The “Fireflies” (Hotaru) chapter of The Tale of Genji contains a famous discussion—the first of its kind in Japan—about the dangers and benefits of tales (monogatari). The discussion is skillfully framed within a scene of seduction. The much older Genji has designs on the young woman Tamakazura, the long-lost daughter of his former lover, Yūgao, whom he has brought to his mansion under the pretext of caring for her like his own daughter. In the scene—a damp day during the midsummer rains—Genji finds Tamakazura engrossed in reading tales, her long hair wet and in a tangle owing to her excitement and the hot, humid air. To tease her, Genji severely criticizes the fictional tales as lies (soragoto), although he admits that their verisimilitude or force of deception can be strongly moving. Genji also smilingly notices the girl’s entangled hair (kami no midaruru), an eroticized attribute usually associated with lovemaking. When Tamakazura accuses Genji of being a liar himself—she has a point, given his attempts at seduction under the pretext of fatherly care—he changes his rhetorical strategy and launches into a defense of fiction. Tales can fill in all the details (kuwashiki koto), Genji explains, that the official histories of Japan have left out. Tales can also allow an author to pass on to subsequent generations things that he or she has seen or heard about other people—things so emotionally moving that they cannot be kept shut in the author’s heart.1 Most important, tales can function like the Buddha’s expedient means (Jp. hōben, Sk. upāya), allegorical fictional parables that he tells his listeners. Although fictional untruths and delusions in themselves, these expedient stories can lead the unenlightened listener or reader, by the teaching they convey, to a realization of the Buddhist truth that is beyond the sensuous and fictional delusions of the world.2
Genji’s discourse, like Murasaki Shikibu’s tale, is unprecedented and exceptional, unparalleled by any extant contemporaneous discussions. In its ambivalence, however, it captures well some of the core ideas regarding literature and fiction that were influential in East Asia throughout the premodern period. On the one hand, it presents the negative view that literary tales are fictional and false—lies that captivate and entertain but also depict erotic desire and incite the reader to it. Tamakazura’s wet, tangled hair is no coincidence in a scene that is set during the summer rains—a seasonal motif associated with boredom but also, especially in poetry, erotic longing. Even more unmistakably, Genji closes his discourse with an invitation to Tamakazura to create together “a tale that has never been told” and to “pass it on to the world.”3 His seductive intent is loud and clear. Subtler, though, is Murasaki Shikibu’s exploration of the fine line between reality and fiction through Genji’s words and the critical, self-referential reflection of The Tale of Genji itself. Genji and Tamakazura are already part of the tale being written and passed on to the world that captivates, moves, and tangles the hair of present and future (female) readers—in other words, that seduces them as much as Genji attempts to seduce Tamakazura. Genji’s attempt at erotic seduction is an allegory of literary fiction. The Tale of Genji’s writing of love and desire involving, besides Genji and Tamakazura, innumerable other protagonists, both male and female, became the main point of criticism leveled against the tale over subsequent centuries. Especially in the early modern period, scholars and critics came to label the tale a licentious book (insho).
Genji’s defense of fiction also ties in with important paradigms in traditional fiction discourse. The idea that fiction could complement official history (seishi) by filling in the left-out details, often of a more private and sometimes erotic nature, served as a commonplace legitimation of fiction writing in China, bringing it closer to the more canonical genre of history, sanctioned by factuality and truth.4 Even more important is Genji’s emphasis on the didactic potential of literature. Genji merely alludes to the Buddhist idea of the expedient quality of fiction. But in a similar vein, later readers also saw in The Tale of Genji, from a Confucian perspective, the potential for moral instruction that could show them, for instance, what they should avoid in their own behavior: especially the licentiousness of love.5
The primary concern of my book and this chapter is not with The Tale of Genji or Heian-period (794–1192) literature but with the nineteenth century. My motivation, however, in starting with Genji’s ambivalent discourse on fiction is to point to the historical depth of the problem at stake and to the subtle connections of the Genji passage to some of the nineteenth-century writings discussed in my study. Tsubouchi Shōyō’s 1886 novel Imotose kagami (Mirror of marriage), for example, contains an important scene of reading that subtly references Genji’s “Fireflies” discussion. In Shōyō’s novel, Tamakazura is a university-educated young male hero, the book that is read is a Western novel, and Shōyō’s moralizing narrator, instead of Genji, delivers the discourse on fiction’s benefits and dangers. Yet the scene’s setting in the tedious (tsurezure naru) midsummer rainy season is similar, as is its theme: the ability of the novel, which for Shōyō must focus on love, to incite dangerous lust and the necessity to read it in the correct way, to see its didactic intent. Otherwise, Shōyō writes, “Novels [haishi] are like morphine: one must love them, but also fear them.”6 Besides The Tale of Genji and the Western novel (Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Ernest Maltravers), another important intertextual reference in Shōyō’s discussion on fiction is to the Jinpingmei, the canonical Chinese erotic novel, often decried as licentious. This brings us closer to the problem of historical layers to be explored in this chapter. The example of Shōyō’s novel, however, is a layer that looks forward to the late nineteenth century, a historical frame that the later chapters explore.
This chapter seeks to uncover historical layers by looking into the past and ultimately to reach forward to the late Edo period. The goal is to offer a new historical contextualization of the early nineteenth-century ninjōbon by outlining the literary and discursive history of ninjō that led to the view of this genre as the paradigm for the licentious novel well into the Meiji period. My objective is not so much to produce a linear history as to shed light on interlocked historical layers that informed the understanding of ninjō in the nineteenth-century Japanese novel. My discussion covers approximately three thousand years and jumps from the highbrow to the lowbrow (from the canonical and classical to the vulgar), from genre to genre (from poetry to the shōsetsu), and from China to Japan. Yet I contend that these historical layers fundamentally underlie not only the ninjōbon but also, more broadly, the narrative practices surrounding the licentiousness of ninjō discussed later in this book.
The oldest discursive layer comprises traditional discussions of Chinese poetry, especially the canonical poetry of the Shijing (Classic of Poetry), the oldest poetic anthology of China. Discourses on Shijing poetry identified emotion (Ch. qing, Jp. jō) and sometimes desire (Ch. yu, Jp. yoku) as what poetry expresses and stirs in the listener or reader, and they negotiated between the blatantly scandalous subjects of the poems—often licentious love and desire—and their purportedly moral significance in an anthology that was a venerated Confucian classic. These discourses produced the idea of literature as a type of textuality that expresses and communicates ninjō and therefore, in comparison with other types of writing (for example, history), is morally unstable—a type of writing that has didactic potential and, in the case of Shijing poetry or The Tale of Genji, can even be ascribed great high-cultural value, but that can also elicit socially destabilizing desire. I then move to the eighteenth century in Japan, which witnessed a broadening of literary discourses on ninjō from canonical Chinese poetry to lowbrow vernacular genres, including the novel. This development was closely interlocked with the new reception of Chinese vernacular fiction in Japan. Early-modern Chinese vernacular novels, especially of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, presented new ways of representing emotion and desire and their didactic significance. The little-studied Japanese reception of so-called licentious books like the Jinpingmei and chaste scholar and beauty novels is an important case in point. Whereas, in the eighteenth century, notions of the novel’s licentiousness, mediated by the reception of Chinese fiction, remained confined largely to scholarly discourse, by the nineteenth century they had come increasingly to define the broader literary imagination of popular fiction, especially in the genre of ninjōbon and the work of Kyokutei Bakin. This literary imagination, in a nutshell, pitched the representation of licentiousness against chastity. Ninjōbon often highlighted the chastity of female virtue while surrounding discourses decried them as immoral. This contradiction informed Tamenaga Shunsui’s foundational Shunshoku umegoyomi and its sequels. Shunsui’s works came to exemplify the ninjōbon genre and epitomized what readers and critics would refer to as licentious novels well into the late Meiji years.
