Reflections on Ihara Saikaku’s Five Women Who Loved Love

Before “falling in love” was an option, most people in many different cultural contexts could only “follow in love;” follow the dictates of class dynamics, of religious stricture, of clan loyalty, of permissible sexuality, and of a broad body of concerns that have brought us to a still-evolving present. It is why Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet or the novellas of Cervantes intrigue us; human will and desire clash against the boundaries of propriety, in oftentimes heart-wrenching or inspiring ways. Ihara Saikaku’s novella collection, Five Women Who Loved Love, honors these explorations in a manner not unlike that of Giovanni Boccaccio. The portly Italian grew up in the thriving cities of Napoli and Firenze in the 14th century, taking as the subject of his literature everyone from the gods to the humble. His masterpiece The Decameron bears witness to the ravages of the 1348 plague and attempts to preserve all aspects of the human in a collection of one hundred novellas. Mercantile society met by disaster allowed for a new way of being, a fact which his ribald and spicy novellas can attest to. Saikaku too grew up in 17th century Osaka which became a haven of the mercantile and the frenetically urban. Theaters, brothels, and market stalls mingled with stately homes and rich tradition. Saikaku envelops this world, reflecting in five novellas the forms which romantic desire took in his transitional society.

“The Story of Seijuro in Himeji” recalls a pantheon of yet-to-be literary dandies that make adultery their sole concern: Don Juan (Tirso de Molina, Molière), Le Vicomte de Valmont (Choderlos de Laclos), Rodolphe (Gustave Flaubert), Eugene Onegin (Alexander Pushkin), Andrea Sperelli (Gabriele D’Annunzio). Despite surface-level associations between these creatures of novels/theatres, we must bear in mind Saikaku’s cultural and literary conditions. While it is true that Saikaku is as detailed a portraitist as these writers, the hot-collared Seijuro still must be light enough to fit in a novella. Seijuro suavely seduces the women of Murotsu, filling numerous reliquaries with the tokens he has garnered. When Seijuro’s first true love, the courtesan Minakawa, kills herself, the reader is prompted to consider the possibility that beyond the death of this first love, Seijuro will rein in his amorous itinerancy. Enter the young, naïve Onatsu, one of the infinite superlative beauties who, like Tatiana and Cécile Volanges, rejects Seijuro for his licentiousness. And just like these ladies, Onatsu begins to fall for Seijuro only when others (specifically the letters of Seijuro’s past lovers) suggest his potential as a partner. The epistolarity of this fall cannot be ignored either, in light of the Romantic attraction with letter exchange as discreet, erotically charged. Parting paper folds and reading delicate words undoes much. In a possibly Girardian slant, Onatsu comes to desire Seijuro exactly because he is proved to be a desirable individual (or rather he seems so), rather than for any directly attractive qualities he possesses. Because he is wanted by someone else, he becomes more desirable.

The third scene of the novella, the picnic, was the first section to remind me of Boccaccio. As his entourage drinks and makes merry, Seijuro distracts everyone with some hired performers and slips behind a curtained enclosure with Onatsu where “the two clasped each other tight.” One may consider the bold Bartolomea of II.10 who tells her cuckolded ex-husband that “qui Paganino tutta la notte mi tiene in braccio e stringemi e mordemi, e come egli mi conci Dio vel dica per me” (here Paganino all night long holds me in his arms, and tangles up with me and bites me, and how he roughs me up God himself shall say for me). This spirit of lovemaking and spicy rapport could feel both natural and shocking even today. Was Saikaku perhaps saying that we, the readers, are allowed the unique pleasure of seeing the real show of beauty, ie the flowering of love? Not voyeurism, but how amidst the often petty charades of this world we come to see that this young love is truer than the charades and false tumbling of the nearby performers? The novella sets the tone for the proceeding four novellas and signals the recurrence of principal tensions that punctuate the love affairs: class discordance, financial ruin, suicidal despair, jealousy, and one's relationship to the divine.

