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Parody, Irony and Ideology in the Fiction of Ihara Saikaku
 Brill’s Japanese
Studies Library

Edited by

Joshua Mostow (Managing Editor)

Caroline Rose
Kate Wildman Nakai

Volume 58

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bjsl

 Parody, Irony and Ideology
in the Fiction of Ihara Saikaku

By

David J. Gundry

LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: Little Yonosuke uses his telescope. Waseda University Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gundry, David J. author.

Title: Parody, irony and ideology in the fiction of Ihara Saikaku / by David
J. Gundry.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2017. | Series: Brill’s Japanese
studies library ; volume 58 | Includes bibliographical references and
index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017011863 (print) | LCCN 2017028875 (ebook) | ISBN
9789004344310 (E-book) | ISBN 9789004343054 (hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Ihara, Saikaku, 1642–1693—Criticism and interpretation. |
Parody. | Irony in literature.
Classification: LCC PL794.Z5 (ebook) | LCC PL794.Z5 G86 2017 (print) | DDC
895.63/32—dc23
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Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

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For Conán Dean Carey

⸪
Contents

Acknowledgments xi
List of Illustrations xiv

Introduction 1
The Dawn of Publishing in Tokugawa Japan 4
Literary Precedents 4
Literary Career, Reception 5
Translations and Scholarship 8
Aims of This Study 12
Setting the Scene: Preliminary Observations 14
Social Hierarchy, Censorship and Sumptuary Edicts 14
Defining (Saikaku’s) Parody 20
Parody, Paradox, Sexuality and Non-Duality 26
Buddhism and “Floating World” Aesthetics 30
The Way of Youths 37

1 Aspirations Above Their Station: The Life of an Amorous Man 40

Introduction 40
Part 1: Haikai, Parody and Social Mobility 45
“The Sumptuous Poem-Coat” 45
“A Kiss in a Cup in a Basket” 53
“Taikomochi Letting Their Hair Down” 58
“Fresh as First-Picked Tea” 62
Part 2: Brothels High and Low 75
“They Couldn’t Recognize a Stylish Man” 75
“Her Backside Aimed in His Direction” 78
Part 3: A Love with Illustrious Precedents: Shudō in Amorous
Man 84
“His Sleeves Damp from an Opportune Shower” 85
“The Bedding in a Clay Hut” 91
“The Whoosh from a Sword in a Dream” 96
Part 4: The Plight of Women and of (Male and Female)
Prostitutes 99
The Roving Libertine 99
“A Secret Stash of Cash” 103
“Now They Call Her ‘Ma’am’ ” 108
viii contents

Part 5: Sailing Out 110

“Dolls from the Capital” 110
The Enlightened Libertine 115

2 Chōnin High and Low: Five Women Who Loved Love 117
Introduction 117
“The Story of Seijūrō in Himeji” 118
“The Barrelmaker Brimful of Love” 129
“What the Seasons Brought the Almanac Maker” 135
“The Greengrocer’s Daughter with a Bundle of Love” 145
“Gengobei, the Mountain of Love” 150

3 Paragons of Wickedness: Twenty Cases of Filial Impiety in Japan 159

Introduction 159
Brothel Quarter Wastrels 165
A Serial Divorcée: “Her Trousseau Held in a Battered Trunk” 167
Charismatic Villains 171
“A Fine Kettle of Fish” 171
“I Am a Traveling Monk, Wandering Through the Gathering
Dusk” 178
The Duty to Procreate 183
“Girls and Cherry Blossoms Fallen in Their Prime” 183
“Competitive Storytelling Was His New Amusement” 187
“An Untoward Pride in His Own Strength” 190

4 The Brave, the Bad and the Ridiculous: Exemplary Tales of the Way of the
Warrior 197
Introduction 197
Part 1: Samurai Behaving Badly 203
“Climbing a Tree to the Height of Indiscretion” 203
“The Four-Legged Walking Foot-Warmer” 208
“A Swordsman Struck Down with Poisoned Saké” 213
“He Took Her, Sight Unseen, Then Ran Amok on Their Wedding
Night” 216
“A Man’s Handwriting from a Woman’s Hand” 219
Part 2: Shudō High and Low 225
“Women Who Played the Bamboo Flute with Secret Intent” 225
“Heartstrings Plucked on Lake Biwa” 231
Contents ix

“Dueling Flames of Passion Raise Smoke on the Funereal Incense

Altar” 238
“A Youth in His Prime, Splendid as the Bush Clover in
Miyagino” 242
“ ’Tis Pity His Forelocks Have Scattered before the Wind off
Mt. Hakone” 244
“Koto Music in a Clay Hut Where One Would Expect to Hear the
Pounding of a Stone Mortar Instead” 246
“Hunting Early Mushrooms Sows the Seeds of Love” 250
“The Investigation Turned Up a Striped Hakama” 256
Samurai and Chōnin 261

Afterword 263

Bibliography 269
Index 278
Acknowledgments

The research that became the foundation of this book was conducted with sup-
port from Stanford University, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International
Studies, the Japan Foundation and the US Department of Education. I am
deeply thankful to all of these organizations for their assistance, as well as to
Harvard University’s College Fellows Program and Department of East Asian
Languages and Civilizations, which provided me with a congenial and stim-
ulating environment in which to conduct research during my first year after
graduation, and to the University of California, Davis, which has granted funds
enabling me to further develop research begun in graduate school. Moreover,
I am greatly indebted to William Fleming and Yale’s Council on East Asian
Studies, Brenda Deen Schildgen and the Reception Studies Working Group at
UC Davis, Alan Templeton, sponsor of UC Davis’s Templeton Colloquium in
Art History, Katharine P. Burnett and UC Davis’s East Asian Studies Program,
Steven D. Carter and Stanford’s Department of East Asian Languages and
Cultures, Homi K. Bhabha and the Humanities Center at Harvard, as well
as the organizers of the Asian Studies Conference Japan, the Early Modern
Japan Network, the International Conference of the European Association for
Japanese Studies, and the Postgraduate Interdisciplinary Conference in East
Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield for providing me with forums in
which to present and discuss my research.
I would also like to offer heartfelt thanks to my dissertation advisor at
Stanford, Steven D. Carter, my research advisor at Waseda University, the late
Taniwaki Masachika, and my project advisor at the Inter-University Center for
Japanese Language Studies, Ōtake Hiroko, for being so generous toward me with
their wisdom and their time, as well as to the members of my dissertation com-
mittee James Reichert, Indra Levy, Yoshiko Matsumoto and Carl W. Bielefeldt
for their thoughtful comments on my writing. In addition to intellectual com-
panionship and numerous kindnesses over the years, Stanford and Berkeley
friends Ian MacDonald, Sujatha Meegama, Molly Vallor and Nikhil Kamat all
gave me indispensable help during the final phase of my dissertation project,
for which I am profoundly grateful, as I am to Edwin A. Cranston, Brenda Deen
Schildgen, Chia-ning Chang, Katharine P. Burnett, Yuming He, Chunjie Zhang
and Cory Blandford for advice and moral support since graduation.
Nakajima Takashi, who kindly provided me with guidance and instruction
during my days as a visiting researcher at Waseda, has since then as well shown
me great hospitality that has helped me continue to think of Waseda as my
academic home in Japan. The warm welcome given me by Carl Freire, Mohan
xii acknowledgments

Nadig and Max Neoustroev during my research trips back to Tokyo has also
helped make these excursions both pleasant and productive.
The evident esprit de corps of the graduate students in Stanford’s Japanese
program was a key factor in my decision to join their ranks, and they have
shown me kindnesses too numerous to mention both during my doctoral stud-
ies and since. In addition to the Cardinals mentioned above, Andre Haag and
Roberta Strippoli stand out for providing me with incisive commentary on,
respectively, portions of this book and grant applications that proved pivotal
in the pursuit of this project.
It was thanks to the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program and the Ōtsu
City Board of Education that I was first able to study Japanese language and
culture in depth, and I am very grateful to these organizations and their mem-
bers for their hospitality and guidance during my three years on JET. I also
wish to express my thanks to the faculty and staff of the Department of East
Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at UC Santa Barbara, especially to John
Nathan and Hsiao-jung Yu and above all to my thesis advisor, Robert Backus,
who counseled me on fine points of semantics and argumentation and tire-
lessly led me through the intricacies of various forms of classical Japanese and
kanbun. The Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies provided
training essential to the completion of this book; long may the IUC prosper! I
also greatly appreciate the research help I have received from Daniel Goldstein,
Adam Siegel and Elmyra Appel of the UC Davis Library, and from Toshie Marra
and Sachiko Iwabuchi of UC Berkeley’s C.V. Starr East Asian Library.
A version of parts of the Introduction and Chapter 1 is featured in my article
“Hierarchy, Hubris, and Parody in Ihara Saikaku’s Kōshoku ichidai otoko,” pub-
lished in The Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Summer 2017).
An earlier version of portions of the Introduction and of Chapter 4
appeared in “Samurai Lovers, ‘Samurai Beasts’: Warriors and Commoners in
Ihara Saikaku’s Way of the Warrior Tales,” in Japanese Studies, Vol. 35, No. 2
(September 2015), pp. 151–68. I greatly appreciate the editorial services pro-
vided by David Kelly for both the JS article and this book; he has always dem-
onstrated an in-depth knowledge of the subject area and a keen sense for le
mot juste.
I continue to marvel at the benevolence shown me by Stanford, which is
extraordinarily generous to its doctoral students and allows them remarkable
freedom, and by Waseda, whose generosity and hospitality toward visiting
researchers is known far and wide. 早稲田幸せだ。 Die Luft der Freiheit weht.
I am especially grateful to the staffs of Waseda’s International Office, of Waseda
STEP 21 and of the Japan Foundation’s offices in Tokyo, who quickly made me
Acknowledgments xiii

feel at home in that enormous city, as well as to Stanford’s Louise Freeman

and Connie Chin for their able management of the logistical issues involved
in doctoral studies split between the Stanford campus and host institutions in
Japan, Taiwan and Germany.
Last but not least I wish to thank my parents, Patricia Smith Gundry and
Stanley N. Gundry, for their support as I have worked on this project and for the
combined wisdom of these two accomplished writers and publishing industry
veterans, which I have continuously drawn upon while writing this book.
List of Illustrations