BETWEEN MORALITY AND EXCESS: EARLY DISCOURSES ON EMOTION, DESIRE, AND LITERATURE
Since the highly influential “Great Preface” (Daxu) to the Shijing, traditional discourses in East Asia had identified “emotion” as the fundamental psychological driving force and content of poetic expression. This foundational text defined basic assumptions about the social meaning of poetry and literature throughout the premodern period in both China and Japan. The prefaces to the Kokinshū (Collection of Ancient and Modern Poems), the extremely influential early tenth-century imperially commissioned collection of waka (classical Japanese poetry), famously make reference to the “Great Preface.” The short treatise presented in condensed form the theoretical position of the so-called Mao school of Shijing interpretation, which arose in the Former Han dynasty (206 BCE–9 CE).7 This position assumes that poetry (Ch. shi, Jp. shi) is the linguistic product of a physiologically grounded emotional response to external stimuli: “The emotions are moved within and take form in words [poetry]. If words are inadequate, we speak them out in sighs. If sighing is inadequate, we sing them. If singing them is inadequate, unconsciously our hands dance and our feet tap them.”8 The compositional process of poetry is thus conceived of as natural and spontaneous, the extension of an emotional and physiological movement that, depending on its intensity, can involve the entire body.9
An important strategy of the “Great Preface” and the Mao tradition of Shijing exegesis was to define the nature of the external stimuli inducing the movement of emotion and the production of poetry—as well as the nature of poetic emotion itself—as political and moral. In this way, the erotic character of many poems in the anthology, especially in the “Airs of the States” (Guofeng) section, could be didactically redirected. For example, the famous first poem, titled “Fishhawk” (Guanju), could be read as a poem of male erotic longing for a young girl. These are the first and third stanzas:
The fishhawks sing gwan gwan
on sandbars of the stream.
Gentle maiden, pure and fair,
fit pair for a prince.…
Wanting, sought her, had her not
waking, sleeping, thought of her,
on and on he thought of her,
he tossed from one side to another.10
The Confucian tradition of the Mao commentary, however, viewed this poem as the expression of the “virtuous attainment” of the queen consort of King Wen of the Zhou dynasty (ca. 1046–256 BCE), who “delighted that pure and fair maidens had been found to be mated with the prince [King Wen].”11 The poem thus expressed the queen consort’s lack of jealousy, which in itself was seen as the result of the sage-king’s civilizing influence. In this way, the “Great Preface” saw poetry as an emotional reaction to and comment on the moral nature of political government. When stirred by good government, such as the ideal rule of King Wen (under which the older corpus of Shijing poetry was allegedly composed), human emotions and the poetry that they generated were defined as “peaceful” and “happy.” The emotions and poetry produced by morally degenerate government, however, were “bitter” and “angry.” The “Great Preface” defined the emotions expressed in Shijing poetry, whether happy or angry, as ethical and correct.12 Even the so-called mutated poetry produced under degenerate governance, after the decline of King Wen’s civilizing influence, was not seen as immoral because it was allegedly composed by virtuous officials (the “historians of the states”) lamenting the decline. The mutated poems in particular often had a strongly erotic quality.
By emphasizing the ethicality of the entire corpus of Shijing poetry, the “Great Preface” left untouched the morally problematic potential of emotion and the illicit amorousness of many poems. However, in the “Record of Music” (Yueji), a contemporary compilation with a textual and intellectual affinity to the “Great Preface,” this dimension was more explicitly explored.13 The “Record of Music” introduced the concept of desire (Ch. yu, Jp. yoku), which was more strongly immoral in comparison with emotion but also similar in being receptive to exterior stimuli—objects inciting desire—that could generate inner movement and outward expression. One prominent concern of the “Record of Music” was how to regulate desire, which, if uncontrolled, could have the power to lead human nature (Ch. xing, Jp. sei), defined as innately moral, to “depraved excess and turmoil.” Important means to give “proper measure” to destructive desire were music and ritual. The “Record” did not discuss poetry, but its philosophical model was very close to that of the “Great Preface.” Although the latter posited Shijing poetry as inherently ethical, poetry was also seen as the result of inner stirrings provoked by external stimuli and thus had, like the emotions it expressed, an implicit affinity to the power of desire. Yet unlike emotion, desire could never be the expression of moral feelings. It was seen as the result of strong physiological urges, including sexual ones.14
Neither the “Record of Music” nor the “Great Preface,” however, explicitly defined key terms such as emotion, desire, or human nature or discussed how they would relate to one another.15 These terms remained relatively unsystematized in early philosophical discourse but were brought together in a more coherent and unified model in the Song period (960–1276), in particular by Zhu Xi’s (1130–1200) neo-Confucian philosophical system. Zhu Xi was also the first to comment on the ethically ambiguous nature of poetry, especially in connection to its expression of emotion and desire.
Although it is impossible here to provide a comprehensive overview of Zhu Xi’s philosophical model, a short discussion of some essential tenets is necessary given the tremendous impact that neo-Confucian notions exerted on discourses of literature, including narrative fiction, in early-modern Japan.16 Zhu Xi distinguishes between two fundamental states of the human mind: an original state of perfect tranquility and moral goodness that is the state of inborn human nature conforming to the cosmic moral order, or heavenly principle (Ch. tianli, Jp. tenri); and the state of the movement (Ch. dong, Jp. dō) of emotions and desires that are stirred by external stimuli and disrupt the tranquility of the mind, thus removing it from the absolute moral goodness of heavenly principle. Zhu Xi notes,
Nature [xing] is the state before activity begins, the feelings [qing] are the state when activity has started, and the mind [Ch. xin, Jp. shin] includes both of these states. For nature is the mind before it is aroused, while feelings are the mind after it is aroused.… Desire [yu] emanates from feelings. The mind is comparable to water, nature is comparable to the tranquility of still water, feeling is comparable to the flow of water, and desire is comparable to its waves. Just as there are good and bad waves, so there are good desires, such as when “I want humanity” [a reference to Confucius’ Analects (Lunyu)] and bad desires which rush out like wild and violent waves.17 When bad desires are substantial, they will destroy the Principle of Heaven, as water bursts a dam and damages everything.18
Both emotions and desires could be good, as when Confucius presents the urge to enact virtues like humanity or benevolence (Ch. ren, Jp. jin) as a desire; they could also be bad if directed at less-noble objects—good food, luxurious clothes, or sex. Zhu Xi situates the origin of and possibility for moral evil in the movement of emotions and desires, which is the realm of material force or vital energy (Ch. qi, Jp. ki), the antipode of the good and calm heavenly principle, and is stirred by external stimuli. Martin Huang, who quotes and discusses the preceding passage, notes that Zhu Xi implies a “subtle hierarchical pattern of moral valorization” in his juxtaposition of human nature, emotion, and desire through the water metaphor.19 While the mind, when in the state of its morally good inborn nature, is like still water, the movement of its emotions is like flowing water, and its desires are likened to violent waves. Although both emotions and desires produce movement, which can be the potential origin of evil, the movement induced by desires is stronger and more dangerous than the one produced by emotions. At the same time, emotions and desires form a continuum that stretches to the “good” tranquility of human nature. To make them good by harmonizing them with heavenly principle was precisely the goal of neo-Confucian self-cultivation.
This model, even if not necessarily on a theoretically explicit level, formed the discursive backdrop for cultural assumptions about emotion and desire in premodern East Asia and, more specifically, in early-modern and even Meiji-period Japanese literary texts. More directly, it also informed Zhu Xi’s thinking about Shijing poetry. In the preface to his Shijing commentary, which draws on both the “Great Preface” and the “Record of Music,” Zhu Xi defined human desire, stirred by external things, as the origin of poetic expression.20 Poetry was the expression of the movement of emotion or desire, and it could be either good or bad. It could either conform to the Confucian Way or be removed from it, depending on the ethical quality of the emotion or the desire from which it originated. Nakamura Yukihiko has categorized the various approaches toward literary writing that Zhu Xi’s model could generate in the early Edo period, the historical moment when neo-Confucianism became prevalent as an intellectual discourse in Japan. Given the ethically ambiguous nature of poetry, neo-Confucian discourses spanned a seemingly contradictory spectrum of positions, ranging from the total rejection of poetic writing as useless and harmful to the view that poetry could serve as a medium to “transmit the Way” (saidō) if expressing good desires. The third possible and very influential view was that poetry could provide examples for good behavior to emulate and bad behavior to avoid—in other words, “promote virtue and chastise vice” (kanzen chōaku).21
The contradictory range of these positions demarcated the most basic assumptions about literary discourse, the long-lasting cultural anxieties about, but also the attempts to find social value in, poetic expression and literary writing, including, later, narrative fiction. On the one hand, literary writing—both poetry and fiction—could be condemned as a medium “teaching licentiousness and inciting to desire” (kaiin dōyoku), the often repeated formula about the danger of literary activity and consumption.22 On the other hand, the didactic function of literature, for instance in “promoting virtue and chastising vice,” always provided a means to legitimate its pursuit. These neo-Confucian views, often as popularized common sense, also complemented medieval Buddhist notions that were equally ambiguous. As Genji’s discourse demonstrated, literature could be far removed from truth (enlightenment) by constituting a fictional lie, presenting delusions related to the phenomenal world that Buddhist doctrine thought to be grounded in desire; but it could also lead to truth as an “expedient means.” In all these discourses, desire—particularly erotic desire—constituted the ethically problematic backdrop of literary writing in need of didactic containment.