“The Barrelmaker Brimful of Love” begins with a pithy phrase that feels equally appropriate in Latin as in the translated English: “Life is short; love is long.” (Vita brevis; amor longus). The Latin is like a serendipitous synthesis of Horace and Ovid. It is an immortal subject, found also in Neruda’s poem “Puedo escribir los versos más tristes” when he writes “Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido” (So short is love, and so long is forgetting). Similar to Onatsu of the prior tale, Osen is of surpassing beauty and “knew nothing of the ways of love.” This quickly changes as an old lady acts as a go-between (Celestina, the Nurse of Romeo and Juliet) and sets the barrelmaker (cooper) with Osen. As a novellist, Saikaku like Boccaccio plays with the limits of popular culture’s prejudices regarding the sexes. While Osen and the cooper seem happily married, Saikaku notes that “Alas, however, most women are fickle creatures. Captivated by some delicious love story, or deluded by the latest dramatic productions of Dotom-bari [the theatre section of Osaka] their souls are caught up in giddy corruption.” Compare this literary, performative “giddy corruption” to that sustained by the theatregoers in the previous novella or that which we readers may feel while reading; are we too not “corrupted?” Let us also consider the moment in which Osen is accused (falsely) of adultery by another woman and decides to truly seduce the woman’s husband, Chozaemon. This ends with tragically for all parties, something which Saikaku attributes to the lower classes and which “never ever happens among the upper classes.” If abandoning oneself to fleeting passion was indeed a sin, more Renaissance men of Boccaccio and Saikaku would end up in the second circle. With Japanese mores in mind (as much as my scant knowledge allows), I will contend that the sin of Osen lies in her betrayal of matrimonial good faith not as a result of lust but of the jealous chitterings that imperil her family’s social status. Perhaps it is giri to the name of her husband. But the theme itself, with natural variation, is very common in the novelistic; Cervantes’ "La fuerza de la sangre" shows honor to be a specific system of social connections rather than a vague sense of responsibility. The authors straddle preconceived sensibilities that judge women as the locus of sin and the locus of redemption; women tempt and succumb to temptation yet are the true vectors of life (since they birth us all and are more often than not the centers around which narratives are made); See Helen, Beatrice, Laura, Dulcinea. Or perhaps the point is that one does not see them. A genius revision (or perhaps interlocution) on the part of a modern poet, Derek Walcott, confronts the mode of abstracting women into superlative and abstractions when he writes:

...Why not see Helen

as the sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow,

swinging her plastic sandals on that beach alone,

as fresh as the sea-wind? Why make the smoke a door?

If Saikaku seems to rebuke Osen (or any of the ladies) for being paradoxically pure and easily caught in “giddy corruption,” he does affirm their right to agency. Herein lies the seed of his humanist sentiment; He plays with the reader’s sensitivity to her class, her gender, her affections as they exist within the confines of a still feudalistic society. Likewise he plays with the reader’s ability to recognize that they too are caught in the very same floating world of corruptions.

The third novella “What the Seasons Brought the Almanac Maker” is one of the more structurally complex novellas of the collection. I say this because, although readers by now have come to anticipate beautiful people, seduction, dandies, and marriage, these motifs are situated over an interlocking series of narratives. A key tool in this endeavor is the use of foreshadowing; the title makes clear that an almanac maker will be a central character, yet the first page describes the beauty of the almanac maker’s wife (only after remarking that the wagtail bird taught humans and gods how to make love). Surprisingly Saikaku then details how she was seduced/ seduced others. As it is, the first scene of action centers on a group of rakes and their playing at being Paris.

