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Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600-1900
Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600-1900
Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600-1900
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Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600-1900

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This is the first anthology ever devoted to early modern Japanese literature, spanning the period from 1600 to 1900, known variously as the Edo or the Tokugawa, one of the most creative epochs of Japanese culture. This anthology, which will be of vital interest to anyone involved in this era, includes not only fiction, poetry, and drama, but also essays, treatises, literary criticism, comic poetry, adaptations from Chinese, folk stories and other non-canonical works. Many of these texts have never been translated into English before, and several classics have been newly translated for this collection.

Early Modern Japanese Literature introduces English readers to an unprecedented range of prose fiction genres, including dangibon (satiric sermons), kibyôshi (satiric and didactic picture books), sharebon (books of wit and fashion), yomihon (reading books), kokkeibon (books of humor), gôkan (bound books), and ninjôbon (books of romance and sentiment). The anthology also offers a rich array of poetry -- waka, haiku, senryû, kyôka, kyôshi -- and eleven plays, which range from contemporary domestic drama to historical plays and from early puppet theater to nineteenth century kabuki. Since much of early modern Japanese literature is highly allusive and often elliptical, this anthology features introductions and commentary that provide the critical context for appreciating this diverse and fascinating body of texts.

One of the major characteristics of early modern Japanese literature is that almost all of the popular fiction was amply illustrated by wood-block prints, creating an extensive text-image phenomenon. In some genres such as kibyôshi and gôkan the text in fact appeared inside the woodblock image. Woodblock prints of actors were also an important aspect of the culture of kabuki drama. A major feature of this anthology is the inclusion of over 200 woodblock prints that accompanied the original texts and drama.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 5, 2002
ISBN9780231507431
Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600-1900

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    Early Modern Japanese Literature - Columbia University Press

    Early Modern Japanese Literature

    TRANSLATIONS FROM THE ASIAN CLASSICS

    Translations from the Asian Classics

    EDITORIAL BOARD

    Wm. Theodore de Bary, Chairman

    Paul Anderer

    Irene Bloom

    Donald Keene

    George A. Saliba

    Haruo Shirane

    David D. W. Wang

    Burton Watson

    Early Modern Japanese Literature

    AN ANTHOLOGY, 1600–1900

    Edited with Introductions and Commentary by Haruo Shirane

    TRANSLATORS

    James Brandon, Michael Brownstein, Patrick Caddeau, Caryl Ann Callahan, Steven Carter, Anthony Chambers, Cheryl Crowley, Chris Drake, Peter Flueckiger, Charles Fox, C. Andrew Gerstle, Thomas Harper, Robert Huey, Donald Keene, Richard Lane, Lawrence Marceau, Andrew Markus, Herschel Miller, Maryellen Toman Mori, Jamie Newhard, Mark Oshima, Edward Putzar, Peipei Qiu, Satoru Saito, Tomoko Sakomura, G. W. Sargent, Thomas Satchell, Paul Schalow, Haruo Shirane, Jack Stoneman, Makoto Ueda, Burton Watson

    COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

    NEW YORK

    Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation

    for assistance given by the Japan Foundation toward the cost of publishing this book.

    Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Pushkin Fund toward the cost of publishing this book.

    Columbia University Press

    Publishers Since 1893

    New York Chichester, West Sussex

    cup.columbia.edu

    Copyright © 2002 Columbia University Press

    All rights reserved

    E-ISBN 978-0-231-50743-1

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Early modern Japanese literature : an anthology, 1600–1900 / [edited with introduction by Haruo Shirane].

    p. cm.—(Translations from the Asian classics)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 0-231-10990-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

    I. Shirane, Haruo, 1951–II. Series.

    PL782.E1 E23 2002

    895.6’08003—dc21

    2001053725

    A Columbia University Press E-book.

    CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

    CONTENTS

    Preface

    Historical Periods, Measurements, and Other Matters

    1. Early Modern Japan

    The Shōgunate and the Domains

    The Social Hierarchy

    The Economy and the Three Cities

    The Licensed Quarters

    The Courtesans and Female Entertainers

    Literacy, Scholarship, and Printing

    Women, Readership, and Literature

    Warrior and Urban Commoner Attitudes

    Popular and Elite Literatures

    Periodization

    2. Kana Booklets and the Emergence of a Print Culture

    Parodies

    The Dog Pillow Book (Inu makura)

    Fake Tales (Nise monogatari)

    Edict Against Christianity

    Humorous Stories

    Today’s Tales of Yesterday (Kinō wa kyō no monogatari)

    Dangerous Things in the World

    The Woman Who Cut Off Her Nose

    Asai Ryōi

    Tales of the Floating World (Ukiyo monogatari)

    Preface

    Regarding Advice Against Wenching

    Hand Puppets (Otogi bōko)

    The Peony Lantern

    Military Stories

    O-An’s Stories (Oan monogatari)

    3. Ihara Saikaku and the Books of the Floating World

    Ihara Saikaku

    Life of a Sensuous Man (Kōshoku ichidai otoko)

    Putting Out the Light, Love Begins

    Afterward Honored Is Added to Their Names

    Aids to Lovemaking: Sailing to the Island of Women

    Saikaku’s Tales from Various Provinces (Saikaku shokokubanashi)

    The Umbrella Oracle

    Five Sensuous Women (Kōshoku gonin onna)

    The Calendar Maker’s Wife

    Life of a Sensuous Woman (Kōshoku ichidai onna)

    An Old Woman’s Hermitage

    Mistress of a Domain Lord

    A Monk’s Wife in a Worldly Temple

    A Teacher of Calligraphy and Manners

    A Stylish Woman Who Brought Disaster

    Ink Painting in a Sensual Robe

    Luxurious Dream of a Man

    Streetwalker with a False Voice

    Five Hundred Disciples of the Buddha—I’d Known Them All

    Great Mirror of Male Love (Nanshoku ōkagami)

    Though Bearing an Umbrella

    Tales of Samurai Duty (Bukegiri monogatari)

    In Death They Share the Same Wave Pillow

    Japan’s Eternal Storehouse (Nippon eitaigura)

    In the Past, on Credit, Now Cash Down

    The Foremost Lodger in the Land

    A Feather in Daikoku’s Cap

    All the Goodness Gone from Tea

    Worldly Mental Calculations (Seken munezan’yō)

    In Our Impermanent World, Even Doorposts Are Borrowed

    His Dream Form Is Gold Coins

    Holy Man Heitarō

    Ejima Kiseki and the Hachimonjiya

    Characters of Old Men in the Floating World (Ukiyo oyaji katagi)

    A Money-Loving, Loan-Sharking Old Man

    4. Early Haikai Poetry and Poetics

    Matsunaga Teitoku and the Teimon School

    Kitamura Kigin

    The Mountain Well (Yama no i)

    Fireflies

    Nishiyama Sōin and Danrin Haikai

    Okanishi Ichū

    Haikai Primer (Haikai mōgyū)

    5. The Poetry and Prose of Matsuo Bashō

    Bashō and the Art of Haikai

    Hokku

    Composing Haiku

    Combining

    Intermediaries

    Single-Object Poetry

    Greetings

    Overtones

    The Art of Linked Verse

    Reverberation Link

    Status Link

    Withering Gusts (Kogarashi)

    Plum Blossom Scent (Ume ga ka)