1 “A Kiss in a Cup in a Basket” 55

2 “Her Backside Aimed in His Direction” 80
3 “His Sleeves Damp from an Opportune Shower” 86
4 “The Bedding in a Clay Hut” 93
5 “The Whoosh from a Sword in a Dream” 97
6 “Her Water-Comb a Memento” 101
7 “A Secret Stash of Cash” 105
8 “Dolls from the Capital” 114
9 Lion dance, “The Story of Seijūrō in Himeji” 126
10 Osen’s hair comes undone 133
11 Moemon and Osan’s boat ride 140
12 Buntazaemon attacked by wild dogs 166
13 Goemon and son boiled in oil 176
14 Kogin murders her mistress 180
15 “An Untoward Pride in His Own Strength” 193
16 “Climbing a Tree to the Height of Indiscretion” 206
17 “The Four-Legged Walking Foot-Warmer” 209
18 Zuimu prepares to kill Ichihashi 222
19 Muranosuke meets Kogō 226
20 Ganmu serenaded 234
21 “The Investigation Turned Up a Striped Hakama” 258
Introduction

The history of popular fiction in early-modern Japan begins with the devel-
opment of a publishing industry to serve the new readership formed by the
bourgeoisie1 and samurai of Japan’s major cities during the period of rapid
urban growth that followed the year 1600, when the Tokugawa shogunate
brought a decisive end to nearly a century and a half of intermittent civil war.
Commercial printing of texts such as Heian-period aristocratic fiction and
essays, anthologies of court poetry, nō dramas, warrior epics and folk tales that
had thitherto been copied by hand now became widely available to those with
money to pay for them. This paved the way for parodies of works in various
genres, which soon constituted a key product of the new book trade.2
During the same period, composition and reading of haikai no renga, a
linked-verse genre that both appropriates the tropes and devices of Japanese
court poetry and flouts its genteel rules of diction, became a popular pastime
among both samurai and educated commoners. In 1682 a leading haikai poet
of the Danrin school, Ihara Saikaku3 (1642–1693), based in Osaka, turned his at-
tention to fiction and wrote the bestselling4 Kōshoku ichidai otoko5 (The Life of
an Amorous Man), which literary scholars later posited as the founding work
of the ukiyozōshi or “floating world fiction” genre, a category encompassing

1 For the sake of comparison, alongside the Japan-specific “chōnin” I also use the transnational
terms “bourgeois” and “bourgeoisie” to refer to prosperous chōnin. (See Howard Hibbett, The
Floating World in Japanese Fiction [New York: Oxford University Press, 1959], pp. 10, 27, 48;
Richard Lane, “Saikaku and Boccaccio: The Novella in Japan and Italy,” Monumenta Nippo­
nica, Vol. 15, No. 1/2 [April–July 1959], pp. 93–94; Gary P. Leupp, Male Colors: The Construction
of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995], pp. 58–
60; Paul Varley, Japanese Culture [Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000], pp. 164–204.)
2 Hasegawa Tsuyoshi, “Kinsei shōsetsu no tenkai: Kanazōshi kara Saikaku tōjō made,”
Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to kanshō, Vol. 58, No. 8 (1993), pp. 18–19.
3 The pen name of Hirayama Tōgo.
4 Donald Keene writes, “The Life of an Amorous Man […] sold about one thousand copies in
its first printing, a best seller for those days” (Donald Keene, World Within Walls: Japanese
Literature of the Pre-Modern Era, 1600–1867 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1999],
p. 173). We do not have sales figures for the book during the decades after it was first pub-
lished, but it merited repeated print runs into the eighteenth century in both Edo and the
Kyoto-Osaka region. As for the sales of Saikaku’s works in general, a major bookshop in
Osaka that stayed in business into the nineteenth century first came to thrive by producing
and selling Saikaku’s works alone (Nakajima Takashi, Saikaku to Genroku media: Sono sen­
ryaku to tenkai [Tokyo: Kasama Shoin, 2011], pp. 144–45).
5 “Ichidai” (“一代”) refers to the fact that the title character leaves no (unabandoned) progeny.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004344310_002

2 Introduction

the bulk of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Japanese fiction.6

An episodic novel7 recounting the erotic adventures of the scion of a wealthy

6 Regarding Saikaku’s reasons for venturing into fiction writing, Robert Lyons Danly writes,
“Scholars generally agree that Saikaku had taken his brand of haikai about as far as it could
go. He was stymied.” He also speculates that disarray in the Danrin school after the death
of its leader, Nishiyama Sōin (1605–1682), may have contributed to Saikaku’s decision, and
presents Saikaku’s long, solo haikai linked-verse compositions as a sort of transition between
haikai poetry he wrote for linked-verse sequences composed in a group and Saikaku’s haikai-
esque fiction. Sasaki Akio perceives in Saikaku’s move from group composition of haikai
linked verse to individual composition (dokugin) of the same as rooted in a desire for great-
er freedom to express himself and to depict the world in all its diversity, and remarks that
Saikaku subsequently chose to write fiction in order to focus more directly and exclusively on
“the world of human beings.”
 In contrast, noting that in 1682 Saikaku’s poetic career was going strong, and that for the
rest of his life he took pride in his status as a haikai master, Nakajima Takashi states that we
do not know why he chose at that time to expand his activities into another field. However,
after quoting Taniwaki Masachika’s assertion that Saikaku had no intention of bidding fare-
well to haikai, made no conscious effort to overcome its formal restrictions by a shift to prose,
and began writing The Life of an Amorous Man “in a very carefree manner,” Nakajima states
that whatever his motive for writing Amorous Man, Saikaku possessed a thorough knowl-
edge of Osaka’s publishing media and approached the book’s publication with careful delib-
eration. (Robert Lyons Danly, In the Shade of Spring Leaves: The Life and Writings of Higuchi
Ichiyō, A Woman of Letters in Meiji Japan [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981], pp. 113–18;
Sasaki Akio, Kinsei shōsetsu o yomu: Saikaku to Akinari [Tokyo: Kanrin Shobō, 2014], pp. 71–72;
Nakajima, Saikaku to Genroku media, pp. 114–15.)
7 I use the word “novel” as applying to any long, fictional narrative written at least largely in
prose. First of all, I apply the term to Saikaku’s longer narratives to facilitate comparison with
early bourgeois fiction in other cultures and to avoid the ex post facto kanazōshi/ukiyozōshi
distinction that Laura Moretti rightly calls into question. I do not use the term in order to lo-
cate Saikaku’s fiction in the sort of teleological narrative of Japanese literary development to-
ward the novel or novelness that Moretti seeks to undo. (Laura Moretti, “Kanazōshi Revisited:
The Beginnings of Japanese Popular Literature in Print,” Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 65, No. 2
[2010], pp. 297–356; see also Keene, World Within Walls, p. 149.)
 M. M. Bakhtin writes, “[…] The experts have not managed to isolate a single definite,
stable characteristic of the novel–without adding a reservation, which immediately disquali-
fies it altogether as a generic characteristic.” Indeed, different scholars and writers working in
European languages choose different qualities as the sine qua non of novelness. Significantly
for this study, key novelistic qualities privileged by Bakhtin and Milan Kundera, both of
whose work I engage with, are present in Saikaku’s fiction. However, both Bakhtin and
Kundera present the novel as a distinctly European phenomenon. One of the goals of this
study is to demonstrate that in important ways their models of novelistic discourse apply to
the works of at least one early-modern author writing well outside of the European cultural
sphere, but also under socio-historical circumstances that had important points in common
Introduction 3

merchant family, The Life of an Amorous Man deftly blends realistic, extraor-
dinarily detailed descriptions of the metropolitan and provincial scenes with
quotations drawn from nō dramas and Japanese court poetry as well as parodic
allusions to the classics of courtly romance Tales of Ise and The Tale of Genji.
This and other Saikaku works differ from Japanese fiction written earlier in his
century in their narrative complexity and virtuoso wordplay,8 and his subse-
quent fictional works explore a wide range of contemporary topics and social
contexts.
The goal of this study is to examine the peculiar mixtures of subject matter,
of narrative voices and of styles that make up the texture of Saikaku’s fiction, as
well as its relation to a socio-historical context characterized by great de facto
social mobility and cultural ferment at odds with a legally imposed system of
hereditary status categories. To that end I focus on a selection of works that re-
flects the broad scope of Saikaku’s œuvre, highlighting commonalities among
them while simultaneously striving to capture their diversity. Chief among the
commonalities I explore are a dialogic quality involving both the blending of
the elements listed above and the existence within individual texts of compet-
ing ethical stances. From this mixture of voices emerges a prevailing ethos that
privileges the period’s de facto money-based social hierarchy, in which com-
moners could rank high, over the Tokugawa shogunate’s official social order
based on hereditary status-group, according to which, in theory, the wealthiest
chōnin (urban commoner) owed utter deference to even the poorest samurai.