BRANCHING OUT TO NEW GENRES: LITERATURE AND EMOTION IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of a new type of literary discourse in Japan that marked a departure from the neo-Confucian views prevalent in the earlier Edo period by stressing the intrinsic value of ninjō in poetic writing, regardless of the ethical or unethical character of a specific poem or literary text. As Peter Flueckiger has argued, though, the new valorization of ninjō in the writings of eighteenth-century Confucian thinkers such as Itō Jinsai (1627–1705) and Ogyū Sorai, or in the nativist (kokugaku) writings of Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), had an essentially social and political motivation. For these writers, poetry and literary writing, by virtue of their emotional expressivity, could provide knowledge about the experience of other human beings and thus teach empathy, a quality of utmost importance for social cohesion and the political government of the state. Ogyū Sorai argued that poetry could aid a ruler in knowing the emotions of his subjects and thus contribute to benevolent government, which again implied a more efficient regulation and control of these emotions. Eighteenth-century discussions thus focused less than prior neo-Confucian discourses on the moral dangers of emotion and literary writing, but they still emphasized the ethical role of poetry in bringing about social cohesion and control.
Concurrently, the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed a new valorization, within intellectual debates, of popular culture and vernacular literature, including theater and narrative fiction, as a unique repository of ninjō. Most previous discourse had been concerned mainly with the interpretation and status of classical poetry, particularly of the Shijing. As a Confucian classic, the latter enjoyed a high degree of orthodox canonicity that was also not entirely undisputed, given the morally unstable character of its poems.23 In the eighteenth century, however, literary debates in Japan opened up to new genres and texts by integrating them into a discursive context and critical vocabulary that had previously been reserved for Shijing poetry.
One important new textual domain was the field of Genji criticism, revived in the context of Confucian discourse beginning in the late seventeenth century. Although less canonical than Shijing poetry, The Tale of Genji held a comparably ambiguous moral position as a literary classic. Highly valued for its literary quality and as a repository of the cultural ideals of the Heian court, The Tale of Genji was also morally problematic for the many illicit love affairs that it depicted, including Genji’s infamous adulterous incursion (mono no magire) into the imperial bloodline. Intellectual discussions of the mid-Edo period aimed at rehabilitating the tale with discursive strategies derived from Shijing exegesis. Kumazawa Banzan’s (1619–1691) Genji gaiden (Discursive Commentary on Genji, ca. 1673), for example, described Murasaki Shikibu’s classic as a window onto the idealized past of the Heian court, in which Confucian ritual, music, and literature prevailed, as in the Shijing poetry allegedly produced under King Wen’s civilizing influence. Banzan also argued that the tale provides the reader with knowledge about ninjō, good and bad, and thus aids the “Way of Government.”24 Andō Tameakira’s (1659–1716) early eighteenth-century treatise on The Tale of Genji, moreover, argued that the human emotions and social customs (ninjō setai) depicted in it could serve as moral instruction (fūyu):
This tale portrays human emotions and social customs, depicting the manners and mores of the upper, middle, and lower levels of society. Without openly expressing either praise or blame, it allows readers, through the medium of the amours it depicts, to discern for themselves what is good and what is evil. Although the principal aim of the tale is said to be the moral instruction of women, it also contains much that serves naturally to admonish men.25
Andō subsequently qualifies the moral teaching that the reader can gain from the representation of human emotion and social customs in the tale as kanzen chōaku.26
Subsequent eighteenth-century kokugaku scholars and especially Motoori Norinaga denounced, in line with their nativist critique of Chinese philosophical influences, Buddhist and Confucian interpretations that had decried the scandalous licentiousness of the tale while emphasizing its didactic potential. Norinaga argued that illicit love was the necessary “fertilizer” (ryō) for the valued poetic sensibility of The Tale of Genji and classical waka poetry to develop, thus likening this sensibility to the beautiful lotus flower, which relies on mud, an allegory for licentious love, to grow.27 Norinaga’s emphasis on love (koi) as an indispensable and valuable component of The Tale of Genji opened up new discursive terrain. One of the significant innovations of Norinaga’s discourse was the semantic reduction of the spectrum of ninjō to love—an outcome of his scholarly engagement with classical waka, where love was, besides the four seasons, the most important topic of poetic composition. Whereas previous Confucian discussions had only implicitly referred to ninjō as love, Norinaga made this connection explicit and also defended illicit love as valuable even if morally problematic. His goal, however, was not to liberate literature and love from Confucian morality. On the contrary, his views displayed a strong affinity with contemporary Confucian discussions, especially of the Jinsai and Sorai schools, which equally aimed at the normative construction of social and political community. Norinaga promoted a type of Japanese protonational community, held together by the ability of “knowing the pathos of things” (mono no aware o shiru)—a deep sensitivity and empathy for others that the emotions expressed in The Tale of Genji and in classical waka, even if immoral from a Confucian viewpoint, could purportedly teach.28
The various positions of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Genji criticism did not all belong to the same intellectual context. Indeed, Andō Tameakira’s neo-Confucian kanzen chōaku apology for the tale was different from Norinaga’s emphasis on empathy and the intrinsic value of love, which more closely fit the intellectual climate of eighteenth-century Japan. Yet the possibility of discussing The Tale of Genji in terms previously reserved for the canonical Shijing or Sinitic poetry points to a new intellectual and discursive environment that broadened the scope of literature—and its discourse about ninjō—to new genres and texts.29
The most important intellectual center from the late seventeenth well into the eighteenth century that promoted a broader array of genres and cultural practices was the Kogidō (Hall of Ancient Meanings) Academy, founded in Kyoto by Itō Jinsai in 1662. Jinsai and his son Tōgai (1670–1736), an eminent scholar himself who followed his father in leading the academy, attracted more than three thousand students from various social backgrounds, including the merchant and samurai classes. Jinsai, who was from the merchant class, was the first scholar to radically push away from the orthodoxy of neo-Confucian discourse through his “emphasis on emotionality and on practical ethics cultivated by ordinary people in their everyday lives.”30 For Jinsai, literature like Shijing poetry had value insofar as it could teach the emotions of others, regardless of a person’s class background, and thus ensure more empathetic and “considerate” social interactions in an everyday context.31 A key word in his discourse was zoku—the common, everyday, or vulgar—and he famously stated, “Shijing poetry takes the common as good. The reason why the three hundred poems [the Shijing] are a Classic is because they are of the common.”32 The everyday life of the common people thus formed a repository of ninjō, and literature “of the common,” for Jinsai, was the best medium to allow insight into it. This stance naturally opened up the range of genres able to provide such insight. Indeed, in his Dōjimon (Questions from children, 1707), a collection of essays on various topics, Jinsai encourages the reading of unofficial histories and novels (yashi haisetsu) as well as songs and dramas (shikyoku zatsugeki)—genres that had been seen as much more vulgar and socially lowbrow than The Tale of Genji, not to mention the Shijing.33 Jinsai’s insight was that all these genres, as literature, could provide knowledge of ninjō and thus have high moral value even though they did not explicitly discuss morality as did canonical Confucian texts.
