Ihara Saikaku’s The Japanese Family Storehouse (Nippon eitai-gura), published in 1688, begins:
Heaven says nothing, and the whole earth grows rich beneath its silent rule. Men, too, are touched by heaven’s virtue; yet, in their greater part they are creatures of deceit. They are born, it seems, with an emptiness of soul, and must take their qualities wholly from things without. To be born thus empty into this modern age, this mixture of good and ill, and yet to steer through life on an honest course to the splendors of success—this is a feat reserved for paragons of our kind, a task beyond the nature of the normal man.
But the first consideration for all, throughout life, is the earning of a living. And in this matter, each one of us must bow before the shrine of the Heavenly Goddess of Thrift (not Shinto priests alone, but samurai, farmers, traders, artisans, and even Buddhist bonzes), and we must husband gold and silver as the deity enjoins. Though mothers and fathers give us life, it is money alone which preserves it.
In the first chapter of this work Saikaku goes on to tell the story of a temple where pilgrims borrowed three, five, or ten copper coins for good luck as they left, always paying back double the number the next year. One day an ordinary-looking man asked to borrow a thousand coins. He disappeared before the astonished priests could collect their wits and wonder if they would ever get their money back. The man lent the coins to fishermen in good-luck strings of one hundred, always got them back with interest, and kept track of the compounding interest he owed the temple. After thirteen years he returned to the temple 8,192,000 coins. Saikaku concludes: “Those who inherit nothing from their fathers and whose fortunes, won by sheer ability, exceed five hundred kanme of silver, are known as Men of Substance. If their fortunes mount above a thousand kanme, we call them Millionaires. By interest alone such money grows to thousands on tens of thousands, and its voices swell in silvery songs to sing its lord’s posterity ten thousand years of luck.”
Saikaku’s Family Storehouse contains many such stories of wealth gained through prudence, diligence, and cleverness. One man never neglected a detail that might lead to profit, stopping on the way back from a neighbor’s funeral to pick medicinal herbs, pausing when he stumbled to pick up pebbles to use to light fires. A widow left with debts she could not possibly pay off by her own meager earning power decided to raffle off her house. She took in enough money to pay off her debts and get a new start in life. A hired farm girl won the raffle, getting a house of her own for a few coins.
Saikaku’s book consists of thirty chapters, each containing several stories of this kind. Sometimes the connections among the stories in a chapter are clear, but in other chapters they are loose, perhaps no more than an association of words or names. Here we can see the continuing influence of the author’s earlier devotion to the haikai-linked verse form, in which an image or word in one verse may be used in a quite different way in the next. Saikaku was famous in his own time for his immense fluency in writing haikai and for the density of their layers of allusion to literature and to contemporary realities. Some contemporary detractors called his style the Dutch style, “Dutch” apparently being used in his time for anything exotic and overblown, roughly as some of us might use “baroque.”
Ihara Saikaku is the pen name of a man who inherited substantial merchant wealth early in life. Although he clearly knew a great deal about the Japanese business world of his time, he cannot have spent much time actively managing the family business, for he was an amazingly prolific writer. Haikai composition traditionally had been a group activity, with one artist writing the first poem, a friend writing another poem echoing and varying the words and attitudes of the first one, then other friends building on one another in a potentially interminable poetic jam session. Saikaku’s first publication had been of a selected 300 from the 10,000 poems he and 150 others had composed during a twelve-day session. Thereafter he and other poets challenged tradition by writing strings of haikai by themselves. In 1683 Saikaku set a record that no one seems to have tried to break, writing 23,500 haikai poems in one day and one night.
By 1683, however, Saikaku already had turned the great flood of his literary creativity into some novel forms of prose, drawing on realms of experience that seldom appeared in earlier Japanese literature and writing for a widening audience of merchants, urban samurai, and probably a few prosperous, literate farmers. Although he did not have to sell his books to fill his rice bowl, his writing was very much directed to those who would buy them, not just to aristocratic patrons and connoisseurs. And although Japanese literature from the tenth-century Tale of Genji on is not prudish, Saikaku’s writings about commercial and obsessive sex set a new standard for frankness and lack of sentimentality. His first prose work, The Life of an Amorous Man, published in 1682, tells the story of a man who “chose of his own to be tormented by love, and by the time he reached the age of fifty-four he had dallied with 3742 women and 725 young men.” Many think his finest work is Five Women Who Loved Love, in which only one of the erotically obsessed heroines avoids execution, suicide, or the nunnery, and another exclaims to a warning vision of a Buddhist deity, “Please don’t worry about what becomes of us. We are more than glad to pay with our lives for this illicit affair.” Still other collections, including Tales of Samurai Duty, published in 1688, tell new stories and retell old ones of samurai demonstrating suicidal loyalty and obsessive pursuit of revenge, but without any of the admiration that had been expressed by earlier authors. The samurai dying for their lords, it seems, are just doing what they have to do, having been born in warrior households. So are the merchants never wasting a moment or a penny. So too, perhaps, are his erotic compulsives, driven by their lusts, showing themselves to have little depth of character or feeling or interest in the individuality of those whose bodies they enjoy.