with those that Bakhtin links to the emergence of the European novel. (I should note here
that despite the cultural and geographic perimeter that Bakhtin draws around the novel, he
adopts a broader definition of the genre than many others do: whereas some Western schol-
ars place its origin in Golden-Age Spain, Bakhtin, with some reservations, refers to the Greek
romances and Roman adventure narratives of late antiquity, as well as medieval European
chivalric romances, as novels.) Accordingly, in addition to the reasons given above, I find it
useful to adopt a broad definition of the novel that includes Saikaku’s longer works of fiction
in order to provide a common frame of reference with Bakhtin and Kundera, and because I
aim to counter discourses of European and Japanese exceptionalism (including this aspect
of Bakhtin’s and Kundera’s arguments). (Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” pp. 4–11, 20–24, 38–40;
“From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,” pp. 55, 60–70, 76–78, 82; “Forms of Time and
of the Chronotope in the Novel,” pp. 86–158; “Discourse in the Novel,” pp. 261–64, 272–73, 291,
301, 366–67, 410, 414–15, 418, all in M. M. Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson, Michael Holquist, The
Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981];
Milan Kundera, L’art du roman [Paris: Gallimard, 1986], pp. 16–18, 25; Milan Kundera, trans.
Linda Asher, The Art of the Novel [New York: Grove Press, 1986], pp. 6–7, 13–14.)
8 Haruo Shirane, ed., introductions, and commentary, Early Modern Japanese Literature: An
Anthology, 1600–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 43.
4 Introduction

The Dawn of Publishing in Tokugawa Japan

The emergence of commercial publishing in Japan coincides closely with the

establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate. Kyoto was the first center of the
book trade, with the name of the first identifiable commercial publisher in
Japan recorded in a book published there in 1608. From Kyoto the industry
spread to Edo, by at least the 1660s, and to Osaka; the earliest book definitely
known to have been produced there was a collection of haikai poetry published
in 1671. Most publishers were also involved in the retail aspect of the trade, en-
gaging in the sale and lending of books through both shops and peddlers. The
extent to which books were available outside of the urban areas centered on
early-Tokugawa Japan’s three great cities is unclear, but the diary of a resident
of Wakayama9 covering the years 1642–1697 indicates that at least in that castle
town there were several booksellers by the 1660s, as well as visits by booksellers
from Kyoto and Osaka.10
Whatever the level of book distribution in the provinces, by the mid-sev-
enteenth century, residents of Edo and the Kamigata11 cities had access to an
unprecedented selection of books,12 a state of affairs that provided the widely-
read public necessary for the commercial success of highly allusive fiction like
Ihara Saikaku’s. Furthermore, the apparent concentration of paying readers
in these three urban centers helps to explain the regional biases of Saikaku’s
narratives, in which people and places far removed from the three great met-
ropolitan areas are frequently portrayed as backward yokels.

Literary Precedents

Despite the modern convention of treating Amorous Man as representing a

radical break from fiction produced up to that time, from early in the seven-
teenth century fictional works were written that in one way or another prefig-
ured the content and style of Saikaku’s stories and novels, such as the mixing

9 A castle town southwest of Osaka, capital of the Kii domain during the Tokugawa period.
10 Peter Kornicki, The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth
Century (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001), pp. 173–75, 197, 200; Kira Sueo,
“Haikaishi to shite no Saikaku,” Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to kanshō, Vol. 58, No. 8 (1993),
p. 27.
11 The Kyoto-Osaka region.
12 Kornicki, The Book in Japan, p. 175; for an overview of early-Tokugawa book publishing, see
also Hibbett, Floating World, pp. 33–35.
Introduction 5

of language drawn from earlier literature, as in the pastiche of Tales of Ise, The
Tale of the Heike and other Heian-period and medieval texts in Usuyuki mono­
gatari (The Tale of Usuyuki, c. 1615),13 or the parodying of literary classics, as in
Nise monogatari (Fake Tales, c. 1639), a sendup of Tales of Ise.14 Travel literature
combining guidebook-like descriptions with a fictional framework, such as
Asai Ryōi’s Tōkaidō meishoki (Famous Sights of the Tōkaidō, 1659),15 may have
served as a model for the many travelogue-like sequences in Saikaku’s fiction,
such as the accounts of Yonosuke’s incessant wanderings in Amorous Man.

Literary Career, Reception

As stated earlier, it was in haikai poetry rather than fiction that Saikaku first
made a name for himself. Born into an affluent merchant family in Osaka in
1642, he began composing haikai at the age of fifteen, such that the portion
of his literary career in which he was known solely as a poet was far longer
than that during which he published fiction, which began with the publica-
tion of Amorous Man in 1682 and lasted until Saikaku’s death in 1693. Saikaku’s
wife died when he was twenty-five, upon which he took the tonsure, retired
from managing his family’s business and devoted himself to literary pursuits.16
Associated first with the Teimon school of haikai and subsequently with the
rival, stylistically more adventurous Danrin school, he gained renown through
high-speed virtuoso performances of on-the-spot composition, starting in
1666 with a sequence of one thousand verses composed in about twelve hours
in the form of a requiem for his recently deceased wife, and working up to a

13  Keene, World Within Walls, pp. 150–52; Joshua S. Mostow, “The Tale of Light Snow: pastiche,
epistolary fiction and narrativity verbal and visual,” Japan Forum, Vol. 21, No. 3 (2009),
p. 364.
14 Howard Hibbett, “Saikaku and Burlesque Fiction,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies,
Vol. 20, No. 1/2 (1957), pp. 55–56; Shinoda Jun’ichi, Nise monogatari e: E to bun • bun to e
(Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1995), pp. 6–11; Shirane, Early Modern Japanese Literature, pp. 22–26;
Suematsu Masako, “Nise monogatari kō—tenkyo o motsu shōdan o itoguchi to shite,”
Yamaguchi kokubun, Vol. 28 (2005), pp. 1–10.
15 Keene, World Within Walls, p. 153.
16 Chris Drake, “Introduction,” in Ihara Saikaku, trans. Chris Drake, John Solt, Lucy North,
Excerpts from Life of a Sensuous Man, An Episodic Festschrift for Howard Hibbett, Epi­
sode 25 (Hollywood: Highmoonoon, 2010), pp. 22–23.
6 Introduction

session lasting one day and one night in 1677 during which he produced six-
teen thousand verses.17
The commercial success of the fiction Saikaku wrote in the last eleven years
of his life is attested to by the fact that five volumes of stories attributed to him
were published with titles beginning with his name (one during his lifetime
and four posthumously, with parts of the latter of uncertain authorship),18 pre-
sumably to use Saikaku’s popularity to boost sales. His prolific fictional out-
put is nowadays usually divided into kōshokumono (erotic tales), chōninmono
(townsman tales), in which the economic aspect of urban commoners’ lives
receives special emphasis, bukemono (warrior tales) and miscellaneous fiction.
These categories are problematic due to their ex post facto nature, the diversity
of works within individual categories, and the thematic and stylistic overlaps
among them. For example, the love affairs of samurai characters figure promi-
nently in works assigned to both the bukemono and kōshokumono categories,
and both the generally carefree Amorous Man and the much darker Kōshoku
gonin onna (Five Women Who Loved Love, 1686) are put in the latter category.
For this reason I have focused on the specific qualities of the works themselves
rather than on conventions of categorization in selecting a group of texts I
deem illustrative of the great variety in Saikaku’s fiction.
After enjoying great popularity during Saikaku’s lifetime and serving as a
model to Japanese fiction writers for decades thereafter,19 Saikaku’s fiction ap-
pears to have fallen from favor with readers in the late Tokugawa period,20 only
to be resurrected in the late 1880s by Japanese writers and intellectuals looking
for a homegrown “realist” author they could hold up as a peer to the European

17 Munemasa Isō, “Haikaishi kara ukiyozōshi sakusha e,” in Asano Akira, Kira Sueo, Taniwaki
Masachika, Hara Michio, Munemasa Isō, eds., Genroku bungaku no kaika I: Saikaku to
Genroku no shōsetsu (Tokyo: Benseisha, 1992), pp. 55–57; Shirane, Early Modern Japanese
Literature, pp. 43–45; Earl Miner, Hiroko Odagiri, Robert E. Morrell, The Princeton
Companion to Classical Japanese Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985),
pp. 167–68.
18 Keene, World Within Walls, pp. 205, 211; Nakajima, Saikaku to Genroku media, p. 159.
19 Nakajima, Saikaku to Genroku media, pp. 3, 144–47, 180–84; Nakajima Takashi, “Saikaku
to ‘kōshokubon’ no bibincho,” Saikaku to ukiyozōshi kenkyū, Vol. 4 (November 2010), pp.
148–50; Keene, World Within Walls, pp. 211–28.
20 Haruo Shirane, “Curriculum and Competing Canons,” in Haruo Shirane, Tomi Suzuki, eds.,
Inventing the Classics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 245. For a discussion
of one piece of anecdotal evidence of this decline in popularity, see Jonathan Zwicker,
Practices of the Sentimental Imagination: Melodrama, the Novel and the Social Imaginary
in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), p. 163.
Introduction 7

novelists who made such a splash in this milieu during the Meiji period.21 At
this time Saikaku’s works were again taken as models, by fiction writers such
as Higuchi Ichiyō, the members of the Ken’yūsha coterie, and those associated
with Japanese Naturalism.22
Those who did not have access to Edo-period editions of Saikaku’s stories
and novels had to contend with the censorship to which they were subjected
from the Meiji period until the end of World War II.23 Postwar high school
textbooks avoid Saikaku’s racier fare, but contain ample selections from more
chaste works such as Saikaku shokokubanashi (Tales from the Provinces, 1685),
and the chōninmono Nippon eitaigura (The Eternal Storehouse of Japan, 1688)
and Seken mune san’yō (Worldly Mental Calculations, 1692).24
One could speculate that this emphasis in postwar school curricula on the
latter two works, which depict a civilian, commerce-driven milieu rather than
the world of samurai portrayed in works such as Budō denraiki (Exemplary
Tales of the Way of the Warrior, 1687) and Buke giri monogatari (Tales of
Samurai Honor, 1688), is in part due to a perception that they accord more
closely with the ethos of the new demilitarized, consumerist Japan. In criticism