The discourse about ninjō in the Kogidō Academy brought new attention to and influenced Japanese vernacular genres. Nakamura Yukihiko has pointed to Itō Baiu’s (1683–1745) positive evaluation of Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693) as an author of narrative fiction “knowledgeable about human emotion” (ninjō ni satoku).34 Baiu was another of Jinsai’s sons. The most remarkable cross-fertilization, however, took place with Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s (1653–1724) contemporary puppet (jōruri) theater. One important source is Hozumi Ikan’s (1692–1769) preface to Naniwa miyage (Souvenirs of Naniwa, 1738), a commentary on Chikamatsu’s puppet plays that is thought to overlap with Chikamatsu’s own views on jōruri performance. Ikan for the first time discusses the puppet theater as a genre expressing ninjō. He argues that since jōruri relies on the performance of lifeless puppets, as opposed to the live play of human actors in kabuki, the playwright needs to make a particular effort to bring out the emotions of his figures and move the spectator. The words spoken by a puppet performing a woman, Ikan explains, should openly state the true emotions (jitsujō) of that woman even if, in real life, a woman would not openly utter her feelings for reasons of propriety. Jōruri in this way has to rely on artifice (gei), as opposed to the mimetic depiction of reality “as it is,” in order to express true emotion and affectively reach the viewer.35 Ikan was a Confucian scholar who had studied under Jinsai’s son Tōgai at the Kogidō Academy. That the lowbrow genre of the puppet theater could catch Ikan’s interest and be subjected to such a discourse on ninjō was a direct outcome of Jinsai’s philosophical views.36
A brief word about Chikamatsu’s own famous dramatization of ninjō versus giri (obligation or duty) is in order here. Chikamatsu’s love suicide sewamono (contemporary life) plays memorably staged the ambivalence of ninjō. Works like Shinjū ten no Amijima (The Love Suicides at Amijima, 1721) emphasized, like Jinsai’s philosophical writings, the profound ethicality of ninjō as empathy rooted in the awareness of the suffering of others—a quality that became especially associated with women. Note, for example, the strong mutual compassion (nasake) of the two women Koharu and Osan in the play, who should, by virtue of being, respectively, the lover and the wife of the same man, be the worst competitors. This empathy translates into the strongly ethical acts of these women supporting each other while suppressing their personal and less-noble emotions: jealousy (in Osan’s case) and sexual love (in Koharu’s). Ninjō and giri are not opposed here but similar in function. Through the mediation of empathy, emotion and ethicality essentially converge, thus conforming to Jinsai’s ideas about the moral role of ninjō in everyday social life.37 However, Chikamatsu also dramatizes ninjō as an excessive passion that defies Confucian social norms and finds gratification only in the act of double suicide (shinjū), the ultimate defiance of the social order. In The Love Suicides at Amijima, it is the male protagonist—the papermaker Jihei—who gives up not only his (Confucian) responsibility as a husband and father but also his socioeconomic position as an artisan for a passion that breaks moral duty (giri). As we shall see, the ambivalence in the representation of ninjō, doubled by the gender divide, anticipates the early nineteenth-century popular fiction of Tamenaga Shunsui’s ninjōbon.
Most important, though, the Kogidō Academy and the broader intellectual network it formed was a, if not the, major venue through which Chinese vernacular fiction and fiction discourse were disseminated in eighteenth-century Japan. In the context of this reception, the shōsetsu, as a popular literary form, was increasingly discussed as a genre relating to ninjō. From Kumazawa Banzan’s and Andō Tameakira’s remarks on The Tale of Genji to countless prefaces and treatises in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel was seen as representing ninjō, often in conjunction with setai (social customs), “as it is” (ari no mama). Ninjō and setai were mutually inclusive terms, indicating that emotion was conceptualized in connection to ideas of community and social norms. Banzan, for instance, notes that the depiction of ninjō in The Tale of Genji can teach about the importance of the five cardinal Confucian relationships as well as “good” and “bad” emotions in the vein of the Mao tradition of Shijing exegesis.38 Even Norinaga writes that the knowledge about ninjō and setai that The Tale of Genji imparts is about “good” and “bad” deeds and people, about “everything there is in the world and in the depths of people’s hearts”—knowledge intricately related to his vision of social community.39 Once again, these discourses on ninjō and setai brought The Tale of Genji and the shōsetsu into the domain of literature and its more highbrow moral-didactic aims, previously reserved for Sinitic poetry or, more narrowly, the Shijing. The term shōsetsu emerged in Japan only in the eighteenth century in reference to Ming- and Qing-period vernacular works as well as their subsequent Japanese translations and adaptations—that is, yomihon. The vernacular Chinese novel, however, already possessed its own complex strategies of representing emotion and desire. To gauge these, a short detour via the world of late imperial Chinese fiction and its “cult of qing” is necessary because of the impact this world had on nineteenth-century Japanese literary texts and their narrative practices of ninjō.
THE CULT OF QING AND THE JAPANESE RECEPTION OF LICENTIOUS BOOKS
The “cult of qing” is a term coined by literary scholars and cultural historians of late Ming-period China to refer to a number of intellectual debates and literary works in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.40 These debates and texts aimed at the rehabilitation and revalorization of emotion (qing), and to a lesser extent desire (yu), against the dominant neo-Confucian discourse characterized by a strong suspicion, if not outright rejection, of both. The intellectual ancestor of this new tendency in Ming discourse was Wang Yangming’s (1472–1529) school of Confucianism, also influential in Japan beginning in the early Edo period. While the concept of qing in earlier Chinese discourses was used broadly and often did not refer to any specific emotion, late Ming-period discussions reduced the semantic range of qing to mean primarily the love and desire between a man and a woman, or husband and wife.41 In this respect, what is called the cult of qing was more narrowly a cult of love.42 Some late-Ming discourses, moreover, radically repositioned qing as the center and origin of all Confucian virtue. Whereas the husband and wife relationship had been seen as rather minor or, even worse, ethically suspicious in comparison with the traditionally more validated relationships between lord and minister or father and son, late-Ming commentators provocatively elevated it to the first place in the hierarchy of the Confucian cardinal relationships.43 Their reason was the putative emotional intensity inherent in the matrimonial bond that surpassed the affective bonds of all other relationships. The scholar Li Zhi (1527–1602), for instance, claimed, “Husband and wife comprise the beginnings of human life. Only after there has been a husband-wife relation can there be a father-son relation … can there be a distinction between superior and subordinate. Should the relationship between husband and wife be proper, then all the relations among the myriads of living things and nonliving matters will also be proper. Thus it is evident that husband-wife is actually the beginning of all things.”44 Haiyan Lee, who discusses this passage and similar pronouncements by late-Ming literati, emphasizes the potentially iconoclastic radicalness of the cult of qing as a “counterdiscourse that valorizes the personal and the subjective.” But she also argues that these new discourses eulogizing qing as a source of virtue and pillar of the social order were still essentially Confucian—hence her term Confucian structure of feeling.45
A limitation of Lee’s term, however, is that it does not take into account the strong interest that some late-Ming intellectual debates and, especially, literary works invested in sexual love and desire precisely for their potential to undermine the Confucian moral order. As Martin Huang and other scholars have shown, works of literature, particularly vernacular theater and narrative fiction, started to explore to an unprecedented degree the various and sometimes contradictory implications of amorous emotion and desire. While qing, as Li Zhi claims, could be profoundly ethical and underlie all virtue, it could also be transgressive, radical, and sexual to the extent of undermining the social order. This reiterated the old neo-Confucian fear of emotion and desire, but a new body of late-Ming literary texts, often commercially published, explored this potentially rich literary topic—rich in ambiguities—for the sake of entertainment but also didactic moralism. Scholars have often singled out Tang Xianzu’s (1550–1616) drama The Peony Pavilion (Mudanting) as an epoch-making work in China, depicting the transcendent power of sexual passion in overcoming the boundaries of life and death and in challenging social norms. The work had a tremendous success among contemporary and later readers in China, and it was cherished and commented on by men and women alike.46 However, despite its tremendous importance in the Chinese context, it had (to my knowledge) no significant reception in early-modern Japan. This indeed exemplifies William Fleming’s important observations about the lack or very limited path of dissemination that specific Chinese works, even if famous in China, would take in Edo-period Japan.47
The most radical late-Ming literary work in its depiction of erotic desire, with a strong and long-lasting impact in both China and Japan, was the novel Jinpingmei. Martin Huang has argued that this novel, depicting the private life and sexual escapades of the profligate male protagonist, Ximen Qing, in great graphic detail, constituted a turning point in the history of Chinese narrative. Among the traditional “four masterworks” of the Ming novel—The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Water Margin, The Journey to the West (Xiyouji), and the Jinpingmei—this last was written the latest (sometime in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century) and marked an important shift in narrative focus that can, very broadly, be described as one from the public to the private.48 While The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and The Water Margin focused predominantly on the world of the battlefield and the male homosocial and at times misogynistic bonds that undergirded it, the Jinpingmei for the first time shifted toward other, more private spaces of narrative—the bedchamber and the garden—and the male-female relationships that could fill them. This shift was foundational for the subsequent development of the vernacular novel that, from overtly erotic works to the chaste scholar and beauty fiction of the early Qing period and even extending to the eighteenth-century masterwork Hongloumeng (The Dream of the Red Chamber), continuously displayed a strong intertextual awareness of the Jinpingmei and its writing of desire.49
The Jinpingmei is a fundamentally ambiguous work that openly relishes the depiction of private desire—the sexual escapades of the male protagonist within and outside marriage—but also presents a starkly didactic framework that negatively judges such excesses. The male hero, Ximen Qing, dies a gruesome death resulting from his sexual overindulgence, and his once-prosperous household collapses. Huang notes that the ambiguous balance between transgression and punishment in the Jinpingmei became one of the most controversially discussed issues among subsequent readers and writers. Narrative fiction thus assumed its peculiar position as a “didactic genre that paradoxically focuses on transgression with the double aim of entertaining and educating.”50 Didacticism and transgressive licentiousness—these were the two contradictory pillars with which much of subsequent fiction and fiction discourse were concerned, reaffirming both the instructive and dangerous potential that neo-Confucian morality saw in the literary representation of emotions and desire. Subsequent literary works and genres negotiated the tension between the two pillars in various ways.