Saikaku goes to great lengths to qualify his colloquy of rakes as skilled, veteran judges of beauty. They describe the women in passing with particular attention to their posture, attendants, fashion, class, age, and physical attributes. Almost needless to say, they are only concerned with physical beauty. Saikaku ridicules their draconic needling, likewise jabbing himself when he describes the girl who becomes the almanac maker’s wife whose “face was perfectly beautiful, and I shall not tire you with needless details.” However, one of the “needless” details of another woman caught my attention. On the sleeve of the woman is a quote from Yoshida no Kaneyoshi’s work Tsurezure-Gusa:

To sit alone in the lamplight with a good book spread out before you and hold intimate conversation with men of unseen generations -- such is a pleasure beyond compare.

What truth, what beauty. And the judgement is that this woman does not earn the apple because she was missing a tooth. Their ignorance would be more banal were I not so entranced by the reference, convinced by literary beauty, its synthesis of dreamlike affect and juxtaposed with a meaningless jostled tooth.

It is from this judgement game that we are introduced to the almanac maker’s future wife Modern Komachi, aka Osan (very similar to Osen and has me recall Onatsu). He, of course, is madly in love with her and goes about establishing their household with care. Business takes him away and the advisor Moemon (recalls Chozaemon?) is brought in. The illiterate maidservant Rin falls for Moemon while Osan, being literate, acts as a go-between by means of letters. Finding Moemon clumsy, Osan decides to prank him by inviting him to bed, taking Rin’s place in secret only to have the maids run in and shame him. This ends contrary to her expectations and she laments:

There is no way to keep this from others. From now on I may as well abandon myself to this affair, risk my life, ruin my reputation, and take Moemon as my companion on a journey to death.

This she does, staging an elaborate false suicide and escaping with Moemon. As per the aforementioned ethical causality of Saikaku, this sin necessarily must be punished.

Easily “The Greengrocer’s Daughter with a Bundle of Love” was my favorite of the five novellas. Saikaku the landscape painter emerges as he evokes the quaint December bustle of Edo during New Year’s: “peddlers selling firewood, pine nuts, dried chestnuts, and giant lobsters… This was indeed a season which gave tradesmen no rest.” It is a grim disaster to then have this activity interrupted by a tremendous conflagration, prompting the most-beautiful Oshichi and her parents to escape to the Kichijo-ji temple. It is here that she encounters and falls for “Sir Onogawa Kichisaburo, a man of fine ancestry and a knight without a lord. He is a gentle, sensitive sort of person.” One of the natural appeals of this novella comes from this first scene that, to me, is so sensitive to mass tragedy, as the plague in Boccaccio that necessitates a reappraisal of society’s values. Disaster has forced absolute social upheaval on the people, and mores are by circumstance redefined. People flaunt their underwear in front of the Buddha, “wives were stepping over their husbands,” and the sheltered Oshichi was able to indulge in loving acts. The romance really is so sweet, so touching. She falls for gentle Kichisaburo first and, when taking a splinter from his palm, affectionately holds his hand. Another aspect of this love is this tentative romantic posturing made by the inexperienced youths. It is heartwarming in that it invites readers to reconsider the small graces inherent in nascent love, that we may recreate them.

The scene of their union titled “Spring thunder shakes out someone in summer underwear” is at times comic, at times eminently beautiful, but always capable in evoking pathos. When leaving her chamber, Oshichi steps over a knowing maid who passes her many tissues. The young disciple guarding Kichisaburo’s chamber mockingly calls out, “Hey, Oshichi has come to have a good time.” I suppose it is fair to be somewhat reserved in saying these incidents are comic; if Oshichi was exposed, her social disgrace would likely necessitate ritual suicide. Nonetheless, the young disciple does demonstrate in a lighthearted manner that even men of the cloth are not immune to desires when he extorts a bribe from Oshichi: money, playing cards, and candy. But these are moments to make us laugh; let us look at the moments to make us love.

To represent the beauty of Saikaku’s storytelling, I must quote a significant excerpt:

Love-making was indeed slow and awkward at the start. Together at last, they found themselves weeping in confusion and embarrassment… Then she bit him on the neck and in a moment they were in the throes of love. Afterward, covering each other with their sleeves to keep warm in their dampness, they resolved to be in love like this forever. But soon day broke. The bell of Yanaka rang busily and a strong breeze flew in through the nettle trees of Fukuage. “It is so annoying. We have hardly had time to warm up the bed and must part already. The world is wide enough -- there should be one land where night lasts throughout the day.