It is as if in the new and highly differentiated social order of Tokugawa Japan, this amazing writer, with his keen sense of the emptiness of men’s souls, no longer could sustain the old unified vision, common since the Tale of Genji, of the warrior-litterateur-aristocrat, his valor or his erotic obsession always tempered with Buddhist knowledge of the transience of all lives and loves. In its place Saikaku presents a world of distinctive types pursuing, with intelligence or stupidity, good luck or bad, the duties and obsessions fate has given them.
Near the end of Family Storehouse, Saikaku writes: “The world is a dreadful place. Never lend money casually, nor, when you marry off your daughter, leave the marriage broker to arrange matters as he pleases. There are enough ways of losing money even if you take proper care. . . . There is more money than there used to be, and both making it and losing it are done on a grander scale. Now, if ever, trade is an exciting venture. So let none of you risk slipshod methods in earning your livings.” In another passage he describes the misery of the poor in a pawnshop: a man leaving in the rain after pawning his only umbrella, a woman pawning the family cooking pot, another pawning her underslip and enduring the leers of the men who can see through her thin dress. But even that far down there is hope; one poor man, out of work in Edo, simply watches the crowds passing by on the great Nihon Bridge. There is so much good work for carpenters in the building and rebuilding of the lavish daimyo mansions that at the end of every day crowds of happy carpenters and their apprentices cross the bridge, leaving a trail of shavings and scraps of wood from their bags. Our hero begins by picking up the scraps and selling them as they were, goes on to build up a flourishing chopstick-making business, and ends as a great timber merchant, owning a mansion, warehouses, and tracts of forestland.
Although most of Saikaku’s tales of wealth made and lost came from the world of the cities, it should not be forgotten that much of Japan’s urbanization had occurred in just a few generations before his time, and rural life was by no means as remote to him and his readers as it is to many city dwellers today. He drew two of his strongest images of the happy results of thrift and diligence from the country. One describes a poor farmer who scatters parched beans for luck every New Year’s Eve. One New Year’s Day he decides to plant one; miraculously it grows. He plants the beans from that plant, and continues to expand his bean plantings until they yield a nice income. The beginning miracle has a strongly Buddhist tinge; Buddhist teachings early and late are full of metaphors of the planting of seeds of merit and compassion that later bear holy flowers and fruit. The farmer now uses some of his income to have a stone lantern constructed to light the way for travelers on the main road at night. “Known as the ‘Lantern of Beans,’ it shines to this day. . . . All things grow bigger in time, and our largest ambitions are not beyond hope of ultimate fulfillment.”
Saikaku chose to end his collection of often worldly and cynical stories by telling of a farm household near Kyoto where grandfather, father, and son and their wives all live in harmony, prosperity, and good health. “Living thus in perfect contentment, worshiping the gods and holding the Buddhas in deep reverence, their hearts came naturally to be endowed with every virtue.” When the grandfather reaches the age of eighty-eight, many people come to him, as was customary for honored men of that age, to ask him to cut for them a bamboo grain level. All the merchants who use these levels prosper; one millionaire uses his bamboo level to measure out the silver he is dividing among his three sons. Saikaku concludes: “Money is still to be found in certain places, and where it lies it lies in abundance. Whenever I heard stories about it I noted them in my great national stock-book, and, in order that future generations might study them and profit thereby, I placed them in a storehouse to serve each family’s posterity. Here they now rest, as securely guarded as the peace of Japan.”
Matsuo Toshichirô, who signed himself Bashô, “Banana Tree,” spent most of 1688 on the road, visiting many famous scenes of Japan at their best times, trying to be, as he believed all great artists were, at one with nature throughout the four seasons. Sometimes he confessed that a well-known place left him with no fresh inspiration. Already he was an eminent poet; his best-known poem, the most famous haiku in all Japanese literature, had appeared two years before:
An old pond.