A case in point was the new early Qing-period genre of scholar and beauty fiction, which became popular in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japan through various adaptations. Although stories of love between women and men of literary talent are extant from the Tang dynasty (618–907) and even earlier, the genre of scholar and beauty fiction per se emerged only in the seventeenth century, after the Jinpingmei, with distinct generic characteristics.51 The most significant is the obsessive concern with the virtue of chastity—the explicit attempt to desexualize qing and keep it in line with Confucian propriety. The novels usually end happily with the talented man’s success in the imperial examinations and the lovers’ marriage after overcoming various difficulties, but the protagonists’ conscious rejection of erotic opportunities, often in spite of their desire, and their virginity at the moment of marriage constitute an important narrative concern, sometimes even involving devices like virginity tests. In the seventeenth-century novel Haoqiuzhuan (The Fortunate Union), a major text of the genre with a nineteenth-century Japanese adaptation by Bakin, the male and female protagonists remain chaste even after their marriage to demonstrate the Confucian propriety of their relationship in the face of various suspicions, an important motor of the novel’s plot.52 This excessive anxiety about chastity of course betrays an inverted obsession with sexuality and points to the genre’s intertextual awareness of more openly erotic works such as the Jinpingmei.
I have discussed the cult of qing and specific Chinese works at some length to shed light on an understudied topic: the reception of the “cult” and of works like the Jinpingmei and scholar and beauty fiction in Japan as well as their impact on narrative practices of ninjō in Japanese texts. I do not believe that the discourses referred to as cult of qing—for instance, Li Zhi’s remarks—had a considerable impact on literary developments in Japan. There was certainly no “cult of jō” in Edo-period culture in any way comparable to the phenomenon in the late Ming. It is true that ninjō was greatly validated in the eighteenth-century Confucian discourses of Itō Jinsai and Ogyū Sorai, who shared with the Chinese advocates of qing an intellectual affiliation with the anti–neo-Confucian criticism of the Wang Yangming school. Moreover, the simultaneous rise of intellectual interest in emotionality in both China and Japan with their world-historically and socioeconomically comparable contexts of early modernity—the Ming-Qing cultural efflorescence of the Jiangnan region (the breeding ground of the cult of qing) and eighteenth-century urban Japan—is certainly not a coincidence. An important difference from the Chinese cult, however, is that Jinsai’s and Sorai’s (and their schools’) discourses on ninjō were not specifically on love. Although amorous emotion and desire constituted, as we saw, an important semantic subtext of ninjō in these discourses, they did not explicitly reduce the term to love. Norinaga’s emphasis on love as the “deepest” emotion in classical literature echoes the Chinese discourse.53 Yet his interest derived from research in the Japanese classics and waka poetry rather than from the discussions on qing in late imperial China.
However, Chinese novels like the Jinpingmei and early Qing-period scholar and beauty fiction were received in Japan. Jonathan Zwicker, relying on Ōba Osamu’s foundational research, has emphasized the extent to which scholar and beauty fiction in particular was continuously imported in relatively high numbers throughout the eighteenth century—a fact confirmed by Bakin for the first half of the nineteenth century.54 As Zwicker shows, scholar and beauty fiction clearly topped, by the numbers of imported books, the otherwise popular genres of historical fiction and military romance novels. Unlike for the other Ming-period “masterworks,” no Japanese translation or adaptation of the Jinpingmei was produced until Bakin’s successful gōkan version, titled Shinpen Kinpeibai (The Plum in the Golden Vase newly edited), was serialized between 1831 and 1847. This seeming lack of reception was a result of the Jinpingmei’s particular linguistic difficulty as a vernacular text.55 However, beginning shortly after its publication in China, the Jinpingmei was continuously circulated in Japan and became, like other Chinese novels, the academic object of vernacular-Chinese studies (tōwagaku), especially in the eighteenth century. Specific passages were quoted in various dictionaries and a glossary of its vocabulary was privately compiled.56
We can gain an idea of how contemporary Japanese readers, aficionados of vernacular Chinese fiction, approached those texts from a limited number of critical pronouncements. One interesting source is a manuscript written by Katsube Seigyo (1712–1788), a doctor, Confucian scholar, and haikai (comic linked verse) poet from Nishinomiya in western Japan. Seigyo’s teacher in Confucianism, the famous Uno Meika (1698–1745), had studied at Ogyū Sorai’s Ken’en Academy in Edo, which, together with Jinsai’s Kogidō, was one of the most important centers advocating vernacular-Chinese learning and the reading of Chinese fiction in eighteenth-century Japan. Seigyo writes,
It is difficult to depict true emotions [jitsujō] in elegant language. For waka poetry, it seems difficult to express everyday content as haikai can do; and when a waka poem accomplishes this, it is exceptionally good. But the vernacular novels [zokugo shōsetsu] in China represent emotions in minute detail.
The Tale of Genji and The Tales of Ise are licentious books [insho], but since they are written in elegant language, they depict emotions less well than the books of the puppet theater or hachimonjiya books.57 Because licentious books in Japan are written with literary flourish, they contain many lies.… The licentious books of China, however, depict things as they are. In the Jinpingmei, … the wanton women are all evil, and the men who are liked by women are all evil as well. This is different from the books in Japan. In the end, [these evil figures] are killed, and the principle of promoting virtue and chastising vice is truly effective. Chen Jingji [in the Jinpingmei] is an attractive young man, and although twice reduced to being a beggar, owing to his attractiveness he is helped by women and can redress himself; however, in the end he is killed. [The adulteress] Pan Jinlian is killed by Wu Song as in The Water Margin. The Carnal Prayer Mat [Rouputuan, 1657] is full of lasciviousness and indecent women, but in the end, [the protagonist] becomes a Zen monk. The Salacious History of Emperor Yang [Yangdi yanshi, 1631] abounds in cruelty and is unbearable throughout.58 [The scholar and beauty novels] Ping, Shan, Leng, and Yan [Pingshanlengyan, 1680] and Yu, Jiao, and Li [Yujiaoli, ca. 1660] are also licentious books, but since they do not depict coarse things and do not contain sexually explicit details [un’u no jō], parents and their children can read them.59 [In these novels,] men and women long for one another, but the women are chaste, and the men are talented scholars who become officials. This resembles The Tale of Genji. [These novels] are rather shallow in [illustrating] the principle of promoting virtue and chastising vice.60
Seigyo’s remarks are noteworthy in several respects. First, they offer a glimpse of the contemporary Japanese reception of a number of Chinese vernacular novels that Seigyo labels as licentious, beyond the mainstream generally discussed as most popular in the Edo period—most importantly The Water Margin, certainly the most studied and commented on Chinese novel in Japan in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Seigyo discusses various literary genres—Japanese poetry, the vernacular Chinese novel, the puppet theater, and literary classics like The Tale of Genji—in terms of their ability to express emotions; and in line with Jinsai’s teaching, he particularly sees popular (zoku) genres like haikai poetry (as opposed to classical waka) and the vernacular novel (as opposed to The Tale of Genji or The Tales of Ise) as fit to do so. But most interesting in Seigyo’s discourse is his category of “licentious books”—obviously books about love, including the Heian-period literary classics as well as erotic Chinese novels (the Jinpingmei, the Rouputuan, etc.) and chaste scholar and beauty works. He juxtaposes, under the generic label of shōsetsu, The Tale of Genji with vernacular Chinese novels, showcasing the beginning of a discursive trend that would last well into the late Edo period.61 But particularly noteworthy is the ambivalence in Seigyo’s treatment of these writings. Although seeing them as morally reprehensible and labeling them licentious, he still finds value in them, for their ability to express emotion “as it is” but also for their didacticism. The Jinpingmei punishes all its wanton protagonists, both male and female, and thus illustrates the “principle” of kanzen chōaku. It does so even more successfully than the chaste scholar and beauty novels, where this principle, in Seigyo’s view, remains shallow.