21 Brian C. Dowdle has recently problematized narratives characterizing the Meiji-period

revival in interest in Saikaku’s writings as a nationalist reaction to Westernization (Brian
C. Dowdle, “Why Saikaku Was Memorable but Bakin Was Unforgettable,” The Journal of
Japanese Studies, Vol. 42, No. 1 [Winter 2016], pp. 91–121).
22 Haruo Shirane, “Issues in Canon Formation,” in Shirane, Suzuki, Inventing the Classics,
p. 7; Shirane, “Curriculum and Competing Canons,” p. 245. Richard Lane also writes of
Saikaku’s fiction as realistic (Lane, “Saikaku and Boccaccio,” pp. 89, 111). Someya Tomoyuki
argues that this latter-day conception of Saikaku as a realist has distorted critical percep-
tions of Saikaku’s œuvre ever since by causing a neglect of aspects of his fictional works
at odds with this characterization, such as their typically idealistic portrayal of erotic re-
lationships between males (Someya Tomoyuki, Saikaku shōsetsu ron: Taishōteki kōzō to
“Higashi Ajia” e no shikai [Tokyo: Kanrin Shobō, 2005], pp. 9–14. The coexistence of ideal-
istic and realistic elements in Saikaku’s fiction will be addressed in the afterword to this
study.
23 Based on a comment by Taniwaki Masachika, demonstrated to me by Prof. Taniwaki with
editions from the period in question, one of which he kindly gave me: Saikaku meisaku
shū, Vol. 1–2 (Tokyo: Nihon Meicho Shū Kankō Kai, 1929). In it entire blocks of text are
simply left blank, eliminating such passages as that describing the courtesan Yoshino’s
seduction of a bashful customer in Kōshoku ichidai otoko (Vol. 1, page 76 in this edition).
The punctuation is left in, however, apparently as a guide to those who would fill in the
missing pieces, which in some cases could be obtained separately, as demonstrated to me
by Prof. Taniwaki with a book into which slips of paper bearing censored lines had been
pasted. Illustrations were also censored.
24 Shirane, “Curriculum and Competing Canons,” pp. 245–46.
8 Introduction

and scholarship as well, Ihara Saikaku has mainly been associated with chōnin
culture, and those of his tales focusing on samurai characters have received
less critical attention and favor than the rest of his œuvre.25

Translations and Scholarship

From the 1970s up to today a tremendous amount of philological work on

Saikaku’s voluminous and notoriously difficult fiction has been done by Jap-
anese scholars. Amorous Man, widely acknowledged as the most chal­lenging
Saikaku text, is nearly incomprehensible without annotations, which explain
vocabulary particular to its time as well as the densely packed, often parodic
literary allusions that are sometimes the entire point of an otherwise unre-
markable passage. In the past few decades prominent Saikaku scholars such
as, to name just a few, Taniwaki Masachika, Maeda Kingorō, Matsuda Osamu,
and Teruoka Yasutaka have divided their efforts between annotative and criti-
cal work. Taniwaki uses a historicist approach that often involves inferring
authorial intent by considering biographical, historical, and literary-historical
factors, such as in his persuasive argument that in Exemplary Tales of the Way of
the Warrior Saikaku wrote of contemporary conditions but set his stories in the
earlier Sengoku period in order to avoid the wrath of the Tokugawa authorities,
and that he also deliberately left in anachronisms that would let readers know
what he was up to.26 I have depended heavily on Maeda Kingorō’s massively
annotated editions of Amorous Man27 and Five Women,28 in which he collects
commentaries on specific words and passages by a number of scholars as
well as his own, supplementing them with essays analyzing the works within
their historical and literary-historical contexts. Matsuda Osamu wrote a large
number of reflective short essays on a wide variety of pre- and early-modern
cultural topics ranging from junshi (committing ritual suicide to follow one’s
lord in death) to tattooing, including many on Saikaku’s fiction. In addition to
his critical and annotative work, Teruoka Yasutaka published a complete set

25 Keene, World Within Walls, p. 190; Fujie Mineo, “Buke giri monogatari,” Saikaku to
ukiyozōshi kenkyū, Vol. 1 (June 2006), p. 192; Miner, Odagiri, Morrell, Princeton Companion
to Classical Japanese Literature, pp. 167–68; Someya, Saikaku shōsetsu ron, pp. 12–14.
26 Taniwaki Masachika, “Saikaku no jishu kisei to kamufurāju: Ichiō no sōkatsu to kongo no
kadai,” Saikaku to ukiyozōshi kenkyū, Vol. 1 (June 2006), pp. 117–31.
27 Maeda Kingorō, Kōshoku ichidai otoko zen chūshaku (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1981).
28 Maeda Kingorō, Kōshoku gonin onna zen chūshaku (Tokyo: Benseisha, 1992).
Introduction 9

of modern Japanese translations of Saikaku’s fiction,29 adding to an already

considerable number of such translations.
To give just a sampling of critical writing on Saikaku’s fiction published since
the turn of the millennium, Nakajima Takashi has used a Media Studies ap-
proach, seeking to analyze texts by Saikaku and other early-Tokugawa writers
in the context of the period’s developments in communications ­technology.30
Someya Tomoyuki’s sweeping Saikaku shōsetsu ron: Taishōteki kōzō to “Higashi
Ajia” e no shikai (Saikaku’s Fiction: Contrasting Structures and a View Toward
“East Asia”) examines Saikaku’s fictional œuvre in the context of roughly
contemporaneous fiction produced in Korea and China, seeks to rehabilitate
the reputation of Saikaku’s samurai-focused stories, and redresses the long-
standing perception of Saikaku’s fiction as “realist” by emphasizing its ideal-
istic and romantic aspects. Criticism of Saikaku’s fiction by Sasaki Akio uses
a Comparative Literature approach, analyzing, for example, the depiction of
erotic love in Saikaku alongside that of seventeenth-century French ­literature.31
Sugimoto Tsutomu has produced a close examination of Saikaku’s prose style,
focusing on its blend of linguistic registers, its particular vocabulary, and its
use of literary allusion.32
Beginning with William Theodore de Bary’s 1956 translation of Kōshoku
gonin onna (1686) as Five Women Who Loved Love,33 nine major fictional works
by Saikaku have been translated into English, the remainder being Nippon
eitaigura (1688) by G. W. Sargent as The Japanese Family Storehouse (1959),34
Kōshoku ichidai onna (1686) by Ivan Morris as The Life of an Amorous Woman
(1963),35 Kōshoku ichidai otoko (1682) by Kengi Hamada as The Life of an
Amorous Man (1963),36 Seken mune san’yō (1692) by Masanori Takatsuka and
David C. Stubbs as This Scheming World (1965),37 and by Ben Befu as Worldly

29 Ihara Saikaku, trans. Teruoka Yasutaka, Gendaigoyaku Saikaku zenshū (Tokyo: Shōga­
kukan, 1976–1977).
30 Nakajima, Saikaku to Genroku media.
31 Sasaki, Kinsei shōsetsu o yomu, pp. 49–70.
32 Sugimoto Tsutomu, Ihara Saikaku to Nihongo no sekai (Tokyo: Sairyūsha, 2012).
33 Ihara Saikaku, trans. Wm. Theodore de Bary, Five Women Who Loved Love (Rutland: Tuttle,
1956).
34 Ihara Saikaku, trans. G. W. Sargent, The Japanese Family Storehouse (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1959).
35 Ihara Saikaku, trans. Ivan Morris, The Life of an Amorous Woman and Other Writings (New
York: New Directions, 1963).
36 Ihara Saikaku, trans. Kengi Hamada, The Life of an Amorous Man (Rutland: Tuttle, 1963).
37 Ihara Saikaku, trans. Masanori Takatsuka, David C. Stubbs, This Scheming World (Rutland:
Tuttle, 1965).
10 Introduction

Mental Calculations (1976),38 Saikaku okimiyage (1693) partially translated by

Robert Leutner as “Saikaku’s Parting Gift” (in Monumenta Nipponica, 1975),39
Saikaku oridome (1694) by Peter Nosco as Some Final Words of Advice (1980),40
Buke giri monogatari (1688) by Caryl Ann Callahan as Tales of Samurai Honor
(1981),41 and Nanshoku ōkagami (1687) by Paul Gordon Schalow as The Great
Mirror of Male Love (1990).42 Hamada’s translation of Amorous Man, while
highly readable, is abridged, very free, and (perhaps necessarily so at the time
of publication) expurgated, so it is of limited use for students of Japanese lit-
erature. Chris Drake’s translations of three chapters from the novel, included
in Haruo Shirane’s Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900
along with other selections from Saikaku’s œuvre, are a better place to start for
those interested in Saikaku’s first work of fiction.43
In contrast to this wealth of translations, Western scholarship on Saikaku’s
fiction is surprisingly scarce. Richard Lane’s 1957 dissertation “Saikaku: Novelist
of the Japanese Renaissance” chronologically treats the full range of Saikaku’s
works using a combination of biographical, humanist and aesthetic-critical
approaches. His assessment of Saikaku’s fictional œuvre, including his portray-
als of samurai, is high, and he goes so far as to refer to Saikaku as a “philo-
sophic novelist.” As its title implies, Lane’s study links Saikaku and his fiction
to Western authors, ranking him alongside Boccaccio, Rabelais and Defoe, and
describes the Genroku period, during which Saikaku wrote, as a sort of trun-
cated Renaissance. He also attributes an individualist and egalitarian sensibil-
ity to the author.44