A frog jumps in.
The sound of water!
Fond of conversation, forty-four years old, not in robust health, he had been through years of rigorous meditation under a Zen Buddhist priest. The most basic teaching of Buddhism is that everything we desire is illusory and inconstant and that to desire, to cling to, to love things of this world can only bring sorrow and endless reincarnation in this sorrowful world. One can gradually liberate oneself from illusions and clingings, gain more and more insight into the real nature of things, and eventually escape altogether from the wheel of rebirth. Zen was a version of this teaching developed in China, Korea, and Japan from about 650 C.E. Its highly disciplined techniques of meditation under the direction of a master are meant to bring the disciple to a moment of enlightenment, a sudden vision of the reality underlying the illusions.
For Bashô, both meditation and his travels to view famous places were routes to inspiration. The artist was necessarily part seer, part shaman and could not expect insight if he cared for his own safety and comfort. The dangers and uncertainties of travel simply mirrored the fundamental inconstancy and unreliability of human life. There was a density of association around famous sights built up by previous visits by notable Buddhist priests. The most ordinary experience might bring insight, Buddhist and artistic. That splash of a frog may have brought a shock of enlightenment into the profound silence of his Zen meditation. He liked banana trees in part because their trunks were of no use; a quiet allusion to the Zhuangzi, a great Chinese text of the third century B.C.E., much appreciated by Zen Buddhists, in which the useless twisted tree is a metaphor for the “useless” man who survives and knows more than the “useful.” Even a chestnut tree would lead him through the character for “chestnut” (
, “west” over “tree”) to thoughts of the western paradise and of reliance on the great Buddhist deity who dwelt there.
Many of Bashô’s travels were uncomfortable and dangerous, but in 1688 he managed to spend Buddha’s birthday among the civilized splendors of the ancient city of Nara. Nara had been the capital of Japan from 710 to 783, at the peak of Japan’s enthusiastic assimilation of Buddhism and of Chinese models of government. Bashô loved the fine buildings of its temples, the multiple walls of its palaces, its cherry trees. The deer in its monastery groves are still one of its pleasures today, and to the Buddhist they bring thoughts of the Deer Park near Benares in India where the Buddha preached his first sermon, advising his disciples to follow a Middle Way, neither clinging to the inconstant things of this world nor engaging in the asceticisms and self-mortifications of Hindu holy men. In Bashô’s response to the ancient trees and the gentle vegetarian animals, there was no distinction among the Buddhist, the aesthete, and the man. There is a haiku from the 1688 visit:
By what divine consideration
Is it, I wonder,
On Buddha’s birthday?
In the fall of 1688 Bashô decided to take a trip to see the full moon rise over Mount Obasute near Sarashina village. This was the mountain, he said, where in ancient times the village people used to abandon their aged mothers. The Kiso road leading to the village passed over several high mountains. The Lord Buddha had taught the inconstancy and sorrowfulness of all things; surely this frail and aging poet taking a dangerous trip to view the waxing and waning moon in a place of great beauty but fearsome associations was a worthy disciple of the Buddha.
At one point Bashô and his companions met an old priest tottering along, carrying an enormous load. “My companions sympathized with him, and taking the heavy load from the priest’s shoulders, put it together with other things they had been carrying on my horse. Consequently, I had to sit on a big pile. Above my head, mountains rose over mountains, and on my left a huge precipice dropped a thousand feet into a boiling river, leaving not a tiny square of flat land in between, so that, perched on the high saddle, I felt stricken with terror every time my horse gave a jerk.”
Finally Bashô gave up riding and walked, still frightened and staggering. “The servant, on the other hand, mounted the horse and seemed to give not even the slightest thought to danger. He often nodded in a doze and seemed about to fall headlong over the precipice. Every time I saw him drop his head, I was terrified out of my wits. Upon second thought, however, it occurred to me that every one of us was like this servant, wading through the ever-changing reefs of this world in stormy weather, totally blind to the hidden dangers, and that the Buddha surveying us from on high, would surely feel the same misgivings about our fortunes as I did about the servant.”
At Mount Obasute, Bashô wrote a poem:
A yellow valerian
With its slender stalk
Stands bedecked
In droplets of dew.
Hot radish
While the autumn wind
Pierced my heart.
Horse-chestnuts
From the mountains of Kiso
Will be my presents
To city-dwellers.
Bidding farewell,
Bidden good-bye,
I walked into
The autumn of Kiso.