    The Poetics of Haiku

    Awakening to the High, Returning to the Low

    Following the Creative

    Object and Self as One

    Unchanging and Ever-Changing

    Haibun

    The Hut of the Phantom Dwelling (Genjūan no ki)

    Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no hosomichi)

    6. Chikamatsu Monzaemon and the Puppet Theater

    Early Jōruri and Kabuki

    Chikamatsu Monzaemon

    The Love Suicides at Sonezaki (Sonezaki shinjū)

    The Drum of the Waves of Horikawa (Horikawa nami no tsutsumi)

    The Battles of Coxinga (Kokusenya kassen)

    The Heike and the Island of Women (Heike nyogo no shima)

    The Love Suicides at Amijima (Shinjū ten no Amijima)

    Hozumi Ikan

    Souvenirs of Naniwa (Naniwa miyage)

    7. Confucian Studies and Literary Perspectives

    Song Confucianism

    Nakae Tōju

    Dialogue with the Elder (Okina mondō)

    On the Virtue of Filial Piety

    Confucian Views of Literature

    Yamazaki Ansai

    Japanese Lesser Learning (Yamato shōgaku)

    Ando Tameakira

    Seven Essays on Murasaki Shikibu (Shika shichiron)

    The Intentions of the Author

    Chinese Studies and Literary Perspectives

    Itō Jinsai

    The Meaning of Words in the Analects and the Mencius (Gomō jigi)

    Postscript to The Collected Works of Bo Juyi (Hakushimonjū)

    Questions from Children (Dōjimon)

    Itō Tōgai

    Essentials for Reading the Book of Songs (Dokushi yōryō)

    Ogyū Sorai

    Master Sorai’s Teachings (Sorai sensei tōmonsho)

    On the Study of Poetry and Prose

    8. Confucianism in Action: An Autobiography of a Bakufu Official

    The Kyōhō Era (1716–1736)

    Arai Hakuseki

    Record of Breaking and Burning Brushwood (Oritaku shiba no ki)

    Early Education

    Confucian Precedent and Justice for a Woman

    9. Chinese Poetry and the Literatus Ideal

    Hattori Nankaku

    Traveling Down the Sumida River at Night (Yoru Bokusui o kudaru)

    Jottings of Master Nankaku Under the Lamplight (Nankaku sensei tōka no sho)

    Responding to the Lord of Goose Lake (Gako-kō ni kotau)

    Gion Nankai

    The Fisherman (Gyofu)

    Encountering the Origins of Poetry (Shigaku hōgen)

    On Elegance and Vulgarity

    10. The Golden Age of Puppet Theater

    Takeda Izumo, Namiki Sōsuke, and Miyoshi Shōraku

    Chūshingura: The Storehouse of Loyal Retainers (Kanadehon Chūshingura)

    Act 6, Kanpei’s Suicide

    Namiki Sōsuke

    Chronicle of the Battle of Ichinotani (Ichinotani futaba gunki)

    Act 3, Kumagai’s Battle Camp

    Suga Sensuke

    Gappō at the Crossroads (Sesshū Gappō ga tsuji)

    Act 2, Climactic Scene

    11. Dangibon and the Birth of Edo Popular Literature

    Jōkanbō Kōa

    Modern-Style Lousy Sermons (Imayō heta dangi)

    The Spirit of Kudō Suketsune Criticizes the Theater

    Hiraga Gennai

    Rootless Weeds (Nenashigusa)

    In Hell

    Ryōgoku Bridge

    The Lover Reveals His True Form

    The Modern Life of Shidōken (Fūryū Shidōken den)

    Asanoshin Meets the Sage

    Land of the Giants

    Land of the Chest Holes

    Island of Women

    A Theory of Farting (Hōhi-ron)

    12. Comic and Satiric Poetry

    Senryū

    Karai Senryū

    Kyōka

    Yomono Akara

    Akera Kankō

    Hezutsu Tōsaku

    Yadoya no Meshimori

    Ki no Sadamaru

    Kyōshi

    Dōmyaku Sensei, Master Artery

    13. Literati Meditations

    Yosa Buson

    Hokku

    Buson’s Poetics

    Preface to Shoha’s Haiku Collection (Shundei kushū)

    Japanese-Chinese Poetry

    Mourning the Old Sage Hokuju (Hokuju rōsen o itamu)

    Spring Breeze on the Kema Embankment (Shunpū batei kyoku)

    Haibun

    New Flower Gathering (Shinhanatsumi)

    The Badger

    Takebe Ayatari

    Tales from This Time and That (Oriorigusa)

    Walking the Neighborhoods of Negishi in Search of a Woman

    14. Early Yomihon: History, Romance, and the Supernatural

    Ueda Akinari

    Tales of Moonlight and Rain (Ugetsu monogatari)

    The Chrysanthemum Vow

    The Reed-Choked House

    A Serpent’s Lust

    15. Eighteenth-Century Waka and Nativist Study

    Debate on the Eight Points of Japanese Poetry

    Kada no Arimaro

    Eight Points of Japanese Poetry (Kokka hachiron)

    On Poetry as Amusement

    Tayasu Munetake

    My Views on the Eight Points of Japanese Poetry (Kokka hachiron yogen)

    Kamo no Mabuchi

    Another Reply to Tayasu Munetake (Futatabi kingo no kimi ni kotaematsuru no sho)

    Kamo no Mabuchi

    Thoughts on Poetry (Ka’i kō)

    Motoori Norinaga

    A Small Boat Punting Through the Reeds (Ashiwake obune)

    My Personal View of Poetry (Isonokami no sasamegoto)

    The Essence of The Tale of Genji (Shibun yōryō)

    The Tale of Genji, a Small Jeweled Comb (Genji monogatari tama no ogushi)

    The Intentions of the Monogatari

    The Spirit of the Gods (Naobi no mitama)

    First Steps in the Mountains (Uiyamabumi)

    16. Sharebon: Books of Wit and Fashion

    The Playboy Dialect (Yūshi hōgen)

    Preface

    Live for Pleasure Alone!

    Santō Kyōden

    Forty-Eight Techniques for Success with Courtesans (Keiseikai shijū hatte)

    The Tender-Loving Technique

    The True-Feeling Technique

    17. Kibyōshi: Satiric and Didactic Picture Books

    Koikawa Harumachi

    Mr Glitter ‘n’ Gold’s Dream of Splendor (Kinkin sensei eiga no yume)

    Santō Kyōden

    Grilled and Basted Edo-Born Playboy (Edo umare uwaki no kabayaki)

    Fast-Dyeing Mind Study (Shingaku hayasomegusa)

    18. Kokkeibon: Comic Fiction for Commoners

    Jippensha Ikku

    Travels on the Eastern Seaboard (Tōkaidōchū hizakurige)

    Journey’s Start

    Changed into a Fox

    The False Ikku

    Shikitei Sanba

    Floating-World Bathhouse (Ukiyoburo)

    The Larger Meaning

    Women’s Bath

    19. Ninjōbon: Sentimental Fiction

    Tamenaga Shunsui

    Spring-Color Plum Calendar (Shunshoku umegoyomi)

    Book 1

    Book 2

    20. Gōkan: Extended Picture Books

    Ryūtei Tanehiko

    A Country Genji by a Commoner Murasaki (Nise Murasaki inaka Genji)

    Book 4 (concluding part)

    Book 5

    21. Ghosts and Nineteenth-Century Kabuki

    Tsuruya Nanboku

    Ghost Stories at Yotsuya (Yotsuya kaidan)