38 Ihara Saikaku, trans. Ben Befu, Worldly Mental Calculations: An Annotated Translation of
Ihara Saikaku’s Seken munezan’yō (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).
39 Robert Leutner, “Saikaku’s Parting Gift: Translations from Saikaku’s Okimiyage,”
Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 30 (1975), pp. 357–91.
40 Ihara Saikaku, trans. Peter Nosco, Some Final Words of Advice (Rutland: Tuttle, 1980).
41 Ihara Saikaku, trans. Caryl Ann Callahan, Tales of Samurai Honor (Tokyo: Monumenta
Nipponica Monograph, 1981).
42 Ihara Saikaku, trans. Paul Gordon Schalow, The Great Mirror of Male Love (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1990).
43 Ihara Saikaku, trans. Chris Drake, Life of a Sensuous Man, in Shirane, Early Modern
Japanese Literature, pp. 45–57; see also the excerpts translated in Ihara, Drake, Solt, North,
Sensuous Man, as well as Gérard Siary’s full French translation (Ihara Saikaku, trans.
Gérard Siary [with the collaboration of Mieko Nakajima-Siary], L’homme qui ne vécut que
pour aimer [Arles: Éditions Philippe Picquier, 2015]).
44 Richard Douglas Lane, “Saikaku: Novelist of the Japanese Renaissance” (PhD dissertation,
Columbia University, 1957), pp. 347–48. See also Lane, “Saikaku and Boccaccio,” pp. 111–18.
Introduction 11

In addition to translations of excerpts from Saikaku’s Kōshoku ichidai

onna (here translated as “The Woman Who Spent Her Life in Love”), Howard
Hibbett’s The Floating World in Japanese Fiction (1959) devotes a chapter to
those fictional works of Saikaku that deal primarily with chōnin life and/or the
pleasure quarters, and gives these works high marks as representing a fresh de-
parture from the tired formulas of their recent predecessors.45 Donald Keene
also dedicates a chapter to Saikaku’s fiction in World Within Walls (1999),
where he provides both a concise overview of the full range of these works
and evaluations of their literary merit.46 These range from fulsome praise for
Five Women, in which he perceives relative emotional depth, to his character-
ization of Amorous Man as stylistically brilliant but “judged purely in literary
terms […] a failure.”47 His overall assessment is that despite its stylistic verve,
Saikaku’s fiction lacks the depth he ascribes to the works of the great European
novelists, as well as the fully-drawn characterizations of Murasaki Shikibu.48
Jeffrey Johnson’s 1994 dissertation “Novelness in Comical Edo Fiction: A
Carnivalesque Reading of Ihara Saikaku’s Kōshoku Ichidai Otoko” draws on a
wide range of Western cultural theory, but as the title suggests the theoretical
concept around which his study is built is Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the
carnivalesque, which Johnson sums up with quotations from Peter Stallybrass:
“[The] carnivalesque is a potent, populist, critical inversion of all official words
and hierarchies […] Carnival, for Bakhtin, is both a populist utopian vision of
the world seen from below and a festive critique, through the inversion of hi-
erarchy, of high culture.”49 With this as a starting point Johnson characterizes
Amorous Man, both in its narrative content and its parodic stylistic features, as
an egalitarian, iconoclastic, hierarchy-leveling work, and extends this charac-
terization to the rest of Saikaku’s fiction. He covers much of the same ground in
his article “Saikaku and the Narrative Turnabout”50 and an essay in Bakhtinian
Theory in Japanese Studies, emphasizing what he posits as an anti-hierarchical
and comical bent pervasive in Saikaku’s fiction, writing of Saikaku’s fictional

45 Hibbett, Floating World, pp. 36–49.

46 Keene, World Within Walls, pp. 167–215.
47 Keene, World Within Walls, p. 170.
48 Keene, World Within Walls, p. 211.
49 Jeffrey Johnson, “Novelness in Comical Edo Fiction: A Carnivalesque Reading of Ihara
Saikaku’s Kōshoku Ichidai Otoko” (PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 1994),
pp. 117–18.
50 Jeffrey Johnson, “Saikaku and the Narrative Turnabout,” The Journal of Japanese Studies,
Vol. 27, No. 2 (2001), pp. 323–45.
12 Introduction

œuvre in general that “his aims were comical,”51 that his “objective is a fes-
tive critique,”52 and that he “clearly delighted in overturning all hierarchies,
whether the order be that of the quarters or Tokugawa officialdom, received
texts or reviews of courtesans.”53
As far as I am aware, Daniel Struve’s Ihara Saikaku: Un romancier japonais
du XVIIe siècle (Ihara Saikaku: A Japanese Novelist of the Seventeenth Century,
2001) has until now been the only book-length scholarly publication published
in the West that is exclusively devoted to Ihara Saikaku’s fiction. Struve’s book
extensively examines the influence of haikai on Saikaku’s fiction, as well as that
of the theater. In his account of the development of both haikai and Saikaku’s
fiction he places great importance on the concept of gūgen, taken from the
Zhuangzi, translatable as “parable” and used in Japan to defend imaginative,
non-didactic literature.54 The book’s final section deals with Saikaku’s fiction’s
mixing of styles and points of view under the rubric of “the polyphonic novel,”
one aspect of which Struve terms a “dialogue of ideologies,” referring to Japan’s
multiple, overlapping religious traditions and the respective ideologies of the
samurai and the chōnin.

Aims of This Study

In my own study of Saikaku’s fiction I will seek to strike a balance between

depth and breadth by providing detailed analyses of four Saikaku texts repre-
senting the wide range of subject matter that his works encompass. Amorous
Man provides a particularly rich trove of examples of the sorts of wordplay,
literary allusions and blending of styles and genres that are also featured, at
lesser densities, in the other works. Moreover, it furnishes plentiful examples
of narratorial moralizing rendered ironic by the surrounding narrative, which
also figures in stories of the other books on which this study focuses. Five
Women contains five novellas, each depicting a transgressive love affair involv-
ing one of the women in question. As in Amorous Man, eros predominates,
with the key difference that these tales are told predominantly from Saikaku’s
version of a female point of view, in this case specifically that of chōnin women

51 Jeffrey Johnson, “The Carnivalesque in Saikaku’s Œuvre,” in Jeffrey Johnson, ed.,

Bakhtinian Theory in Japanese Studies (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2001), p. 41.
52 Johnson, “The Carnivalesque in Saikaku’s Œuvre,” p. 42.
53 Johnson, “The Carnivalesque in Saikaku’s Œuvre,” p. 43.
54 Daniel Struve, Ihara Saikaku: Un romancier japonais du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 2001).
Introduction 13

who do not work as prostitutes. Pleasure-quarter erotic connoisseurship, and

suspicion regarding prostitutes’ sincerity, which are major themes in Amorous
Man, are, after the brothel scenes opening Five Women’s first tale, supplanted
in importance by the glorification of four of its five heroines as contemporary
chōnin heiresses to refined sensibilities rooted in Heian-period court culture,
as well as by the question of what consequences erotic assertiveness on the
part of “amateur” women will bring. Honchō nijū fukō (Twenty Cases of Filial
Impiety in Japan, 1686), arguably the most atypical Saikaku text of these four,
consists of twenty stories regarding violations, of varying extremes, of the
Confucian ethic of filial piety. Stylistically simpler than the other works ana-
lyzed here, this collection of ostensibly didactic tales nonetheless features in
some of its stories a complex and disturbing moral ambiguity that resonates
with similar features in the other three texts on which this study focuses. Budō
denraiki (Exemplary Tales of the Way of the Warrior, 1687), a collection of
thirty-two samurai vendetta tales, provides particularly dramatic depictions
of class conflict and of homosexual55 love affairs and desire; the latter theme
figures in the other works examined as well.
In addition to aiming for breadth of scope by focusing on these four works,
I have chosen three of them partly in order to give exposure to texts for which
there is still no English translation available or none that is useful in an aca-
demic context, the one exception to this being Five Women. I focus on one work
per chapter, highlighting common traits that link these widely divergent texts.
Chief among them is a dialogic quality that includes the chōnin, samurai and