William Hedberg has discussed the institutionally and socially ambiguous position of vernacular-Chinese studies in eighteenth-century Japan. Although connected to the venerated tradition of classical sinological (kangaku) scholarship with its highbrow ethical and political ambitions and thus enjoying a social prestige it did not have in China, the discipline, in comparison with classical scholarship, was marginalized as it partook of the “heterodox, plebeian, and the morally dubious.”62 The Water Margin, undoubtedly the vernacular novel most venerated in Japan, was indeed a morally problematic text that glorified outcasts and bandits, giving headaches to early-modern Japanese readers and critics. Bakin, most notably, attempted to correct its moral shortcomings by writing Hakkenden.63 When labeled as licentious, however, the position of the vernacular novel became even more problematic. With Seigyo’s remarks, the discourse on vernacular fiction in Japan rejoined broader and more traditional anxieties about literature, like Shijing poetry or The Tale of Genji, as writing that could incite desire. Whereas in the eighteenth century the notion of licentious books remained largely a matter of scholarly discourse, after the turn of the century it came to permeate the Japanese literary imagination more broadly. A significant awareness of Chinese works like the Jinpingmei and scholar and beauty fiction as the material for adaptations and literary rewritings emerged only in the early nineteenth century to fundamentally shape the narrative practices of ninjō in the Japanese novel. This new tendency was most notable in the genre called ninjōbon and also in the yomihon by Bakin. Faithful virtue and licentious vice, chastity and sexuality, transgression and didacticism—these entangled and antagonistic concerns became major themes of the Japanese novel. I examine Bakin’s work in the next chapter; the following discussion surveys the emergence of the ninjōbon and what I call ninjōbon discourse.
LICENTIOUS BOOKS: THE EMERGENCE OF NINJŌBON AND NINJŌBON DISCOURSE
Literary histories generally describe the moment around 1800 as comprising a series of interlocked paradigmatic shifts: the emergence of Edo as dominating cultural and literary capital superseding in dynamism the Kansai region, particularly the cities of Kyoto and Osaka, as the country’s traditional cultural center; the transformation of gesaku (playful writing), formerly the leisurely pursuit of a relatively circumscribed group of scholars and literati, into a commodified mass-produced and mass-circulated popular literature; the growth in literacy and the emergence of a broad group of sufficiently educated readers of both genders in the big cities and the countryside; and the aesthetic shift, partly brought about by the censorship of the Kansei-era (1789–1801) reforms, from a literature of wit, parody, and satire (often focused on the pleasure quarter) to the darker, more violent, and more moralistic “worlds” of the new early nineteenth-century genres of the Edo-based gōkan and yomihon. Indeed, this period witnessed the transformation of the shōsetsu, or yomihon, into a distinct genre that focused primarily on martial themes and adopted the format of the long Chinese historical novels such as The Water Margin.
The moment around 1800 also witnessed, particularly within the yomihon genre, another important shift pertaining to the representation of ninjō. In eighteenth-century yomihon, the works of Tsuga Teishō (b. 1718), Ueda Akinari (1734–1809), or Morishima Chūryō (1756–1810), emotions, desire, and sexuality were important themes, often explored through the adaptation of Chinese stories of the supernatural. In these texts—stories like the “Reed-Choked House” (Asaji ga yado) or “The Chrysanthemum Vow” (Kikka no chigiri) in Akinari’s famous collection Ugetsu monogatari (Tales of Moonlight and Rain, 1768)—emotions and desire are dramatized as a strong force that can transcend life and death as well as materialize in dreams and supernatural apparitions (ghosts). These texts, replete with references to both the classical Chinese and Japanese traditions, were aestheticized literati (bunjin) fantasies. The didactic message, although not absent, is often complex and ambiguous.64 Emotion and desire, in order to materialize as supernatural apparition, are necessarily excessive and can lead to death, through the embrace, for instance, of a beautifully deceptive ghost that in truth is a skeleton exuding lethal energy.65 But desire as materialized in ghostly form can also serve ethical ends, like the fulfillment of a vow made to a friend in “The Chrysanthemum Vow”—a story that, however, also ambiguously points to the excess of male-male erotic longing. In such a fashion, the early yomihon, as adaptations of Chinese literary sources, translate some of the anxieties and glories attributed to the power of qing in late imperial Chinese discourses.66
This schematic summary here of an otherwise complex genre serves primarily to emphasize a difference: the shift toward the new, more dominant regime of the representation of ninjō in the early nineteenth century. This shift is toward what I call, in the broadest sense, the scholar and beauty paradigm—a new interest in plots dramatizing the chastity, faithfulness, and sincerity, often against adverse circumstances, of morally exemplary male and female protagonists in love (the moral focus tends to be, although not exclusively, on women). This interest necessarily includes, as its flip side, a fascination with desire, evil depravation, and licentiousness. The morality and didactic message inherent in these plots are often simpler and less ambiguous than in the early yomihon and fit the aesthetic format of the more popular mass-produced literature of the early nineteenth century. Kanzen chōaku is a key term in the didactic discourse surrounding this type of fiction. The scholar and beauty paradigm shaped the genres that became essential for the definition of the novel in a longer nineteenth-century perspective: Tamenaga Shunsui’s ninjōbon that came to maturity in the 1830s and particularly Bakin’s yomihon. I use the term “scholar and beauty paradigm” rather loosely here to indicate the concern with ethically exemplary chastity and faithfulness—or, on the contrary, licentious desire—that these nineteenth-century Japanese genres shared with the Chinese genre. Although some yomihon by Bakin were indeed adaptations of specific Chinese scholar and beauty works, most ninjōbon were not because the literacy of their authors, including Shunsui, was too low. However, a broader infiltration of scholar and beauty plots—through adaptations and a more general genre consciousness produced in this process—shaped the emergence of the ninjōbon and, more broadly, the nineteenth-century aesthetic of representing ninjō.