It was a futile hope...

In my opinion, Saikaku captures the frenetic dynamism of love along with the static peace of embrace. Like a child gifting another a butterfly, Saikaku gives these lines to us. The concluding line, though, sobers us. Just as Oshichi and Kichisaburo must release the butterfly of their love to the sharpness of reality, so too must we release all pretense that its flight is intransitory. As Oshichi later laments, “It is all a dream, an illusion.” In Saikaku, especially in this novella, he affirms the importance of Amida Buddha’s salvation: life is an illusion, and attachment but suffering. Though I speak to Orpheus, is not Oshichi herself saying:

O venga qua, invidia d’ogni fiore!

Dell’aiuto abbiamo bisogno,

Perché la vita umana è sogno,

Ma resta reale il canto d’amore.

(Bouquet our words with flowers ever leal,

Let love for friends recall a peaceful stream,

For human lives dissolve into a dream,

But songs of love that last are always real.)

In spirit, Oshichi utters the first three lines; she cannot utter the fourth line as much as she believes it. The song (novella) given by Saikaku is one of love, while the pages are many wings of aforementioned mortal butterflies.

Such is the nature of their passionate love that in the third scene Kichisaburo arrives at Oshichi’s door disguised as an itinerant wanderer. Their affectionate reunion conversation is cut short by the arrival of Oshichi’s father. The two then devise a plot to be intimate again: “they got out ink and paper and in the lamplight wrote down everything on their minds and in their hearts. Showing their notes to each other, they made love as silently as the mandarin ducks painted on the screen behind them.” I wonder about what they wrote, and think of Valmont bending over one of his sexual partners and using her back as a writing desk for the salacious letter addressed to Madame de Merteuil.

The fourth scene is when tragedy enters the tale. Her intense passion, itself infernal, leads Oshichi to think that she can be reunited with Kichisaburo if she starts a house fire. She is apprehended and swiftly dealt with. She sang:

How sad a world it is, when I must fall today like the last blossoms of the cherry and leave my ill fame to blow about in the winds of spring.” Her song redoubled the grief of those who stood by until she was put to death, which was soon to come as it must sometime to every living thing. At dawn the bell struck, and in the roadside grasses, no longer green, Oshichi gave up her life to join the wisps of smoke that hovered in the morning air. Death, the smoke of life, lies waiting at the end of every road. Nothing is so certain, nothing is so sad.

In the margins of the book from the first time I read it, I wrote the following: “As of today, November 20th, 2018, a fire has raged for twelve days in California, in the city of Paradise. There, there is a parable for you: Man grew too vain and in their negligence have burned Paradise. I just… 77 dead, ~1,000 missing. So much human life has already been lost, so many families have been fractured. I cannot and will not lie: while the numbers are themselves an indication of this ongoing, heart wrenching narrative, it all feels so distant and abstract to me. I was once told that a wise person said (Voltaire? Paine? I could not find the origin) something to the effect of “An earthquake 1,000 miles away is less urgent and serious than a papercut right here.” In response to this, I would say that sonder and empathy are invaluable. We lament because others suffer, because taking on the burdens of others is meaningful. Oshichi removing the splinter from Kichisaburo’s hand is the moment of immediacy, and the fires that concatenate the work of life remind us that the distant is close and the closeness of that hand touch is temporally distant. I wish sincerely that Paradise lasts; we have not held hands for nearly long enough.”

