in their search of fugitive pleasures, have turned day into “a kingdom of eternal night.”