    Act 2, Tamiya Iemon’s House

    Act 3, Deadman’s Ditch

    22. Late Yomihon: History and the Supernatural Revisited

    Kyokutei Bakin

    The Eight Dog Chronicles (Nansō Satomi hakkenden)

    Fusehime at Toyama Cave

    Fusehime’s Decision

    Shino in Ōtsuka Village

    Hamaji and Shino

    23. Nativizing Poetry and Prose in Chinese

    Yamamoto Hokuzan

    Thoughts on Composing Poetry (Sakushi shikō)

    On Spirit and Freshness

    The Conclusion

    Kan Chazan

    Kanshi

    Rai Sanyō

    The Unofficial History of Japan (Nihon gaishi)

    Kusunoki

    Uesugi Kenshin and Takeda Shingen

    Kanshi

    Ryōkan

    Kanshi

    24. The Miscellany

    Matsudaira Sadanobu

    Blossoms and the Moon (Kagetsu sōshi)

    On Blossoms

    Leaving It to Heaven

    Study

    On Skies Clearing and Rain Falling

    Rain

    Comments Made by Bystanders

    On the Ainu

    Fox Stupidity

    Bugs in a Hawk

    25. Early-Nineteenth-Century Haiku

    Kobayashi Issa

    Journal of My Father’s Last Days (Chichi no shūen nikki)

    Fourth Month, Twenty-third Day

    Fourth Month, Twenty-ninth Day

    Fifth Month, Second Day

    Fifth Month, Sixth Day

    Fifth Month, Thirteenth Day

    Fifth Month, Twentieth Day

    Hokku

    My Spring (Ora ga haru)

    Orphan

    Giving the Breast

    A World of Dew

    Come What May

    26. Waka in the Late Edo Period

    Ozawa Roan

    Waka

    The Ancient Middle Road Through Furu (Furu no nakamichi)

    Dust and Dirt

    Reed Sprouts

    Responses to Questions

    Ryōkan

    Waka

    Kagawa Kageki

    Waka

    Objections to New Learning (Niimanabi iken)

    Tachibana Akemi

    Waka

    Ōkuma Kotomichi

    Waka

    Words to Myself (Hitorigochi)

    27. Rakugo

    Sanyūtei Enchō

    Peony Lantern Ghost Story (Kaidan botan dōrō)

    Volume 5, part 12

    English-Language Bibliography

    Index

    PREFACE

    This anthology, one of two planned volumes of Japanese literature from the ancient period through the nineteenth century, brings to the reader carefully chosen examples of literature from the Edo period (1600–1867). Except for such late-seventeenth-century writers as Saikaku, Bashō, and Chikamatsu, the three centuries of early modern Japanese literature have often been neglected by Western readers, and most of the texts here have been translated for the first time. It is my hope that this volume will stimulate interest in one of the most exciting periods in world literature.

    This book pays particular attention to gesaku (playful writing), the popular literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which includes dangibon, kyōka, senryū, kibyūshi, sharebon, yomihon, kokkeibon, gōkan, and ninjōbon. Also integral to early modern culture were the poetry and prose written in Chinese or classical Japanese by those in the literati (bunjin), Chinese studies (kangaku), and nativist studies (kokugaku) movements that came to the fore in the eighteenth century and are well represented here. The anthology’s focus on these high genres, especially poetics and literary treatises, reveals their close connection to the popular literature and culture.

    Nine selections from jōruri (puppet theater) and kabuki by major playwrights are an important part of this book as well. Today in Japan, jōruri and kabuki plays are rarely viewed in their entirety. Instead, favorite scenes or acts are performed, often as a medley. This book takes the same approach, thereby allowing the reader to sample a wide variety of plays. The jōruri and kabuki selections also were chosen to demonstrate their close connection to the fiction of this period.

    Early modern Japanese fiction was accompanied by pictures that existed in a dialogic relationship to the printed text. In this anthology, I have tried to create the same relationship and provide commentary on the images. The drama selections likewise include both photographs from modern performances and Edo-period ukiyo-e and print illustrations.

    Much of Japanese literature, particularly the poetry, is highly allusive and elliptical. Consequently, considerable effort has been made not just to translate important and interesting texts but also to offer critical introductions to the various genres, sociocultural phenomena, and authors. Almost all the poetry is accompanied by commentary in the footnotes. Except where indicated, I have written all the introductions and commentaries, and I bear full responsibility for the accuracy and quality of the translations.

    This anthology owes its existence to Jennifer Crewe, editorial director at Columbia University Press, who many years ago urged me to take on this project. Because of various other commitments, however, I did not begin working on it seriously until 1997. Since then, I have accumulated many debts.

    My greatest debt is to Chris Drake, with whom I had long discussions about the texts, who took on a lion’s share of the translations, and, indeed, without whom this anthology would not exist. A number of scholars in Japan gave generously of their time, particularly Horikiri Minoru, Hori Nobuo, Ibi Takashi, Kawamoto Kōji, Kurozumi Makoto, Momokawa Takahiro, Nagashima Hiroaki, Ogata Tsutomu, Ōoka Makoto, Shirakura Kazuyoshi, Suzuki Jun, and Torii Akio. My gratitude goes as well to Lewis Cook, Andrew Gerstle, Howard Hibbett, Donald Keene, Lawrence Kominz, Lawrence Marceau, Mark Oshima, Thomas Rimer, Edward Seidensticker, Tomi Suzuki, and the anonymous readers who provided invaluable feedback.

    Many thanks go to my graduate students—particularly Anne Commons, Cheryl Crowley, Torquil Duthie, Peter Flueckiger, Christina Laffin, Herschel Miller, Jamie Newhard, Satoru Saitō, Tomoko Sakomura, Michael Scanlon, and Akiko Takeuchi, all of whom assisted with the manuscript at various stages. I-Hsien Wu checked the pinyin, and Wei Shang helped with the Chinese references. Special thanks go to Tomoko Sakomura, who did extensive research on and wrote the legends for the ukiyo-e prints and for the kana-zōshi, jōruri, late ukiyo-zōshi, literati, kibyōshi, gōkan, late yomihon, and late kabuki illustrations. Melissa McCormick and Barbara Ford assisted with the illustrations. I am grateful to Sakaguchi Akiko, who helped obtain for me the illustrations from the National Theatre in Tokyo. Barbara Adachi, who recently donated her jōruri collection to C. V. Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University, allowed me to use her superb photographs, and Amy Heinrich, the director of the library, provided much assistance with the photographs and other matters. Mihoko Miki, the Japanese studies librarian at the C. V. Starr Library, obtained important materials for this book. Yuiko Yampolsky helped me in many ways. Winifred Olsen was an invaluable editor and consultant for the first draft. Margaret B. Yamashita was a superb copy editor. Irene Pavitt at Columbia University Press provided invaluable advice.

    My thanks to all the translators for their contributions and patience with what turned out to be an enormously complex and time-consuming project and for the seemingly endless revisions.

    Most of all, my thanks to Shinchōsha for providing generous support to make these two volumes possible. Funding was also provided by Itoh Foundation (Tokyo) and the Daidō Life Foundation (Osaka).

