Ihara Saikaku

Abstract Variously humorous, violent, or titillating, the narrative works of Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693), writer of haikai linked verse, both short- and long-format fiction, and one jōruri (puppet play), were apparently extremely popular in his day and have had the most lasting appeal of any fiction from the first half of Japan’s Tokugawa (Edo) period (1600–1867). They also qualify as popular fiction in the sense that they were written for commercial publication, then a relatively new phenomenon in Japan, whose publishing industry had emerged around the start of the Tokugawa era. Later termed, along with works by his imitators, ukiyozōshi (floating-world fiction), much of Saikaku’s fictional oeuvre focuses on the fleeting pleasures of erotic love, commercial sex, and other forms of consumerism in the world of nouveau-riche chōnin (urban commoners), with especial attention paid to the licensed (female) prostitution quarters and the prostitution of (male) kabuki actors. Saikaku was the son of a wealthy merchant family from Osaka, and the milieux inhabited by prosperous chōnin in the Kyoto-Osaka region are at the center of his fictional universe. However, his stories and novels are set in locales throughout the Japanese archipelago and are populated by samurai, peasants, and outcasts, as well as chōnin. Literary scholars have traditionally divided Saikaku’s stories and novels into kōshokumono (erotic fiction), chōninmono (townsmen tales), bukemono (warrior tales), and miscellaneous works, but these categories overlap to such an extent that they are of limited use when approaching Saikaku’s fiction as a whole. Saikaku’s stories and novels are of great interest for the panoramic view they provide of the Japanese society of his era, including in their scope the contrasting ways of the samurai and the chōnin and peasants they ruled over; interactions and occasional conflict between the first two of these groups; the customs, laws, and sentiments governing both heterosexual sex and shudō (age-structured male homosexuality); material culture; crime and punishment; samurai vendettas; the cultural aspirations of wealthy chōnin; and the world of both chaste and sexual entertainment.