55 In this study I apply “homosexual” (adj.) and “homosexuality” to behaviors and their
associated sentiments, rather than to persons, a social identity, a psychological condi-
tion or a state of being. Gregory Pflugfelder employs the term “male-male sexuality” in
order, among other reasons, to avoid bringing modern, Western sexual taxonomies and
their conceptual baggage to the premodern Japanese context (Gregory M. Pflugfelder,
Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950 [Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999], pp. 5, 23, 27, 60). For reasons of euphony I follow
the lead of those who apply “homosexuality” to shudō while making clear the differences
between it and contemporary conceptions of “homosexuality.” (Ihara, Schalow, Great
Mirror, pp. 1–46; Leupp, Male Colors, pp. 7–9. For an eloquent defense of the use of the
term in the context of late imperial China, see Giovanni Vitiello, The Libertine’s Friend:
Homosexuality and Masculinity in Late Imperial China [Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2011], pp. 13–14.) I treat “homosexuality,” “pederasty”/“age-structured male homo-
sexuality,” “shudō” and the adjectival forms of the first two as terms of ascending specific-
ity all useful for referring to the relationships between males (primarily through pairings
of men and youths) that form part of the wide range of erotic experience depicted in
Saikaku’s fiction.
14 Introduction

divergent religious voices that Struve mentions, to which I add consideration

of other, competing narrative strands, namely, those promoting moral abso-
lutes or moral relativism, those depicting given characters in a positive or a
negative light, those expressing the competing points of view of people linked
in hierarchical relationships such as prostitutes and clients, and those express-
ing conflicting feelings of resentment, admiration and contempt on the part of
chōnin toward the samurai.
In doing so, my aim is to interrogate the claims made for Saikaku’s work
as transgressive and iconoclastic, attempting to arrive at a more nuanced ac-
count of his place in the cultural discourse of his day. For while in Amorous
Man and elsewhere in Saikaku’s fiction there are, to be sure, passages that fea-
ture the sort of hierarchy inversions and blurring of social categories to which
Johnson refers as carnivalesque, I believe it is an exaggeration to say that either
Amorous Man or the other texts I examine here provide evidence that Saikaku
delighted in truly “overturning” all hierarchies. For example, the rigid and of-
ficial hierarchy among the various ranks of prostitutes in the pleasure quar-
ter is never overturned, symbolically or otherwise, or disapproved of by either
Amorous Man’s protagonist or its narrator. Furthermore, comic contrasting of
coarse provincial prostitutes and their elegant metropolitan counterparts, at
the expense of the former, is a prominent feature of Amorous Man, and unflat-
tering portrayals of provincials and rural folk as such are to be found in each
of these texts. Moreover, the parody of elite genres that Johnson sees as icono-
clastic has a dual function, in some cases symbolically tarnishing the originals,
but also demonstrating the parodist’s erudition and flattering the reader who
gets the joke, thus reconfirming the value of elite cultural forms. Furthermore,
any analysis of Saikaku’s works needs to take into account that the haikai in
whose stylistics his parody is rooted is a genre in which samurai were active be-
fore it became a chōnin pastime, and which brought members of both groups
together, including Saikaku and his haikai master Nishiyama Sōin (1605–1682),
who was a samurai.

Setting the Scene: Preliminary Observations

Social Hierarchy, Censorship and Sumptuary Edicts

Saikaku’s fiction is noteworthy for the tension between its narrator’s moralistic
pronouncements regarding characters’ transgressive behavior and sympathet-
ic, even heroic portrayals of these same characters. The resulting ambiguity
has led scholars to radically differing interpretations of the ideological stance
of these texts. For example, as noted above, Jeffrey Johnson employs Bakhtin’s
Introduction 15

theory of the carnivalesque56 as he posits a socially egalitarian impulse

behind57 and function of Saikaku’s fiction, whereas Howard Hibbett main-
tains, among other observations in a similar vein, that Saikaku “[did not] ques-
tion the principle that crimes violating the feudal hierarchical system were
especially heinous.”58 Portions of Amorous Man to be examined in Chapter
1 will shed light on the interpretation of this ambiguity in that they feature
narrator­ial condemnations of hubristic behavior on the part of characters of
commoner status that are undermined by parodic elements in the surrounding
narrative that make these chapters guilty of the rhetorical equivalent of that
which they condemn: the outrageous redeployment of artifacts of elite culture
in ostensibly vulgar contexts. These passages have broad implications for the
interpretation of the rest of the novel and other works by Saikaku. This study
proposes that rather than evincing, as Hibbett suggests, contentment with or
acquiescence to the social hierarchy imposed by the Tokugawa or, as Johnson
suggests, an urge to overturn all hierarchy, the passages in question and much
of the rest of Saikaku’s fiction partake of a parvenu sensibility informed by a
desire to rise in society rather than either to level social distinctions or to seek
contentment with one’s lot.59 To support this proposition this study will ana-
lyze other portions of Amorous Man and other Saikaku texts that foreground
the role of money as a facilitator for the attainment by prosperous chōnin of a
cultural sophistication that places them above less-moneyed commoners, as
well as passages in which a new social hierarchy based on such sophistication
is manifested in the contrasting of metropolitan chōnin refinement with rural
or provincial crudity.
Given the apparent popularity of Saikaku’s fictional works during and after
his lifetime and the many imitations they spawned, their stance with regard to
the Tokugawa social order has significance beyond the realm of literary analy-
sis, and can be posited as reflective of a strain of commoner aspirations and

56 In this study I engage with Bakhtin’s essays regarding the role of dialogism, heteroglossia
and parody in the development of the European novel, but not with his writings on the
carnivalesque.
57 See also Lane, “Saikaku and Boccaccio,” pp. 111–18.
58 Johnson, “Turnabout,” pp. 326, 327, 329, 344; Johnson, “The Carnivalesque in Saikaku’s
Œuvre,” p. 43; Howard Hibbett, The Chrysanthemum and the Fish: Japanese Humor Since
the Age of the Shoguns (New York: Kodansha International, 2002), pp. 67–68.
59 In an earlier work, Hibbett does present social climbing as a motivation behind chōnin
efforts to become conversant in elite cultural forms, and remarks on the parvenu and
arriviste nature of the high-chōnin culture of Saikaku’s day (Hibbett, Floating World,
pp. 16–18, 41).
16 Introduction

sensibilities at the time they were first published and avidly read.60 Much of
Saikaku’s fiction engages with the discrepancy between the Tokugawa regime’s
official, hereditary status-group system and the era’s de facto, fluid status sys-
tem, in which potentially acquirable advantages such as money and skill in the
arts were decisive.61 This de facto status system and the high-chōnin culture it
generated receive a generally positive depiction in Saikaku’s fictional works,
such as in the passages just mentioned, but their approach to these features of
Tokugawa-period society is complicated by occasional appearances of a stern-
ly moralizing narrative voice that condemns, among other transgressions of
law and official morality, characters’ attempts to symbolically rise above their
status as commoners by means of inappropriately luxurious living and the sac-
rilegious use of elite cultural products.
Saikaku was of course not free to write in a way that would directly chal-
lenge sumptuary laws and other official efforts to keep commoners in their
place, so it is unsurprising that his fiction periodically pays lip service to the
rules and moral underpinnings of the Tokugawa status-group system even
as they are undermined elsewhere in the same text. Significantly, sumptuary
regulations increased in number and specificity from the mid-seventeenth
century. Doi Noritaka writes that the Tokugawa authorities deemed high living
by wealthy chōnin not in accord with their status, and that the “thrift edicts”
(ken’yakurei) of the shogunate were at first primarily focused on reinforcing
the status-group system, evolving into a means of curbing consumer spend-
ing as a part of financial policy from the Kyōhō period (1716–1736). According
to Doi, under Tokugawa Tsunayoshi (reigned 1680–1709), sumptuary edicts
gained in specificity, with the suppression of luxurious clothing especially
prominent among regulations aimed at chōnin, including an edict issued by
the shogunate in the second month of 1682, the year in which Amorous Man
was published, in reaction to the wearing of showy clothing among wealthy
chōnin women. Furthermore, Donald Shively singles out the following year as

60 For an examination of the apparently wide and enduring popularity of Saikaku’s fiction
in Tokugawa Japan, see Nakajima, Saikaku to Genroku media, pp. 3, 144–47, 180–84.
61 In a study of Tokugawa popular culture that focuses primarily on the latter part of the
period, Katsuya Hirano observes, “Money […] exerted a corrosive effect on the mecha-
nisms of hierarchy by promoting the dynamic flow and uninhibited interaction of goods,
ideas, knowledge, customs and people.” To this I would add that, as I have stated earlier,
in Tokugawa Japan money also established a new hierarchy, which is much in evidence
in Saikaku’s fiction. (Katsuya Hirano, The Politics of Dialogic Imagination [Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2014], p. 71.)
Introduction 17

a time of especially prolific legislation in this area, so the book was clearly pub-
lished at a time of official concern over the ability of money to trump inherited
status.62
As will be detailed in Chapter 1, in key passages of Amorous Man featuring
descriptions of sumptuous clothing worn by commoners and other examples
of extravagance, there is a dialogic tension between the moralizing narrative
voice’s condemnations of chōnin hubris and countervailing elements of the
narrative that undermine these so powerfully as to make them read as slyly
ironic. These elements are manifested in parodic wordplay and literary al-
lusions that recall the techniques of Danrin-school haikai poetry, which fre-
quently transfers materials drawn from elite literature to a non-elite or vulgar
context for comic effect, and through which, as noted above, Saikaku first won
fame.63 Such passages in Amorous Man are emblematic of the tension between
narratorial commentary and the surrounding narrative contents in Saikaku’s
fiction, for they establish a pattern of seemingly deliberate equivocation con-
tinued in his later works that must have skirted the era’s bounds of acceptable
literary discourse.64