    HISTORICAL PERIODS, MEASUREMENTS, AND OTHER MATTERS

    DISTANCE

    WEIGHTS

    CAPACITY

    AREA

    COINS

    DATES AND SEASONS

    The First through the Third Month of the lunar calendar (roughly the equivalent of February through April): spring

    The Fourth through the Sixth Month (roughly May through July): summer

    The Seventh through the Ninth Month (roughly August through October): autumn

    The Tenth through the Twelfth Month (roughly November through January): winter

    Conversion from the lunar to the solar calendar is complex. For example, the eighteenth day, Twelfth Month, in the third year of the Jōkyōera, was January 31, 1687.

    TERMS AND TITLES

    Whenever possible, a Japanese term or title is translated in its first appearance. Japanese literary terms are listed and defined in the index.

    ROMANIZATION

    The romanization of Japanese words is based on the Hepburn system, and the romanization of Chinese words follows the pinyin system.

    NAMES

    Names are given in the Japanese order, surname first, followed by personal or artistic name. After the first occurrence, artists and poets are referred to solely by their artistic name or pen name. Thus, Matsuo Bashō is referred to by his haikai name (haigō), Bashō, and not Matsuo, his family name.

    ABBREVIATIONS OF MODERN SERIAL EDITIONS

    Citations are followed by an abbreviation of the series title, the volume number, and the page. For example, NKBZ 51: 525 refers to page 525 of volume 51 of the Nihon koten bungaku zenshū.

    Provinces in the Early Modern Period

    Chapter 1

    EARLY MODERN JAPAN

    One of the most dramatic transformations in Japanese history was the transition from the medieval period (thirteenth to sixteenth century) to the early modern era (1600–1867), when literary and cultural paradigms gave birth to a whole new body of vernacular literature. During the seventeenth century, urban commoners (chōnin) emerged as an economically and culturally powerful class; mass education spread, especially through the domain (han) schools for samurai and the private schools (terakoya) for commoners; and printing was introduced—all of which led to the widespread production and consumption of popular literature, which became a commodity for huge markets. As a result, traditional Japanese and Chinese literary texts were widely read for the first time.¹

    Until the seventeenth century, literary texts had been shared through limited quantities of handwritten manuscripts, almost all of which belonged to a small group of aristocrats, priests, and high-ranking samurai. In the medieval period, traveling minstrels (biwa hōshi) had recited military epics such as The Tale of the Heike to a populace that could neither read nor write. Even most samurai were illiterate, as were farmers and craftsmen. But in the seventeenth century, with the creation of a new socioeconomic structure, the government promotion of education, and the spread of print capitalism, this situation changed drastically. By midcentury, almost all samurai—now the bureaucratic elite—were able to read, as were the middle to upper levels of the farmer, artisan, and merchant classes.

    The seventeenth century brought not only a dramatic rise in the standard of living for almost all levels of society but also a dramatic change in the nature of cultural production and consumption. In the medieval period, although provincial military lords were able to learn about the Heian classics from such traveling renga (classical linked verse) masters as Sōgi (1421–1502), the acquisition of these classical texts was limited to a relatively small circle of poet-priests and aristocrats, who were deeply rooted in the traditional culture of Kyoto. A monopoly—epitomized by the Kokin denju, the secret transmission of the Kokinshū (Anthology of Old and New Japanese Poems, ca. 905)—was established over a significant part of so-called refined culture, which was often passed on through carefully controlled lineages in one-to-one transmissions to the elected few. In the seventeenth century, by contrast, anyone who could afford to pay for lessons could hire a town teacher (machi shishō) in any one of the many arts or fields of learning. The transmission of learning was no longer dependent, as it had been in the medieval period, on the authority or patronage of large institutions such as Buddhist temples or powerful military lords. Such cultural activities as writing haikai poetry, singing nō (utai), and performing the tea ceremony (chanoyu) became not only available to commoners but highly commercialized.

    THE SHŌGUNATE AND THE DOMAINS

    The Tokugawa shōgunate (1603–1867), the third and last of three warrior governments (the first two being the Kamakura and Muromachi shōgunates), was founded by Tokugawa Ieyasu three years after he vanquished his rivals at the battle of Sekigahara in 1600. The first of fifteen successive Tokugawa shōguns, Ieyasu took the title of seii-tai shōgun (barbarian-subduing generalissimo), and his military government was referred to as the bakufu, generally translated as shōgunate. To control foreign trade and diplomacy, the shōgunate restricted many of the foreign contacts, under the seclusion (sakoku) edicts of 1633 to 1639, and to preserve social order at home, it attempted to establish a four-class system (shi-nō-kō-shō) in which samurai, farmer, artisan, and merchant were viewed as existing in a strict hierarchy.

    By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Japan’s population had reached nearly 30 million. Of this number, roughly 10 percent were samurai, who were organized along feudal hierarchical lines, with ties of vassalage linking every man to his lord and ultimately to the shōgun, who ostensibly stood at the top. Immediately under the shōgun were two groups of vassals: the daimyō, or domain (han) lords, and the shogun’s direct vassals. The total number of daimyō, to whom the shōgun entrusted most of the work of provincial administration, was around 260. At the top were the collateral houses (shinpan), or cadet houses of the Tokugawa, which eventually numbered 23, followed by the house (fudai) daimyō, who had been Tokugawa vassals before the battle of Sekigahara and who numbered 145 by the end of the eighteenth century. The remainder were outside (tozama) daimyō, who had gained eminence before the rise of the Tokugawa. Many of these daimyōruled their domains like private princes. To help maintain control over them, in the 1630s and 1640s the shōgunate institutionalized the alternate attendance (sankin kōtai) system, which required daimyōto reside in Edo in alternate years in attendance on the shōgun. To perform this obligation, a daimyōhad to maintain in Edo a residential estate (yashiki)—which consumed about 70 to 80 percent of his income—where his wife and children were permanently detained by the shōgunate as political hostages. The typical daimyōtraveled to the capital every other year with a large retinue, using the main highways, which were under shōgunal control, and expending a considerable amount of money. For example, Kaga Domain (now Ishikawa Prefecture), on the Japan Sea side, belonging to the Maeda family, with an income of 1,030,000 koku, required a retinue of 2,500 when the daimyōtraveled to Edo.

    The Tokugawa house itself formed the largest power bloc. The direct Tokugawa vassals were the hatamoto, the enfeoffed bannermen and the higher-ranking direct vassals; and the gokenin, the stipended housemen and the lower-ranking direct vassals. The hatamoto, about five thousand in number, occupying a position analogous to an officer corps in a standing army, drew annual stipends of at least one hundred koku and usually were descendants of warriors who had helped the Tokugawa before the battle of Sekigahara. Their civil positions ranged from grand chamberlain (sobayōnin), directly under the senior councillor (rōjū), to financial clerks. The gokenin, who numbered about twenty thousand in 1800, received annual stipends that were usually less than one hundred koku. Under the gokenin and the provincial daimyōcame the bulk of the samurai class.

    With a few exceptions, such as Tokugawa Tsunayoshi (r. 1680–1709), Tokugawa Yoshimune (r. 1716–1745), and Tokugawa Ienari (r. 1787–1837), who wielded nearly absolute power, the shōgun was usually overshadowed by others in the shōgunal administrative system, particularly the senior councillors, most often house daimyō who met in formal council and conducted national affairs, foreign relations, and control of the daimyō. From time to time, powerful senior councillors such as Tanuma Okitsugu (1719–1788), Matsudaira Sadanobu (1758–1829), and Mizuno Tadakuni (1794–1851) were able to dominate the council and control shōgunal policy.