To transition back to the text with this in mind, we are told that there was no ear that this tale did not touch and no eye that did not weep over this ill-moving love. Even though Oshichi fears death and commends herself over to Amida Buddha, she remains convinced of her love’s immortality. This prompts me to ask the following question: What validity lies in asserting that there may be a law of conservation of love by which love is neither created nor destroyed, only redistributed? Even with what little I actually know of Empedocles’ philosophy (an equally hot death, may it be said), may we call Oshichi’s action the force of fire under the influence of the supraforce Love (as opposed to Empedocles’ other guiding force, Strife)? She made a fire not to create strife but to try and salvage love. Upon her death, what evidence is there to suggest that her immortal love and immortal form were not reincarnated into new forms? A Romantic slant on Buddhist faith, but I would not posit it this way if I was not somewhat assured by Saikaku himself that love and faith must be intertwined; it is in the temple where the lovers met and consummated their passion in a fit of frantic exploration. The writer allows the matter to play out as the bereaved Kichisaburo debates suicide for having lost Oshichi and for having broken an oath to his swordmaster/lover. “If I died,” Kichisaburo thought, “both my love and all this bitterness would come to an end.” Love as a force or love as it exists in the temporal body? I am not certain of the answer to that, but he does decide to then become a monk, though not because of Oshichi’s plea, “become a monk of some kind. That way he can look after me when I am gone, and I shall never forget him, come what may. Even in the next world our love will not die” (emphasis mine). No, only secret words from Oshichi’s mother convince him, and the novella ends on a somber note:

And so this tale is told, with all its love and sadness, to show how unreal and uncertain life is, how much like a wild, fantastic dream.

When I read this novella, I am humbled by this echo (Petrarchan, Shakespearean) of dreamlike life and the pen of Saikaku that write it just as well.

The final tale is “Gengobei, the Mountain of Love,” a raucous tale of deception, homosexual love, and the giddy proclivity of many monks to be rowdy. The progression of the novella can be summarized thusly: Gengobei, a gay man, must reconcile the death of his first young lover, falls for a second boy, sees him pass, and secludes himself from society and love. As it is described, his love for boys is natural, though it distracts from his quest for Buddahood. Note that pederasty was a normal thing at the time and something that the Tokugawa shogunate later outlawed (leading to a number of changes in kabuki theater among other things). Only when lady Oman disguises herself as a boy and seduces him does he seem truly lustful and, as a gossiper says, “a slave to love.” I would like to forgo any serious commentary about the anagnorisis and instead focus on Saikaku’s commentary on gender and love.

In a sharp turn of tone, Saikaku shifts from showing us how forlorn Gengobei remained after the death of his second love into a scathing slash at humanity:

People themselves are the most despicable of all creatures… even in the midst of tears unseemly desires are ever with us. Our hearts slip off to seek treasure of all kinds or give way to sudden impulses.

How utterly Ariostan, this chasing of treasure troves falsely named “love.” Gengobei demonstrates this (lack of) principle when, enamored by Oman, he cries out, “What difference does it make -- the love of men or the love of women?” Not that bisexualism is the issue, but the violent intensity with which he seeks others. Abandoning himself to the “bestial passion which rules this fickle world,” the pair end their passionate affair both alive and wealthy. Is there a message to be found from the fact that the saddest novella (“The Greengrocer’s Daughter”) is the most sincere, tragic, while the most comedic novella is full of invective against slavery to passion? Fortune turns cruelly and fickly; Onatsu ends up in the 4th day of the Decameron, Gengobei becomes the anchorite of that day’s Prologue, and Oman ends up as a woman of the 2nd day. Ah.

The magic of Saikaku, as evidenced by my many remarks, has touched me greatly. As the tender sleeves of the girl’s dress in “What the Seasons Brought the Almanac Maker” read:

To sit alone in the lamplight with a good book spread out before you and hold intimate conversation with men of unseen generations -- such is a pleasure beyond compare.

The pleasure of having read Saikaku many nights has been the grounds for this meandering, heartfelt conversation. As I now humbly lay this writing to rest, I light up with youthful brilliance to look upon my own lamp and the books below.

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Image: Miyagawa Issho, Untitled