The ninjōbon became firmly established as a genre with the publication of Shunsui’s extremely popular Shunshoku (Spring colors) series from 1832 to 1841 and, in particular, the series’ first canonical work, Shunshoku umegoyomi, published in four installments in 1832–1833.67 This series merits attention as it was seen, from the beginning, as paradigmatic for the ninjōbon genre, which continued to thrive well into the early Meiji years. Shunsui indeed repeatedly labeled himself the “ancestor of the ninjōbon authors.”68 But his ninjōbon also marked the culmination of prior literary developments that underline the genre’s affiliation, even if indirect, with Chinese vernacular fiction and the genealogy of the shōsetsu (or yomihon) in Japan. In a seminal essay on the ninjōbon’s genesis, Nakamura Yukihiko has demonstrated their generic connection to the yomihon and its themes.69 He argues that the ninjōbon originally emerged out of a variety of the yomihon, the so-called chūhon (middle-sized book)—a publication format that was smaller than the yomihon’s usual hanshibon (folded book) format but also bigger than the sharebon’s (books of wit) kohon (small book) format. Nakamura’s argument was important because it corrected the previous view that the ninjōbon had simply grown out of the sharebon, a genre that introduced the art of buying courtesans in the pleasure quarter through humorous dialogic scenes but was mostly devoid of plot. The middle-sized books, however, combined the focus on courtesans with sentimental—sometimes melodramatic—plots that stressed (female) virtues such as chastity and faithfulness and derived from various sources, including Chinese scholar and beauty fiction and the theater. While middle-sized books, Nakamura argues, were a hybrid genre accommodating a variety of topics that could not be integrated in other, more established formats, beginning in the late Kansei years (after 1800) works focusing on male-female love (involving mostly courtesans) came to dominate—works penned by authors, to name only the more famous, such as Umebori Kokuga (1750–1821), Hanasanjin (1791–1858), and Shunsui himself.70 As a rule, these were linguistically more accessible than both sharebon and regular yomihon and targeted the expanding market of less-educated readers. But they were also intertextually aware of the more literate, regular yomihon in which similar ninjō-related themes abounded, often as direct adaptations of Chinese scholar and beauty fiction, including works by the famous Santō Kyōden (1761–1816) and Bakin.71 Shunsui, for instance, who did not have the sinological expertise to write an adaptation himself, was certainly aware of Bakin’s rewritings of Chinese scholar and beauty plots.72
In this context, the publication of Shunsui’s Shunshoku series was an important event. Shunsui’s ninjōbon are of tremendous literary-historical significance. The specific innovations of their literary format and discourse not only subsequently defined the genre but also came to be seen, by the early Meiji period, as largely synonymous with the novel as such, often in negative terms as a licentious genre. Particularly important was Shunsui’s discourse on ninjō and its representation. More systematically than previous authors, he presented the novel as a literary medium that was to exclusively depict ninjō. Whereas earlier discourses had broadly defined the shōsetsu as representing human emotions and social customs, Shunsui filled this vague premise with a more concrete and programmatic discourse. He used the term ninjō primarily in the sense of male-female love, but in distinction from other terms like koi (love—a word traditionally used in waka poetry), ninjō carried strongly ethical connotations pointing back to earlier philosophical and literary discussions. In one of the prefaces to his ninjōbon Shungyō Hachimangane (The Hachiman Shrine bell at spring dawn, 1836–1838), Shunsui famously remarked,
What does human emotion mean? It does not mean simply the path of love [koiji]. Only someone who does not sneer at the everyday silly laments of men and women and their futile sufferings and who does not look down on ordinary people’s delusions, only someone who empathizes with the feelings of various people [sono omoiomoi no hito ni narete] and who intimately and wholeheartedly knows to be moved by them [aware o shiru]—only such a person can be said to truly understand human emotion. If my writings are not read with this in mind, it will be hard to understand them.73
Scholars have debated whether Shunsui was aware of Motoori Norinaga’s notion of empathy or “knowing mono no aware.” Hino Tatsuo argues that Shunsui was not educated enough to have read Norinaga’s scholarly writings and points to the broader popular dissemination by the early nineteenth century, for instance through the theater, of philosophical notions of empathy and catchphrases like mono no aware.74 Maruyama Shigeru, in contrast, has stressed Shunsui’s unsystematic education (zatsugaku), which covered the Japanese classics and nativist (kokugaku) writings, including Norinaga’s works.75 Whether Shunsui was aware of Norinaga or not, for both the emotion most worthy of empathy—the emotion that could most strongly produce suffering and delusion—was love. Shunsui’s discourse stressed that literature should depict ninjō and thus reiterated, whether consciously or not, the tradition of earlier discourses on Shijing poetry and The Tale of Genji on a popular level.
Shunsui’s emphasis on ninjō was predicated on a strong awareness of ethicality and didacticism. One aspect of this awareness was his strategic move away from the pleasure quarter and the conventions of the earlier sharebon genre that focused on the techniques of courtesan buying and the satirical “exposing” (ugachi) of the mistakes of boorish customers.76 He remarks, “Since this book is mostly about the depiction of the emotions of [the female protagonists] Yonehachi and Ochō, its goal is not to expose flaws in the pleasure quarter. I have never been familiar with courtesan houses and therefore I cannot talk much about them. This book therefore should not be judged in the same way as a sharebon.”77 Shunsui spatially distances his action from the Yoshiwara quarter, which dominated most previous Edo-based sharebon literature and those middle-sized books that introduced romantic plots in the early nineteenth century. In Shunshoku umegoyomi, Yonehachi, a former Yoshiwara courtesan, works as a geisha in the unlicensed Fukagawa quarter while the younger girl Ochō, her romantic competitor, has a townsman (chōnin) background. The most important type of “futile suffering” induced by love in Shunsui’s texts and worthy of empathy is female jealousy. With her characteristic temperament of iji and hari (strong-willed combativeness), Yonehachi repeatedly bursts out in anger against the women who are also in love with her lover, Tanjirō. In a dialogue with her geisha friend Ume, she reaches the following insight after one such scene of romantic competition and angered desperation at her rival, Ochō:
Yone: “This is really embarrassing, but how was it possible that I could go astray in such a way [naze konna ni mayottarō]?” … Ume: “Truly, even if selling your body is not your profession, you might think that you have everything under your control, but when you’re truly in love [horeru] you cannot help becoming really stupid.” Yone: “Ah, in the past I used to laugh at other people, but when you feel so frustrated and helpless, it’s because of that Way [love].”78
Anger is an emotion typical of an amateur (shirōto) but inappropriate for a geisha or courtesan. Shunsui labels Yonehachi’s behavior inelegant (yabo)—the most dreaded adjective in Yoshiwara aesthetics but one that showcases the emotional authenticity of a woman in love (horeta onna). These authentic emotions are worthy of empathy, the ethical feeling that Shunsui seeks to address in his readers. Although his writings allude to sexual intercourse in titillating fashion, unlike in Bakin’s yomihon, their phenomenology of love never includes desire (jōyoku) as sexual excess and wantonness.
Even more important than his emphasis on empathy was Shunsui’s didactic outlook on the chastity and faithfulness of his heroines. In an authorial aside, he makes the following remark:
If I fill my book with [erotic] scenes, I may seem to be teaching indecent behavior to women. Some people say this is despicable but, ah, it is not true!… Since my books are written mostly for women, they are certainly clumsy. However, the women I depict are indecent only in appearance. In truth, they possess the deep feeling of chastity and faithfulness [teisō setsugi no shinjō]. I do not depict women who associate with more than one man, desire money, behave immorally, or are deficient in the Womanly Way. Although my books contain many amorous words, the determination of the men and women in them is pure and unstained. Although my four heroines Konoito, Chōkichi [Ochō], Oyoshi, and Yonehachi are all different, they are faithful and courageous, not unlike any male hero. At the end, you shall see how each of them protects her man with female virtue and proves peerless.79
Umegoyomi’s ideology of female morality is not merely rhetorical camouflage but is deeply inscribed into the work’s structure. One of Shunsui’s important innovations was the staging of the erotic man (irootoko) protagonist Tanjirō, who, temporarily weak and fallen but still attractive and emotionally manipulative, must rely on the faithful support of the women who love him. Through this help in the face of adversity, Yonehachi and Ochō prove their wifely faithfulness, even despite their jealousy. Their attitude inverses the sharebon topos of the coldhearted courtesan who manipulates her clients for money. Ochō even sells herself into a geisha contract to provide Tanjirō with financial assistance. Female jealousy also ultimately transforms into homosocial empathy, for instance when Yonehachi chivalrously supports her rival, Adakichi, in Shunshoku tatsumi no sono (Spring color southeast garden, 1833–1835), Umegoyomi’s sequel.80 This inversion of gender roles, with an attractive and manipulative man and chivalrous women, is not truly subversive but on the contrary drives home a profoundly conservative message. Shunsui himself notes that his goal in depicting several women in love with the same man is to teach the control of jealousy and to promote female virtue.81 Unlike Bakin, he would never depict women indecently involved with more than one man.82 Shunsui also repeatedly notes that his work’s goal is kanzen chōaku, the key formula underlying Bakin’s didactic understanding of fiction.83 Shunshoku umegoyomi is loudly explicit about the fact that the faithfulness of the women Ochō and Yonehachi is rewarded when both are allowed to marry Tanjirō after his social rehabilitation (it turns out that he is a high-ranking samurai), as his first and second wife, respectively, reflecting their difference in social status. The work’s indirect scholar and beauty structure thus becomes apparent, culminating in a marriage with one or two faithful, chaste, and talented—although, in the case of the ninjōbon, not literate—wives. With Shunsui, moreover, previously philosophical assumptions about ninjō have clearly arrived in the popular sphere: Itō Jinsai’s, Ogyū Sorai’s, or Norinaga’s belief that emotion can teach empathy and the neo-Confucian idea that emotion can be good, that it can produce virtuous behavior, despite its potential to be the origin of all evil as well. Shunsui’s heroines are profoundly virtuous because they are in love.