    Politically and financially, the Tokugawa shōgunate was at its peak in the seventeenth century. Thereafter, many of its daimyō controls lost their efficacy, and its revenues began to decline. Periodic attempts were made to restore both authority and solvency, first with the Kyōhō Reforms (1716–1736), carried out by the eighth shōgun, Tokugawa Yoshimune; then with the Kansei Reforms (1787–1793), executed by the senior councillor Matsudaira Sadanobu; and finally with the Tenpō Reforms (1830–1844), administered by the senior councillor Mizuno Tadakuni. Although the Kyōhō Reforms temporarily restabilized the finances of the Tokugawa shōgunate, none of these measures had lasting success. They generally did, however, have a greater impact, in terms of censorship and other limitations, on cultural and literary production. Accordingly, the high points of early modern literature—the Genroku era (1688–1704), the Hōreki-Tenmei era (1751–1789), and the Bunka-Bunsei era (1804–1829)—tended to come precisely between these major reforms.

    THE SOCIAL HIERARCHY

    In order to strengthen their power and authority, the bakufu and the provincial domains created a rigid, hierarchical class society made up of samurai, farmers, artisans, and merchants, in descending order. (Nobility were treated separately, and Buddhist and Shinto priests were given a position equal to that of the samurai.) Below the four classes were outcasts called eta and hinin (nonpersons). By the end of the early modern period, about 75 percent of the population were farmers; 10 percent, samurai; about 7 to 8 percent, urban commoners; 2 percent, priests; and 4 percent, a miscellaneous mix. To reinforce this social hierarchy, extremely harsh rules were instituted. Only samurai were given surnames; they also had the right to cut down a farmer or chōnin for an insult. Every aspect of clothing and living was regulated to bring each individual within the class system.

    Among the samurai, a strict hierarchy was established as well, beginning at the top with the shōgun, daimyō, hatamoto, and gokenin and working down to the servants of middle-rank samurai families, each pledging absolute fidelity to his immediate superior. Similar hierarchies based on fidelity also existed in commoner society: between the main family (honke) and the branch family (bunke) in regard to kinship structure, between the master and the apprentice in artisan society, and between the employee and the employer in the merchant world. Strict laws governing residence and clothing were applied also to the eta, who were confined to farming and jobs related to dead animals (such as leather making) or criminals, and the hinin, who cleaned up waste and performed other demeaning tasks.

    The fundamental social unit in the early modern period was the ie (house), which was centered on the family and governed by the house head (kachō), with preferential treatment given to the eldest son, who usually inherited the property and became the next head of the house. The ie included nonblood relations such as employees and servants, and it was possible, and not uncommon, for an adopted heir with no blood tie to become the kachō. The younger sons, who did not inherit any property, frequently left the house to be adopted by a family that lacked sons. The house was the principal unit within each class category (samurai, farmer, artisan, and merchant), with each house pursuing a hereditary house occupation (kagyō). The members of the house considered themselves as both individuals and part of the larger social unit of the house, with a sense of obligation toward other members of the house similar to that between child and parent or retainer and lord.

    The income for a samurai house—which came from a stipend—was fixed according to hereditary criteria, leaving rōnin (masterless samurai) and second or third sons in a precarious financial situation. One result was that they often took up scholarship, literature, religion, or the arts, in which they could establish a house of their own. Many of the leading writers and scholars of the early modern period—such as Gion Nankai, Hiraga Gennai, and Koikawa Harumachi—were samurai who had either lost or become disillusioned with their inherited positions or were of extremely low status, with insufficient means for survival, and consequently sought alternative professions in scholarship and the arts.

    The social position of women was low. In a samurai family, a woman had no right to inherit the family name, property, or position. In the medieval period, when the samurai lived on the land as property owners and producers, samurai wives had an important position sustaining the household and family. But under the Tokugawa bakufu system, the samurai were no longer tied to the land, and so they gathered in the castle towns and became bureaucrats. The shōgun and the domain lords took over direct control of the farmers, who became the producers. In the seventeenth century, the samurai became similar to aristocrats in that they had male and female servants who took care of them. One consequence was that the role of the wife was reduced to that of a protected lady, with any power she might have had going entirely to her husband, who was master of the house. As the position of women declined and that of men rose, it became normal for the samurai, as head of the house, to have a mistress or to spend considerable time in the pleasure quarters.

    The literature of the early modern period is often thought to be the literature of and by urban commoners (chōnin). Although some writers—such as Ihara Saikaku, Santō Kyoden, and Shikitei Sanba—were from artisan or merchant families, an overwhelming number came from samurai families. Asai Ryōi, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Gion Nankai, Hattori Nankaku, Hiraga Gennai, Koikawa Harumachi, Jippensha Ikku, and Takizawa Bakin—to mention only the most prominent names—were from warrior families, usually ones in severe decline. Even those not normally associated with samurai, such as Matsuo Bashō, were descendants of warriors. The literature of the early modern period is thus as much by the samurai as by the chōnin. A few writers had a peasant background, perhaps the best known being Issa, a haikai poet. Buson was the son of a well-to-do farmer.

    THE ECONOMY AND THE THREE CITIES

    At the end of the sixteenth century, foundries for minting gold and silver coins were built, leading to a unified gold- and silver-based currency. In 1636, the bakufu opened a foundry for minting zeni, or bronze coins, which provided the basis of a common currency. The bakufu and the daimyō, who were in need of cash, established large warehouses (kurayashiki) in cities such as Osaka, Edo, Tsuruga, and Ōtsu, to which merchants transported and in which they sold the rice and goods stored in the warehouses. The domain lords distributed the rice grown by their farmers to their vassals and sent the remainder to the warehouses in these large cities, where they exchanged it for hard currency which was used to pay the domain’s expenses. These merchants, referred to as warehouse people (kuramoto), also extended loans to the domain lords, thus becoming a key part of the domain’s financial structure. In the Genroku era, this system prospered, particularly in Osaka, which became known as the kitchen of the country because it contained as many as ninety-seven domain warehouses. Ideally positioned, Osaka became the national trading center for goods from the provinces, mainly rice, the country’s most important staple. As a result, gigantic sums of currency circulated through Osaka and provided enormous profits for the city’s merchants.

    Before the mid-seventeenth century, when the supply routes and the financial (currency exchange) institutions still were inadequate, a special class of urban commoners—like those involved in minting gold and silver, managing the domain warehouses, and trading in Nagasaki—were the exclusive beneficiaries of the new currency and market economy, in which fortunes were made through the accumulation of capital. In 1671/1672, however, Kawamura Zuiken (1618–1699), receiving orders from the bakufu to create shipping routes for its annual rice tributes, successfully created an eastern shipping lane, from the Ōshū (the northeastern region of Honshū) to Edo and, more important, a western shipping lane from Sakata, at the northern end of the Japan Sea coast, down to Osaka. These new shipping lanes formed a national trade network that revolutionized the economy and made the Kamigata (Kyoto-Osaka) region the center of the new economy. In 1660, Yagobei of Tennōji was the only currency dealer in Osaka to exchange the currency from one part of the country for that from another, but ten years later, both a system of exchange dealers and a zeni exchange had been established. The 1670s through the 1680s gave rise to new, more financially powerful urban commoners and to such family businesses as the Kōnoike, Mitsui, and Sumitomo, which later became the huge Kamigata financial cartels.

