T HIS VOLUME WAS FIRST published privately in London in 1928 for subscribers to a set entitled Eastern Love. It comprises two separate books bound together. Both books are reprinted in this edition. The first book, Comrade Loves of the Samurai, is a selection of stories made by the eminent translator E. Powys Mathers. It includes tales from several Saikaku works, notably Glorious Tales of Pederasty, Tales of the Samurai Spirit, Tales of Duty of the Samurai, and Stories in Letters. The second book is a charming anthology entitled Songs of the Geisha, likewise selected and translated into English by Mathers.
Ihara(or Ibara)Saikaku, author of the stories of Comrade Loves of the Samurai, ranks as Japan's greatest novelist. His tale Life of a Satyr ( 1682 ) is Japan's first true novel. Born in 1642 among the merchants of Osaka, Saikaku became absorbed in the commercial world around him. In the Tokugawa era, which was launched in 1603 under the Edo shogunate, society turned away from medieval ideals to trade and money-making. The code of bushido and the knightly samurai declined in importance. Family security and personal pleasure gave a new meaning to a society that savored peace after centuries of devastating clan wars. The roots of modern Japanese are in the Tokugawa era and the Meiji era, which followed in 1868.
The best recent exposition of Ihara Saikaku's place in the Japanese literary tradition may be read in A. M. Janeira's Japanese and Western Literature (Charles E. Tuttle). Janeira, in his chapter "The Picaresque Novel, "explains how Saikaku (with Kiseki and Ikku) introduced "a new literary genre that expressed the new social changes which were taking place." The new authors were despised by the "official" writers of the day but not by the common reading public, who preferred them in daily reading, however much they continued to venerate the classic authors. The best pictorial representation of the times is the ukiyo-e, or woodblock, art of the time, for there we see the "floating world" in which Saikaku lived and died. In many respects the novels of Saikaku are entirely modem in spirit. The character sketches in his novels have social meaning for the Japanese as those of Dickens have for the English. The genius of both may be shared by the world. The translations in The Comrade Loves of the Samurai were rendered by E. Powys Mathers from a French translation by Ken Sato.
Saikaku admired the merchants of his times both for their sagacity in business and for their manner of squandering profits on a gay life. His themes are various. In the novel This Scheming World (Charles E. Tuttle) we see the merchants of Osaka, Edo, and Kyoto in all the rush and befuddlement of meeting year-end money obligations, and no one who has lived in Japan at year's end will fail to appreciate the subtle humor of this tale. The subject of money and love predominates in most of the incomparable stories by Saikaku. However, the love he writes about is not always that which pre-sent-day society regards as "normal."
In Comrade Loves of the Samurai the theme is the homosexual love of samurai for samurai or the love of samurai for page or court boy bent on becoming a samurai. The subject is potentially sordid, and in modem novels is almost invariably so, but to the old Japanese such love among samurai was quite permissible. The sons of samurai families were urged to form homosexual alliances while youth lasted, and often these loves matured into lifelong companionships. Modem samurai films and television shows often use the undying companionship of two men, but the homosexual origins of traditional relationships are overlooked by most viewers.
The homosexual loves of the samurai ranged from those of high platonic ideal to sensual pederasty. The general attitude toward women was similar to that of classic Greece, namely that women were for breeding but boys were for pleasure. Women, in both cultures, were thought to make men cowardly, effeminate, and weak. Saikaku describes Japanese love scenes of all kinds with a frankness that has made him a favorite of the expurgators, but he touches the subject of both normal and abnormal love with tenderness. He avoids gross language and pornography, but his attitude to women is unsympathetic by modern standards. For example, in a jesting preface to Glorious Tales of Pederasty he says: "Our eyes are soiled by the soft haunches and scarlet petticoats of women. These female beauties are good for nothing save to give pleasure to old men in lands where there is not a single good-looking boy. If a man is interested in women, he can never know the joys of pederasty."
Homosexual males have always existed in Japan, and they figure large today, as in American society. In the traditional setting they were highly regarded, as in Polynesia, where they attached themselves to groups of chiefly women who cultivated them for both gossip and humor. They are adroit at handling social situations and succeeding in certain professions. In the modern setting homosexualism among males is driven under the surface, but it re-emerges in various guises. Love of military uniforms, jackboots, Nazi symbols, body-con-tact sports, muscle building, and militaristic activities is often based on this suppressed impulse. This is not to suggest that the manly soldier with wife and children at home is a homosexual, although there are curious connections between a passion for militarism and homosexuality. For example, Yukio Mishima represents a strange admixture of the bushido spirit and the homosexual urge to love comrades in arms with intense devotion to a cause. Mishima's tragic last act of ritual suicide, in which a comrade struck off his head, is in keeping with traditional samurai practice. In fact this anachronistic act had an enormous impact on the contemporary Japanese, since it struck a responsive cord in their latent traditional behavior patterns.