The conservative Confucian outlook of Shunsui’s ninjōbon notwithstanding, a discursive construction of the genre as licentious was under way from its inception. What I call ninjōbon discourse was tremendously powerful well into the Meiji period and, through metonymical reduction, often decried the novel per se as a mediator of dangerous desire. Shunsui, in various authorial asides, defended himself against critics who chastised him for fanning indecent desire in his (female) readers.84 Contemporary critics who pointed out the licentiousness of Shunsui’s works included Terakado Seiken (1796–1868), the author of the famous Edo hanjōki (Record of the prosperity of Edo, 1832–1836), Bakin, and Kimura Mokurō.85 In his “Kokuji shōsetsu tsū,” Mokurō presents a vociferous critique of the ninjōbon:
There is nothing as bad as the ninjōbon written for the entertainment of women.… They depict only male-female licentiousness and obscenity [danjo inpon waisetsu no koto] and do not have the intent to promote virtue and chastise vice. They consist of small booklets whose illustrations and character carvings are poorly executed. Their authors do not invest much labor in them, and they are easily published, thus providing an opportune income to penniless book lenders. The recent government edicts that discontinued their publication can only be lauded as a most appropriate measure.86
Mokurō’s critique of the ninjōbon is noteworthy, as his view on other lowbrow subfields of the shōsetsu, including the heavily illustrated kusazōshi, is rather generous. Mokurō compares the ninjōbon to “extremely obscene” Chinese novels such as The Carnal Prayer Mat.87 The “recent government edicts” allude to the Tenpō Reforms of 1842 to 1844 that initiated a severe censorship crackdown on the ninjōbon and Shunsui in particular. Subjected to a punishment of fifty days in manacles and having his works’ printing blocks destroyed, Shunsui died shortly thereafter. The censorship regulations that led to Shunsui’s downfall precisely singled out the obscenity of his writing.88
Why ninjōbon discourse focused on obscenity requires some closer examination. Unlike the Chinese erotic novels to which Mokurō compares the genre, Shunsui’s works were only mildly erotic, containing allusions to sexual intercourse but lacking graphic details. Chastity (misao) in Shunshoku umegoyomi certainly did not imply the absence of sexual relations—an impossibility given the sharebon tradition and the world of geisha society that forms most of the work’s backdrop. But as noted, Shunsui was careful to never let desire itself be the focus of his depiction. While titillating, the erotic allusions were the necessary extension of his ideology of faithful, even monogamous, female love. One reason for the genre’s discursively stated obscenity was perhaps its perceived vulgarity that was in important ways linguistic. Large portions of Shunsui’s texts consisted of dialogue that accurately reproduced the characters’ Edo speech—a feature that the ninjōbon shared with the earlier sharebon as well as the kokkeibon of equally middle-sized printing format. The depiction of speech imparted liveliness and emotional authenticity to the text, but this vernacular directness could also be a problem. Bakin, in line with previous discourse on the vernacular, notes that only vernacular language (zokugo) expresses emotions (jōtai) appropriately. However, contemporary vernacular speech in Japan (rigen zokugo) is dialectal and vulgar (shuri hizoku) to an extent that makes it inappropriate for literary composition (bun). Bakin explains that, for his yomihon, he therefore devised a highly mixed and eclectic (hakuzatsu zusan) style mediating between the elegant (ga) and the vulgar (zoku) as well as between Japanese (wa) and Sinitic (kan) elements.89 Bakin’s linguistic sensibility and attempt to negotiate between “vulgar” but emotionally authentic vernacular language and literary sophistication bespeaks the complexity of his own literary project but also sheds light on the perceived vulgarity of Shunsui’s ninjōbon.
Yet the appeal and strength of the ninjōbon lay precisely in their figures’ dialogic interaction, through which power relations between the genders could be negotiated and erotic tension produced. Shunsui’s ninjōbon staged playful and sometimes titillating dialogues.90 The skillful manipulation of eroticized linguistic interplay was the prerogative especially of the erotic man. In one Tatsumi no sono scene, for example, Yonehachi—half pleading, but also half performing her characteristic strong will—urges Tanjirō to see her rival, Adakichi, less openly, as this would hurt her pride and pique her jealousy. Tanjirō’s reaction to Yonehachi’s pleas is ambiguous:
As hard as Tanjirō might try, there was no way to find any defect in [Yonehachi’s] forceful reasoning. Although, in his heart, he did not despise Adakichi, when hearing Yonehachi’s arguments, he could not but praise her as a most extraordinary woman, born so clever and so beautiful with a nuance of weakness. But then he said in a deliberately light tone, “Why all this talk about ‘understand me’ and ‘I apologize’? There is nothing to worry about, Yonehachi! I will make sure very soon that everything will be the way you like. There is really no need to talk like this and to worry. Calm down and stop arguing—I will make you feel totally relieved!”91
The skillful interplay between the narrator’s psychological insight into Tanjirō’s thoughts and male eroticizing gaze and his playfully manipulative response (and performance of coolness) reflects the subtle appeal of the genre. At the same time, Shunsui consciously contrasts his virtuous and chaste heroines, dedicated in their love, with a male protagonist who perhaps not criminally, but with manipulative skill and without moral restraint, indulges in erotic play with several women. Not unlike Chikamatsu’s earlier sewamono plays, Shunsui’s text dramatizes the ambivalence of ninjō in gendered terms as both virtuous and licentious, thus simultaneously showcasing the narrative’s moral-didactic and dangerously titillating potential.
It was therefore particularly the licentious attitude of Shunsui’s male protagonist, in addition to his socioeconomic reliance on women, that marked the genre as problematic and obscene. Other male figures in Shunsui’s works, such as Tōbei in Shunshoku umegoyomi and Bairi in Harutsugedori (The warbler announcing spring, 1836–1837), are socioeconomically independent and display a strong moral (and financial) responsibility for the women with whom they interact. The profligate Tanjirō, however, became the prototypical ninjōbon hero, to the extent that his name was regularly invoked as the epitome of male licentiousness. His shockingly amoral, if not immoral, masculinity was a major reason the ninjōbon were devalued as socially pernicious. Bakin, in contrast, while illustrating the criminal effects of erotic desire in his evil figures, was very careful, at least on the surface, to depict his virtuous male protagonists in Hakkenden as truly virtuous and chaste—as “good people,” to use Tsubouchi Shōyō’s later term. As I show in subsequent chapters, in Tanjirō’s flawed masculinity, Meiji readers and authors continued to see the emblem of the ninjōbon’s—and more broadly, the novel’s—licentiousness, and it was precisely on the male hero as the epitome of the nation that major efforts at literary reform would concentrate.
This chapter has cast light on the interlocked layers of literary and discursive history underlying the emergence of Shunsui’s ninjōbon in the early nineteenth century. More than other genres and despite their lowbrow popular outlook, these works, by their emphatic reference to ninjō as what they represent, connected to previous discourses on literature and emotion as well as to the literary works at the center of them—the Jinpingmei, The Tale of Genji, or Shijing poetry. The common thread linking these works across an otherwise almost unbridgeable gap in historical time, linguistic register, and social status was that they all belonged to a lineage of literature whose social and moral standing, by virtue of its focus on emotion, remained unstable. These works were situated in a field of tension between legitimizing discourses that highlighted their morality and didactic value (even, in the Shijing’s case, canonical sanctity as a Confucian classic) and the threat of discursive devaluation as licentious.
The specific significance of Shunsui’s ninjōbon, reaching far beyond the historical moment of the early 1830s, was that they firmly installed this traditional discursive field of tension within the relatively new category of the shōsetsu in Japan. Eighteenth-century scholarly discussions had situated vernacular Chinese novels like the Jinpingmei and scholar and beauty fiction within the parameters of didacticism and licentiousness, but especially with the ninjōbon as a mass-circulated and popular genre in the Japanese vernacular did those parameters—and the idea of licentiousness—permeate the literary imagination of the Japanese novel more broadly and in a longer nineteenth-century perspective. By the early Meiji period, the ninjōbon defined to a large extent what the novel was: a lowbrow narrative medium focusing on ninjō and therefore potentially dangerous.
On a narrative level, Shunsui’s texts pitched the representation of titillating licentiousness, most notably in Tanjirō’s profligacy, against moral-didactic ambitions. This epitomized nineteenth-century narrative practices surrounding the novel’s ambiguous status as both licentious and socially useful writing. A similar ambiguity, although on a more highbrow literary level, also lay at the heart of Bakin’s yomihon. As I describe in the next chapter, Bakin’s writings, more explicitly than Shunsui’s ninjōbon, displayed an intertextual awareness of “licentious books” from China. Given the yomihon’s great literary sophistication, their narrative practices highlighting the licentiousness of ninjō and the novel’s didactic ambivalence in representing it reached a complexity unprecedented in any Japanese texts. Before turning to the Meiji novel, therefore, a close examination of Bakin’s writing of ninjō is in order.