    The capital that accumulated at this time in the hands of Kyoto-Osaka chōnin also indirectly affected the farm villages in the provinces. The urban commoners hired the second and third sons of farming families as assistants who would work to become assistant managers and then, after many years of service, would set up their own business, thereby becoming members of the middle- or upper-class chōnin. These middle- to upper-class chōnin enjoyed such arts as waka (thirty-one-syllable verse), haikai, nō, kyōgen (comic drama), chanoyu, and kadō (incense). The vitality of the economy at this time was a major reason for the flourishing of literature and arts.

    A salient feature of the late seventeenth century was the growth of an urban culture. The deliberate policy of the Tokugawa bakufu to place the samurai class in the regional castle towns and to force the daimyō to maintain residences in the new capital of Edo, combined with the new transportation networks and commercial infrastructure, resulted in the rapid development of the cities. Particularly significant was the enormous growth of Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto, where the local domain products and the rice that the daimyō collected as taxes were sent and stored, particularly in Edo and Osaka, where they were exchanged for currency. To facilitate the circulation of goods, special markets sprang up in the cities: a rice market at Dōjima in Osaka, fish markets at Zakoba in Osaka and Nihonbashi in Edo, and vegetable markets at Tenma in Osaka and Kanda in Edo. This commerce led, in turn, to the development of chains of wholesalers, middlemen, and retailers.

    Edo was the home of the daimyō, hatamoto, and gokenin and their retainers and servants. Merchants and artisans gathered in Edo to supply this substantial population, which was a large source of their income. After the Great Meireki Fire of 1657, which destroyed most of Edo, including Edo Castle, the city was redesigned and reconstructed, leading to further expansion and growth. By the mid-eighteenth century, Edo had become a center for not only consumption but also commerce and production. In 1634 the population of Edo was about 150,000; by 1721 it had more than tripled to exceed 500,000; and by 1873 the inhabitants of Edo numbered nearly 600,000. (By contrast, the population of Paris in 1801 was 548,000.) Unlike Edo, which was populated by samurai and its supporters, Osaka was largely a merchant city, with a population of more than 380,000 in 1721. Its streets lined with domain warehouses, Osaka became in the seventeenth century the trade and distribution center for not only western Japan but also the entire nation and, by the early eighteenth century, had a population of more than 350,000. Kyoto, which had been the cultural capital of Japan for more than six hundred years and was the site of the imperial palace, had a thriving craft industry that produced dyed cloth and other wares. In addition, Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples were concentrated in Kyoto, giving it a religious character and making it a common destination for pilgrims from around the country. Nonetheless, the population of Kyoto, reflecting its shrinking economic and political importance, gradually decreased, from 410,000 in 1634 to 340,000 in 1721 to less than 240,000 in 1873.

    THE LICENSED QUARTERS

    The licensed quarters, particularly those in the three largest cities, played a major role in Japan’s early modern culture and literature. In a deliberate effort to bring prostitution under control and to separate it from society at large, the bakufu consolidated the existing brothels and placed them in designated licensed quarters (yūkaku), which were usually located on the periphery of the large cities, surrounded by a wall or moat, as in the case of Shimabara and Yoshiwara. Because of their construction, they were popularly referred to as the kuruwa (literally, castle wall). The licensed quarter had only one large gate, which controlled the clientele entering and prevented the courtesans from leaving at will. The bakufu eventually designated roughly twenty such areas throughout the country, of which the largest and most noteworthy were Shimabara in Kyoto, Yoshiwara in Edo, and Shinmachi in Osaka, followed by Maruyama in Nagasaki.

    In 1589 the shōgun, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, gathered together the dispersed brothels in Kyoto, the capital, in a single area called Yanagi-machi. In 1640, under the Tokugawa shōgunate, the houses were moved to the western part of the city, dubbed the Shimabara. A similar licensed quarter called Shinmachi, whose facilities were unrivaled throughout Japan, was built in Osaka. In contrast to Kyoto’s Shimabara, which served mainly upper-class and well-educated gentlemen, Shinmachi, which was situated near the provincial daimyō storehouses and the commercial port, served local wealthy merchants as well as those who came for business from all over Japan. Then, around 1618 the bakufu established the Yoshiwara licensed quarter in the Nihonbashi area of Edo. After the Great Meireki Fire of 1657, Yoshiwara was moved to the Asakusa area where, like Shimabara and Shinmachi, it became a major center of urban culture. The daimyō and the hatamoto stationed in Edo spent lavishly at Yoshiwara, as did wealthy townsmen.

    Throughout most of the early modern period, the licensed quarter and the theater district were the two major entertainment centers, and they were closely connected. The kabuki, for example, drew its subject matter from the licensed quarters, and ukiyo-e (literally, pictures of the floating world) depicted courtesans and kabuki actors. Equally important, the licensed quarters became gathering places for intellectuals, artists, and performers, whose work had a profound impact on contemporary literature, drama, music, and art as well as on the fashion and customs of the times. During the 1770s and 1780s, as the center of popular culture increasingly shifted from Kyoto-Osaka to Edo, there was an explosion of popular literature in Edo, including the sharebon (books of wit and fashion) such as The Playboy Dialect (Yūshi hōgen, 1770), which described the ideal of tsū, or connoisseurship of the licensed quarters, specifically that of Yoshiwara. In contrast to the wealthy merchant and daimyō customers who had supported the golden age of high courtesan culture in the seventeenth century, the customers in Edo included petty merchants and middle- or lower-level samurai like the one found in The Playboy Dialect.

    THE COURTESANS AND FEMALE ENTERTAINERS

    The most general terms for women who worked in the licensed quarters were yūjo (literally, women who play or entertain) and jorō (women). Another general term was keisei (literally, castle toppler, a Chinese term alluding to the power of a woman to bring down a kingdom), which came to refer to high-ranking courtesans. In the licensed quarter, these women were arranged in a strictly hierarchical order that reflected their status and price.

    Until the 1750s, tayō, a term generally used for a superior artist, was the highest rank of courtesan. Tayū were highly trained and educated performers skilled in such arts as music, dance, poetry, calligraphy, tea ceremony, and flower arrangement. Because there were very few, access to them was very difficult. Tayū could also reject men, who could see them only by special appointment. It is said that out of a thousand kamuro (preteenage attendants) in training, only three or five ever were elevated to the rank of tayū.²

    Immediately below the tayū were the tenjin, called kōshi in Yoshiwara. Although kōshi also were considered to be of high rank and highly skilled, their price was 30 to 50 percent less than that of a tayū. They sat in the latticed parlors, where prospective customers could view them from outside, hence the name kōshi (lattice). In 1668 a new system, which incorporated hitherto illegal prostitutes, was established in Yoshiwara, adding the ranks of sancha (powdered tea) and umecha (plum tea) beneath those of tayū and kōshi. The sancha were originally teahouse waitresses who worked as prostitutes and did not reject clients, but under the new system their status rose. Their services cost half or less than what a kōshi charged.

    By the 1760s, the situation had changed significantly. The tayū and kōshi had disappeared in Yoshiwara and been supplanted by the oiran, the highest-ranking courtesans. The highest oiran were the yobidashi (literally, persons on call), who could be seen only by making an appointment through a teahouse. The next level of oiran was the chūsan, who were displayed for selection in the latticed parlor. The third level, originally beneath that of an oiran, was the zashikimochi (parlor holder), who had her own parlor and anteroom, and the heyamochi (room holder), who had only one room, where she lived and met her clients.³

    In the late eighteenth century, the oiran, like the tayū before them, were typically accompanied by kamuro and shinzō (literally, newly launched boat), who were apprentices from fourteen to twenty years of age. In Yoshiwara, a kamuro became a shinzō at the age of fourteen. The kamuro and shinzō took lessons in the arts, trained to become courtesans, and performed various tasks for their elder sisters (anejorō), who looked after them. The shinzō who attended the highest-ranking oiran sometimes entertained a client with talk and music until the oiran arrived.