The idea of homosexuality is traditionally much more acceptable to Orientals than to Westerners. One reason for this may be the lesser physical differentiation of the sexes in the Mongoloid race (Japanese women and men have relatively sparse body hair, while women's breasts and buttocks are small compared to those of average Caucasian women.) Also the East viewed sexual love detached from Western-style notions of sin. Provided social proprieties were observed, there was no association of sin with sex. Women were excluded from important arts (including Kabuki and Noh acting and the tea ceremony) because they were of little social importance. In the circumstances it was fitting that men should seek men for their most intimate life.
Ihara Saikaku's youthful writings were unsuccessful, but when he published his novel The Armorous Life of Yonosuke, the gateway to fame and prosperity opened to him. Among his many popular bawdy best sellers is Five Women Who Loved Love (Charles E. Tuttle).
The Songs of the Geisha is quite unassociated with the stories of Ihara Saikaku. It is a collection of geisha folk songs composed to be sung to the accompaniment of the shamisen. Ninety of these songs were retranslated by E. Powys Mathers from Gaston Morphy's anthology Le Livre des Geisha . The remainder are from Chansons des Geishas by Steinilber Oberlin and Hidetake Iwamura. All have that charmingly nostalgic quality which fitted well the time and the circumstances for which they were composed. Geisha entered the entertainment trade in old Japan under sad circumstances, most often being sold to procurers by impoverished parents for training in the ways of pleasure houses (for the whole story see De Becker's The Night/ess City (Charles E. Tuttle).
For lonely girls who were courtesans and geisha the only hope was to find a lover to purchase their freedom, but until this happened —which was rare—they were obliged to spend many years in erotic slavery. When youthful bloom had faded and their time of service had expired, they were often cast aside undesired. So these songs, freely composed and intimately personal, expressed the feelings of the geisha toward their sympathetic listeners. Unlike classic songs, they reach to the heart of the common people. Love, frustration, and the futility of hope are their main themes. Here is an example from "Who Loves":
A body that loves
Is fragile and uncertain,
A floating boat.
The fires in the fishing boat at night
Burn red, my heart burns red.
Wooden stakes hold up the nets
Against the tide of Uji.
The tide is against me.
These song-poems, mere thumbnail sketches of life, belong to a very ancient oral tradition in Japan. The best known are popularly quoted and sung, but for a true rendering they must be heard from a beautiful geisha with a shami-sen, and in a teahouse. The effect is unique. After long training in singing, dancing, and playing instruments, the geisha became herself a living work of art. These lyrics, for all their erotic symbolism, are restrained and tactful. Their erotic beauty must be felt rather than heard.
Ihara(or Ibara)Saikaku, whose real name was probably Hirayama Togo, was bom in Osaka, 1642. As a poet and novelist he was one of the most illustrious writers of Japan's seventeenth-century literary revival. He excelled in describing the life of the common people and, in satirical tone, the samurai, who were in his age falling from positions of grace before the money power of the merchants.
Saikaku's speed in composing was such that he earned the nickname of "the 20, 000 poet" by composing a verse a minute in twenty-four hours. Regardless of his great skill as a haiku poet, he is best known as a storyteller. His style is allusive and elliptic, accurately describing the common people among whom he lived. Society of the time was enjoying peace after years of bitter clan warfare. At last people could go about their business in comparative tranquility. The merchants and their affairs in the gay quarters gave Saikaku his most fruitful theme: that of money and love.
Some of his novels about samurai allowed his satirical humor to reach its fullness. His knack of delineating character with a few strokes of his brush enabled him to demolish knightly pretense, just as Cervantes had done in Europe, using Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Saikaku gained popularity in his lifetime, and it has continued unabated since his death in 1693. The homosexual loves of the samurai open a window to a little understood aspect of old Japan. The love of boys and comrades is no new thing to the Western world, as its own classic culture is imbued with the idea from the days of ancient Greece. Saikaku provides us with a new view of homosexual love, which has a venerable history in Japan.
Edward Powys Mathers was bom in England in 1892. He graduated from Oxford with a bachelor of arts degree after an outstanding undergraduate career at Trinity College. Following his natural inclination to literature, he became a professional author, specializing in the translation of Oriental works. From 1919 to 1931 Mathers produced many books. Among his brilliant translations from the classics the best known is The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, but his other translations, such as those of Flaubert's Salammbo and The Elegies of Ovid, rank high among his literary works taken from foreign tongues. He died in 1939.
The present tales and songs are from E. Powys Mathers'masterly anthology entitled Eastern Love, which was published between 1927 and 1930. This monumental collection of erotic stories expresses, as no others can, the great industry of Powys Mathers and his sensitivity to that persuasive influence over all of life— the power of love!-
Terence Barrow Ph. D.