    In the seventeenth century, when customers wanted to visit a high-ranking yūjo, they did not go to her residence but instead went to a teahouse and made an appointment to visit a place called an ageya (performance house). In Yoshiwara, the ageya lined Nakanochō, the main street of the licensed quarter. At the ageya, the customers were entertained by geisha and professional jesters and were served food and drink while they waited for the tayū, who arrived with her retinue in an elaborate procession called the ageya-iri, or entering the performance house. By 1760 the ageya system, along with the tayū and kōshi, had disappeared in Yoshiwara (although it continued in Osaka until the end of the nineteenth century) and been replaced by a cheaper system: customers went to a guiding teahouse (hikitejaya) where they were entertained until they were taken to see the high-ranking courtesan at a courtesan residence (yūjoya).

    The geisha (skilled person) was a professional entertainer in one or more of the traditional Japanese arts such as music, dance, and storytelling. The town (machi) geisha worked freelance at parties outside pleasure quarters, and the quarter (kuruwa) geisha entertained at parties in the pleasure quarters. The role of the quarter geisha (both men and women), who first appeared in Osaka in the 1710s and in Edo in the 1750s, became more important as the artistic talents of the high-ranking courtesans declined. Initially there were more male geisha (sometimes referred to as hōkan, who were often jesters and storytellers) than female geisha in Yoshiwara, but by 1800 female geisha outnumbered the men by three to one, and the term eventually applied only to women, as it does today. Geisha were performers, not prostitutes, although in the late Edo period, the line between these callings was often crossed.

    Further down the social scale were the illegal courtesans who worked outside the licensed quarters. Those in unlicensed quarters, such as Fukagawa and Shinagawa in Edo, also were arranged in ranks. At the bottom of the scale were the various unlicensed prostitutes not connected to any quarter. They ranged from bath women (yuna), who washed and entertained bathers, to streetwalkers (tsujikimi) and night hawks (yotaka), who solicited on the streets.

    LITERACY, SCHOLARSHIP, AND PRINTING

    Through the sixteenth century, the average samurai was illiterate, as were farmers and urban commoners. But with the transformation of the samurai from warriors to bureaucrats, politicians, and the social elite, education became a primary concern. A school was established in Edo for the hatamoto; the various domains created domain schools for their own samurai; and by the mid-seventeenth century, almost all samurai were literate. In contrast to their medieval counterparts, the new Tokugawa rulers adopted a policy of rule by law and morality—by letter rather than force—a policy that required mass education. With the introduction of a currency-based economy, a knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic became essential to farmers, artisans, and merchants, and as a result, private schools (terakoya) sprang up in both the cities and the farming villages. By the middle of the seventeenth century, middle- to upper-class chōnin and farmers were literate, and by the late seventeenth century, when Matsuo Bashō and Ihara Saikaku were writing, the audience of readers was large.

    Earlier popular literature—such as The Tale of the Heike and the Taiheiki—often were texts orally presented (katarimono) by raconteurs and blind minstrels. But with the spread of literacy, both samurai and commoners had access to a literate culture, including various forms of refined or elite literature (such as waka, renga, monogatari, kanshi, and kanbun, which earlier had been the exclusive possession of the nobility, priests, and elite samurai) and a variety of new popular literature. Perhaps the most important form of popular literature in the seventeenth century was haikai (popular linked verse), which in the Muromachi period had been an adjunct to renga (classical linked verse). The Puppy Collection (Enoko shū), a collection of haikai edited in 1633 by two Kyoto urbanites, Matsue Shigeyori and Nonoguchi Ryūhō (disciples of Matsunaga Teitoku), was the first anthology of poetry by commoners.

    Haikai masters such as Matsunaga Teitoku (1571–1653), who were teachers and specialists in waka and renga, wrote commentaries on the classics to make them accessible to their students, who needed a fundamental knowledge of the classics to be able to compose haikai. Teitoku, for example, wrote influential commentaries on Essays in Idleness (Tsuzuregusa) and One Hundred Poets, One Hundred Poems (Hyakunin isshu), while his noted disciple Kitamura Kigin compiled commentaries on The Tale of Genji, the First Eight Imperial Waka Anthologies (Hachidaishū), Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing (Wakan rōeishū), and Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book. Knowledge of the Japanese classics, which had been socially restricted through the sixteenth century, now became the foundation for writing haikai and created a mass audience that could appreciate such complex and allusive writers as Saikaku and Bashō.

    With the exception of some Buddhist sutras, Japanese literature before the seventeenth century existed only in the form of hand-copied manuscripts. Then, using the printing technology imported by Christian missionaries from Europe, a romanized version of Isoho monogatari, a Japanese translation of Aesop’s Fables, was printed in 1594. Inspired by this development, the first shōgun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, began printing important Confucian, military, and administrative texts in the early seventeenth century, using movable type. In Kyoto, Hon’ami Kōetsu (1558–1637), a court artist, with the help of a calligraphy disciple, Suminokura Sōan (1571–1632), who lived in Saga, printed luxury editions of thirteen different texts, including The Tales of Ise, an abridged version of The Tale of Genji, the Shinkokinshū, and Essays in Idleness. Although they represented a major step in the canonization process, these private editions (commonly referred to as the Saga, Kōetsu, or Suminokura texts) were not available to general readers.

    In the 1630s, movable type, which could be used for kanji (Chinese characters) but not for the cursive kana (Japanese syllabic writing), was replaced with multiple-use woodblocks, which were more suitable for reproducing Japanese texts. At about the same time, commercial publishing houses opened, mainly in Kyoto. The result was that by the 1660s, major premodern Japanese texts, key Chinese texts, medical books, calendars, and dictionaries, along with the new vernacular fiction and haikai handbooks, were being published and sold in bookstores and publishing houses in the three largest cities. With the rise of the publishing industry—which had become fully developed by the time Ihara Saikaku published Life of a Sensuous Man in 1682—prose fiction acquired a fixed size and length. The commercialization of literature also meant that publication was based on an expected profit, for which the author was promised a certain amount of money. This development gave birth to the professional writer, who had to produce a certain number of pages within a set period of time and to write for a mass audience. As a result, this tended to lead—with the exception of works by a handful of writers and in special genres—to literature of low quality. In addition, the mass circulation of literature caused literary works to become the object of government censorship, which had a further negative effect on the range and quality. During each of the three major bakufu reforms—Kyōhō (1716–1736), Kansei (1787–1793), and Tenpō (1830–1844)—the bakufu issued orders to stop certain types of publications. Works that touched on the Tokugawa family and other sensitive matters or that contained erotic material were banned, and writers who violated these rules could be imprisoned.

    WOMEN, READERSHIP, AND LITERATURE

    Compared with the Heian period, in which there were many prominent women writers, the early modern period produced almost no women writers in the field of vernacular fiction. The only exception was Arakida Reijo (1732–1806), who wrote historical tales (monogatari) and Heian court romances between 1772 and 1781 and was a contemporary of Motoori Norinaga, Takebe Ayatari, and Ueda Akinari. The same is true in the field of drama. Legend has it that Ono no Otsū was the author of the Muromachi-period Tale of Prince Jōruri (Jōruri hime monogatari), considered to be the origin of jōruri narration, but there are no known women playwrights of jōruri (puppet plays) or kabuki. The only field in which women had some presence as writers was in poetry, particularly waka and haikai, and in literary diaries and travel literature, often by the same authors. Women did, however, play a major role as characters in drama and fiction and became an important audience for both drama and fiction, which had more readers than did waka and haikai.

    The audience for ukiyo-zōshi (books of the floating world), of which Ihara Saikaku’s writings are the most famous and that dominated vernacular fiction from the late seventeenth century until the middle of the eighteenth century, appears to have been overwhelmingly male. With the exception of works such as Women’s Water Margin (Onna suikoden, 1783) which was aimed at female readers, the late-eighteenth-century yomihon (reading books) in the Kyoto-Osaka region were targeted at male readers as well. However, in the nineteenth century, when the audience for fiction expanded, two major genres of fiction, gōkan (bound picture books) and ninjōbon (books of sentiment and romance), catered to a largely female audience, and Tamenaga Shunsui, the principal writer of ninjōbon, had an assistant writer who was a woman.

    In the eighteenth century, literacy rates for women appear not to have been high, even for those who were economically well off, and even literate women lagged significantly behind men in their level of education. Japanese classics such as Hyakunin isshu, Kokinshū, The Tales of Ise, The Tale of Genji, and A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari) are said to have been the basic reading for women in the Edo period, but these works, particularly the longer ones, were generally read in digest form with pictures, such as Child Genji (Osana Genji, 1665), a popular kana-zōshi (kana booklet) by Nonoguchi Ryūho, and Women’s Genji, Lessons for Life (Onna Genji kyōkun kagami, 1713), which combined plot summaries of each chapter of The Tale of Genji with lessons from Record of Treasures for Women (Onna chōhōki), a woman’s guide to everyday life. Ethical textbooks such as Women’s Great Learning (Onna daigaku), which reinforced conservative Confucian values, were used in schools, while illustrated digests such as Lessons and Good Manners for Women (Onna kyōkun shitsukekata), which combined didactic tales with commentary on classical stories, were the most popular among women.

    Of particular interest here is the fact that theater, kabuki, and jōruri, in which the difference in educational background was not so serious a handicap, were extremely popular among women in the Edo period. In contrast to kabuki, whose scripts were for internal consumption only, the texts for jōruri were published at the time of the first performance and were sometimes followed by illustrated, easy-to-read digests, thereby making jōruri an important form of popular literature. Jōruri chanting also became a popular practice among amateurs. Indeed, when the numbers of texts and performances, including kabuki performances of jōruri plays, are combined, jōruri may have had the widest audience of any artistic genre in the Edo period, and women accounted for a large percentage.

    In his jōruri, Chikamatsu generally casts the female protagonist as a person who loves her husband and makes every sacrifice for him. A similar type appears in prose fiction. For example, in Ueda Akinari’s Reed-Choked House, from his Tales of Moonlight and Rain (Ugetsu monogatari), Miyagi waits faithfully for her husband and endures difficulties to the point of sacrificing her own life. Many eighteenth-century jōruri depict women who must suffer as a result of their husband’s infidelity or lack of concern, although the actions of these men are rarely punished. In eighteenth-century society, the position of a woman was inferior to that of her husband, who had the right to take her life for any transgression, thus making it difficult for her to protest. Women in jōruri rarely commit adultery, and when they do, as in Chikamatsu’s Drums of the Waves of Horikawa, the adultery is the result of accident and circumstance. But these female characters are not simply exemplaries of Confucian self-sacrifice and devotion; instead, they reveal the extremely difficult position of women. Significantly, Ueda Akinari portrays another type of woman in Tales of Moonlight and Rain, a type introduced largely from Chinese vernacular fiction—the strong woman who, feeling betrayed by the man whom she has loved, takes revenge, as Isora does in Caldron of Kibitsu. This kind of angry, vengeful woman does not appear in eighteenth-century jōruri but marks a new development in Japanese fiction and emerges in such nineteenth-century kabuki and fiction as Oiwa in Tsuruya Nanboku’s Ghost Stories at Yotsuya.

    WARRIOR AND URBAN COMMONER ATTITUDES

    Much of the thought and writing of the early modern period tends to be this-worldly in outlook, affirming life in this world and looking forward to future improvement, compared with the other-worldly attitudes of the medieval period. The this-worldly perspective was reflected in the literature of the period: in the focus on contemporary society and in the pursuit of hedonistic pleasures. Warrior attitudes were reinforced by Confucian ethics, with its emphasis on humaneness (jin) and rightness (gi), and so tended to be highly moralistic, self-sacrificing, and concerned with honor and obligation. Chōnin attitudes, formed from the new commercial and urban economy, were oriented toward the present and physical needs.

    The ethical system that emerged and was supported by the bakufu was fundamentally Confucian, and at the base of the Confucian virtues were filial piety (toward parents) and loyalty (toward the master or ruler), which gave the bakufu an ethical basis for reinforcing both the status hierarchy and the hereditary system. From the bakufu’s perspective, the greatest threat to this morality and social structure was the notion of individual love or desire. The bakufu thus passed a law stating that a person who falls in love with the daughter of the master of the house can, at the request of the master, be executed, exiled, or, at the very least, bodily removed. Those youths who did not obey their parents and fell in love could be legally disowned. If the husband discovered his wife in an act of adultery, he had the right to kill her on the spot. If she ran away with a lover, the master could capture her, have her tied to a stake, and stabbed.

    The attitudes of the warrior and of the urban commoner overlapped and influenced each other. Although samurai society was built on a lord-retainer relationship, with the disappearance of war and the need for income beyond the monthly stipend, particularly for lower-ranking samurai, traditional values and structures began to collapse. The pleasure seeking that marked wealthy chōnin life infiltrated samurai life, and the samurai became interested in the customs and culture of the urban commoners, such as pipe smoking, jōruri, kabuki, and kouta (popular songs), and in the licensed quarters, in ransoming prostitutes and committing double suicide. And with their finances falling apart, the samurai turned to wealthy chōnin for support as adopted sons.

    Likewise, samurai values—for example, the notion of lord and vassal and the ideas of duty and loyalty—deeply infiltrated chōnin life: the relationship between the employer and the employee in a merchant business, or between master and apprentice in an artisan house, became infused with the notion of duty/obligation (giri) and service (hōkō). As commoners became wealthy and had more leisure time, they indulged in cultural activities that earlier had been the province of elite samurai—nō, tea, and ikebana (flower arranging)—and took Buddhist names (ingo), as samurai did. More important, the ideals of the samurai as they were transformed by Confucianism were reflected in the popular literature and drama of the period. Jōruri, or puppet theater, also was centered on the notions of duty as they became entangled and conflicted with love and human passion (ninjō). Much of kabuki as well as popular fiction took the form of samurai narratives, succession disputes in great samurai houses (oiesōdō), or vendettas (kataki-uchi), such as that found in Chūshingura: The Storehouse of Loyal Retainers, with the samurai spirit and values usually winning in the end. It was only toward the end of the early modern period, in the nineteenth century, that a more degenerate image of the samurai, no doubt reflecting their deteriorating financial condition, appeared on stage

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