62 Donald H. Shively, “Sumptuary Regulation and Status in Early Tokugawa Japan,” Harvard
Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 25 (1964–1965), pp. 123–64; Doi Noritaka, “Shashi kinshi to
ken’yakurei,” Nihon rekishi, Vol. 526 (March 1992), pp. 61–63. See also Hibbett, Floating
World, pp. 4, 6–7, 25; Keene, World Within Walls, p. 200; Conrad Totman, Early Modern
Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 136–37, 245.
 As Shively points out, there is a passage in The Eternal Storehouse of Japan expressing
approval of sumptuary regulations aimed at preventing commoners from wearing flashy
or luxurious clothing (Shively, “Sumptuary Regulation,” pp. 124–27). True to the pattern
of equivocation in Saikaku’s fiction, the story, with its meticulous descriptions of various
offending garments, reads like an overly detailed condemnation of pornography by some-
one too interested in that which he condemns. This takes on added significance when one
considers the role of fashion in Saikaku’s erotically-themed fiction, in which descriptions
of characters of both sexes presented as paragons of attractiveness devote far more atten-
tion to clothing and accessories (as well as hair) than to faces or bodies (Ihara Saikaku,
Nippon eitaigura, in Taniwaki Masachika, Teruoka Yasutaka, Jinbō Kazuya, eds., Shinpen
Nihon koten bungaku zenshū, Vol. 68: Ihara Saikaku shū 3 [Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1996], pp.
39–43; Ihara, Sargent, Family Storehouse, pp. 26–29). A story in Twenty Cases examined
in Chapter 3 mentions, without commentary, sumptuary regulation regarding the wear-
ing of dyed cloth (Ihara Saikaku, Honchō nijū fukō, in Munemasa Isō, Teruoka Yasutaka,
Matsuda Osamu, eds., Shinpen Nihon koten bungaku zenshū, Vol. 67: Ihara Saikaku shū 2
[Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1996], p. 172).
63 Nakajima, Saikaku to Genroku media, p. 123.
64 Taniwaki, “Saikaku no jishu kisei to kamufurāju,” pp. 117–31; Nakajima, Saikaku to Genroku
media, pp. 175–80; Hatanaka Chiaki, “Warera wa nanshoku no michi o wakete: ‘Enshutsu’
18 Introduction

Regarding Saikaku’s fiction in general, Jeffrey Johnson insightfully remarks,

“A consistent pattern in his work is that the ‘moral’ of a given line, paragraph,
or tale is often inverted in the next line, paragraph or tale,” and later in the
same essay observes, “The contrast between the focus of the narration itself
and the posturing of the narrative voice renders the didactic and moral com-
ments laughable.”65 As for the predominant tone of Amorous Man in particu-
lar, Someya Tomoyuki contrasts it with the roughly contemporaneous Korean
love narrative A Nine Cloud Dream, which he posits as reflecting the influence
of the “rigoristic” Neo-Confucianism that then held sway in Korea, observ-
ing that “[…] newness and change, which are the polar opposites of solidity
and order, pervade the essence of The Life of an Amorous Man.”66 The quali-
ties Someya observes in Amorous Man further undermine the heavy-handed
narratorial moralizing in two key passages from the novel that Chapter 1 will
examine closely.
One’s take on the moral and social purport of Saikaku’s complexly equivo-
cal fictional works depends largely on the relative importance one perceives
in their conflicting elements; I assign great weight to those that, subtle or in-
frequent as they may be in a given text, seem critical of the samurai, feudal67

de yomu Nanshoku ōkagami,” Saikaku to ukiyozōshi kenkyū, Vol. 4 (November 2010), p. 96.
Conspicuous examples of tension between narratorial commentary and narrative con-
tents can also be found in Five Women, particularly in its first, third and fifth stories, as
well as in Great Mirror of Male Love, as pointed out by Hatanaka in the article cited here.
65 Johnson, “Turnabout,” pp. 336, 341. In a similar vein, regarding Saikaku, Ejima Kiseki and
other authors of Genroku fiction, Howard Hibbett finds “their moralizing superficial at
best.” He later comments of their works, “While extolling every Confucian virtue, they
display hedonistic, materialistic attitudes,” and that they “seldom preach[…] without im-
plying parody, and a bright satirical sketch is often enclosed in a thick Chinese border of
Confucian moralizing” (Hibbett, Floating World, pp. 3, 18, 19–22).
66 Kim Man-jung, trans. Richard Rutt, A Nine Cloud Dream, in Richard Rutt, Kim Chong-un,
trans., Virtuous Women: Three Classic Korean Novels (Seoul: Royal Asiatic Society, Korea
Branch, 1974), pp. 1–171; Someya, Saikaku shōsetsu ron, p. 89. All translations from the
Japanese in this study are my own, except in cases where issues regarding others’ transla-
tions are discussed.
67 Ōguchi Yūjirō asserts that the power of the shogunate over Japan as a whole compromises
the applicability of the term “feudalism” to the political structures of the Tokugawa era.
(Ōguchi Yūjirō, “Foreword to the Volume,” in Bettina Gramlich-Oka, Gregory Smits, eds.,
Economic Thought in Early Modern Japan [Leiden: Brill, 2010], pp. xiii–xiv.) While conced-
ing that there were great differences between the political structures of early-modern
Japan and medieval Europe (as there were between various “feudal” societies within
Europe), I find the term useful for encapsulating various aspects of the Tokugawa socio-
political structure, namely, the existence of hereditary status-groups, the inheritance of
Introduction 19

institutions, and Confucian orthodoxy, for their inclusion must have involved
some risk to author, printer, and bookseller, and making them more overt or nu-
merous would presumably have carried the danger of upsetting the Tokugawa
authorities. Peter Kornicki writes that although book censorship in Tokugawa
Japan was not systematized until the 1720s, censorship edicts (which were pri-
marily aimed at guiding the self-censorship of booksellers’ guilds) survive from
as early as the 1670s, and the earliest known case of censorship in the period
involved a text published in 1649. Kornicki views the public posting in 1682 (the
year Amorous Man was published) of a prohibition on “dealing in new books
that are unsound” as evidence that by then the Tokugawa authorities “had be-
come sufficiently aware of the power of publishing.”68
Although I agree with Jeffrey Johnson’s perception of irony in much of
the narratorial moralizing in Saikaku’s fiction, one of the ostensible aims of
which, as adumbrated earlier, is to enforce officially prescribed hierarchies, in
contrast to Johnson’s emphasis on the overturning of hierarchies in Saikaku’s
fiction, my focus is on its establishment of new hierarchies based on wealth
and personal cultivation, as delineated above. A central assertion of this study
is that the reigning sensibility of the works it examines is not iconoclastic or
egalitarian but rather that of the ambitious and assertive bourgeois who is con-
cerned with social self-advancement rather than with leveling social distinc-
tions. Amorous Man and Saikaku’s subsequent fiction valorize the milieus in
which this sensibility reigns, in part by means of references to elite literature
that occupy a range of positions on the continuum between obviously comi-
cal parody and straightforward allusion, and many of which have the effect of
transferring samurai or aristocratic cachet to chōnin social spaces.69 The fact
that such literary references become markedly less concentrated in Saikaku’s

rank within the ruling (samurai) status-group, the existence of domains not directly con-
trolled by the shogunate, the emphasis on personal bonds between lord and vassal, and
the apparently greater importance of loyalty to one’s immediate superiors than loyalty to
a centralized state.
68 Kornicki, The Book in Japan, pp. 331–35. See also Hibbett, Floating World, pp. 19–22;
Taniwaki, “Saikaku no jishu kisei to kamufurāju,” p. 117.
69 Taniwaki Masachika writes of how a process of simultaneous “vulgarization of the classi-
cal” and “classicization of the vulgar” serves in parts of Amorous Man as a source of come-
dy, and leaves open the question of whether this constitutes parody (Taniwaki Masachika,
Saikaku kenkyū josetsu [Tokyo: Shintensha, 1981], p. 90). See also Struve, Ihara Saikaku,
p. 98.
20 Introduction

works after Amorous Man70 bespeaks a growing confidence that commoner

characters and milieus are worthy of literary portrayal in their own right.71

Defining (Saikaku’s) Parody

In addition to treating the issues introduced above, this study examines the
interface between social history and genre development in early-Tokugawa
Japan, with a view toward contributing to a broadened understanding of how
this process works across cultures. It will do so by focusing on a moment in
Japan’s literary history when, as Bakhtin adumbrated with regard to European
literature, parody of aristocratic genres morphs into a new form of fiction that
both borrows from elite literature and deems commoners and commoner mi-
lieus fitting subjects for literary depiction.72 This section will briefly examine
Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism and its relevance to, to borrow Struve’s term,
Saikaku’s polyphonic style. It will then seek parallels between Bakhtin’s ac-
count of the function of parody in the development of the European novel
and the role of parody in the literary history of early-Tokugawa Japan, before
engaging with theoretical works by Linda Hutcheon and Tzvetana Kristeva
in the process of settling on a definition of parody that suits the context of
Saikaku’s fiction. It will propose, and portions of the rest of this study will con-
firm, that the functions of parody and other forms of allusion in Amorous Man
and other works of fiction by Saikaku include the implicit elevation of wealthy
commoner characters and milieus by linking them to the elite characters and

70 Maeda Kingorō, Kinsei bungaku zakkō (Tokyo: Bensei Shuppan, 2006), p. 225.
71 Of Saikaku’s fiction, Howard Hibbett remarks, “For the first time townsmen could see
themselves, in their intense pursuit of happiness, through the lens of artistic fiction”
(Hibbett, Floating World, p. 39). Someya Tomoyuki observes that Saikaku performed a role
of pan-East Asian significance by exploring the potentialities of people in the warrior and
merchant milieus despised by Confucianism, which he characterizes as accomplishing
an “overturning and relativization” of hegemonic Confucian culture and thought not at-
tained in Chinese popular fiction exploring these same milieus (Someya, Saikaku shōsetsu
ron, pp. 36–38). Given the attention paid to warriors in earlier Japanese texts such as The
Tale of the Heike, the Taiheiki and various nō dramas, in the Japanese context Saikaku’s
explorations of bourgeois life seem more groundbreaking than his samurai tales.
72 Howard Hibbett writes of the whole of Saikaku’s fictional œuvre in terms of elements
of burlesque, which he characterizes as an “embarrassingly hazy literary term.” He dis-
tinguishes burlesque from strict parody, describing the former as “a more independent
genre, free from the requirement of close formal resemblance, and inclined to mock the
spirit and aim, rather than the form, of another work.” However, he also writes of parody
as “one of the many resources of the burlesque writer” (Hibbett, “Saikaku and Burlesque
Fiction,” pp. 53–54).
Introduction 21

social settings portrayed in literary classics such as nō dramas, waka and The
Tale of Genji, the flattering of readers of commoner status by providing them
with evidence of their own erudition when they get the joke, and veiled resis-
tance to the attempts of the Tokugawa regime to keep wealthy commoners in
their place through sumptuary regulations.73 As we shall see in Chapter 1, in
Amorous Man this last feature of Saikaku’s fiction is embedded in the novel’s
broader problematization of what Jonathan Zwicker has called the Tokugawa
period’s “great social contradiction and great symbolic lie,” namely, the dis-
crepancy between, on the one hand, the Tokugawa regime’s status-group sys-
tem, according to whose tatemae74 birth counted for everything and wealth
acquired through commerce for nothing, and, on the other hand, the era’s ac-
tual, commerce-driven state of affairs.75
In essays collected in The Dialogic Imagination,76 Bakhtin elaborates a the-
ory of dialogism (which he views as a defining feature of the early European
novel) that resonates with the competing voices and stylistic registers featured
in Saikaku’s fiction. I do, however, have reservations about Bakhtin’s optimism
regarding the supposedly egalitarian nature of the type of fiction he describes
as dialogic. In The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture,
Franco Moretti expresses similar reservations, in this case specifically related
to Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia, a juxtaposition of regional and class dia-
lects, professional jargons and speech registers that Bakhtin posits as a compo-
nent of dialogic fiction:

[Heteroglossia’s] most typical habitat is, symptomatically, traditional so-

cieties, “status” societies—those rigidly classified worlds that generate all
sorts of local and professional jargons, of almost sumptuary distinctions
and nuances, of expressive idiosyncrasies and arcana of communications
[…]. Heteroglossia here flourishes because such worlds do not tolerate
dialogue, which by nature is anticlassificatory, as it implies equality, spiri-
tual mobility, interchangeability of positions. […] Precisely because peo-
ple talk to one another and understand one another, heteroglossia tends

73 Although I prefer to term this “resistance” rather than an “attack,” in discerning the former
I do differ from Donald Keene when he categorically asserts that Amorous Man “in no way
suggests […] a veiled attack on the regime” (Keene, World Within Walls, p. 173).
74 A Japanese term designating a polite fiction for public consumption.
75 Zwicker, Sentimental Imagination, p. 105. See also Hibbett, Floating World, pp. 4, 6–7, 9, 23.
76 Bakhtin, Emerson, Holquist, Dialogic Imagination.
22 Introduction

to disappear, and instead we find an “average” linguistic tone potentially

accessible to all.77

Since juxtapositions of different types of speech (as opposed to juxtapositions

of literary styles, of vernacular and literary language, or of different modes of
behavior or styles of dress) are a rarity in the Saikaku works I examine, the issue
here is different. However, I shall seek to demonstrate that in general, despite
mostly conforming to Bakhtin’s definition of dialogic fiction, these four texts,
and especially Amorous Man, which contains the most heterogeneous blend
of linguistic styles and narrative modes, embody not an egalitarian worldview
but rather a bourgeois will to make hierarchy depend on potentially acquirable
assets such as money and cultural sophistication, rather than depending on
birth, thus replacing a hereditary status system with a fluid hierarchy, a sort of
meritocracy of the marketplace.
The issue of Amorous Man’s treatment of social and aesthetic hierarchies is
linked to the question of what function parody performs in Saikaku’s haikai-
like prose and in haikai poetry itself, which derives its verse structure from
waka and frequently alludes to the waka canon but also ostentatiously flouts
its genteel rules of topic choice and diction. Here a comparison with the his-
tory of parodic literature in Europe is instructive. The following description by
Bakhtin of the role of parody in the formation of the European novel could just
as easily apply to the role of haikai no renga and other parodic literary forms in
the emergence of Saikaku’s fiction:

Parodic stylizations of canonized genres and styles occupy an essential

place in the novel. In the era of the novel’s creative ascendancy—and
even more so in the periods of preparation preceding this era—literature
was flooded with parodies and travesties of all the high genres (parodies
precisely of genres, and not of individual authors or schools)—parodies
that are the precursors, “companions” to the novel, in their own way stud-
ies for it.78

In the decades before Ihara Saikaku wrote Amorous Man, individual works
were parodied in early-Tokugawa texts such as Fake Tales, a line-by-line parody

77 Franco Moretti, trans. Albert Sbragia, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in
European Culture (New York: Verso, 2000), p. 195.
78 Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” p. 6.
Introduction 23

of Tales of Ise,79 and Inu hyakunin isshu (The Mock One Hundred Poets, 1669),
a parody of Ogura hyakunin isshu (A Hundred Poems from a Hundred Poets).80
Taken as wholes, haikai and kyōka parodied waka as a genre, the former laying
the groundwork, as in Bakhtin’s model, for Saikaku’s fiction. There would be
problems of course in positing a narrowly defined “novel” as arising indepen-
dently in both Japan and Europe in precisely the same way. I have used the term
“novel” simply to designate a long prose narrative, a category that does not ex-
clude, for example, The Tale of Genji. Bringing Bakhtin into the discussion here
is chiefly of use because one of the phenomena he describes closely parallels
developments in early-Tokugawa Japan, namely, the parodying of elite genres
that largely or wholly ignore bourgeois life preceding the emergence of prose
fiction giving it ample attention, fiction that includes in its purview matters
such as the prices of things that were shunned by, for example, Heian-period
aristocratic narrative.
However, applying Bakhtin’s model to the Japanese context does not result
in a perfect fit. Earlier in the essay I have cited Bakhtin writes, “The novel paro-
dies other genres (precisely in their role as genres); it exposes the convention-
ality of their forms and their language.”81 Here the word “exposes” implies the
revelation of something undesirable and not immediately apparent, and be-
trays the modern, avant-garde European intellectual’s bias against convention-
ality and in favor of boundary-pushing innovation. What would it have meant
to “expose conventionality” in the cultural context of late-medieval and early-
modern Japan, where an exacting conventionality was the sine qua non of the
high literary genres, and of high culture in general? Waka especially is the con-
ventional genre par excellence, and much of its aesthetic appeal derives from
the tension between extremely restrictive rules governing diction and topic
on the one hand and the need to produce poetry somehow distinguishable
from its predecessors, a task ever more difficult to perform as over the course
of centuries the number of possible new combinations from waka’s narrowly
circumscribed palette of elements dwindled. The ascendency of haikai poetry,
with its much greater freedom in diction and topic choice, accompanied an

79 Hibbett, “Saikaku and Burlesque Fiction,” pp. 55–56; Shinoda, Nise monogatari e, pp. 6–11;
Shirane, Early Modern Japanese Literature, pp. 24–26; Suematsu, “Nise monogatari kō,”
pp. 1–10.
80 Ian MacDonald, “The Mock One Hundred Poets in Word and Image: Parody, Satire
and Mitate in Seventeenth-Century Comic Poetry (Kyōka)” (PhD dissertation, Stanford
University, 2004); Yoshikai Naoto, Hyakunin isshu e no shōtai (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2013),
pp. 164–65.
81 Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” p. 6.
24 Introduction

exhaustion of the possibilities of the waka genre rather than any loss of waka’s
prestige. The same is true of the emergence of Saikaku’s fiction and the for-
tunes of the objects of its parody, which, unlike pastoral and chivalric romance
in post-Quijote Europe, retained their status and much of their currency.82
Accordingly, the term “parody,” with its implications of comedy at the ex-
pense of the work parodied, requires clarification when applied to haikai and
to Saikaku’s fiction. For one thing, their use of the forms of elite genres with
language and in contexts that violate their rules of decorum does not always
have the comic effect that the word usually entails. Despite the surrounding
context of hardship in the hinterlands, the horse urinating near Bashō’s pil-
low in The Narrow Road to Oku easily reads as comical; Bashō’s crow on a bare
branch does not,83 but both follow haikai’s defining pattern of violating waka’s
rules of decorum in diction and topic in a verse format derived from waka. As
witnessed by his haikai requiem for his beloved wife, Saikaku was also perfect-
ly capable of producing serious haikai.84 Likewise, many apparently non-com-
ical passages in Saikaku’s fiction use the same haikai-like recontextualization
techniques as the apparently comical passages, and there are many passages
employing these techniques in Saikaku’s fiction where it is hard to tell whether
or not one is meant to laugh. Furthermore, in both haikai and Saikaku’s fiction
it is typically far from clear that these techniques constitute an attack on the
prestige of the source texts.
These are issues with other early-modern and modern Japanese cultural
products as well, such that Tzvetana Kristeva, following the lead of Linda
Hutcheon’s A Theory of Parody, focuses her introduction to Parodi to Nihon

82 Here I concur with Linda Hutcheon when she writes, “To adopt slavishly Bakhtin’s specific
statements about parody (that is, to imitate his practice) is to fall victim to the arbitrary
and monolithic, not to say monologic, in those statements; to adapt, on the other hand, is
to open up one of the most suggestive Pandora’s boxes this century has produced” (Linda
Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000], p. 70).
83 Matsuo Bashō, Oku no hosomichi, in Hisatomi Tetsuo, Imoto Nōichi, Muramatsu
Tomotsugu, Horikiri Minoru, eds., Shinpen Nihon koten bungaku zenshū, Vol. 71: Matsuo
Bashō shū 2 (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1997), p. 101; Matsuo Bashō, trans. Donald Keene, The
Narrow Road to Oku (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1996), p. 88; Matsuo Bashō, Matsuo
Bashō zen hokku, in Hori Nobuo, Imoto Nōichi, eds., Shinpen Nihon koten bungaku
zenshū, Vol. 70: Matsuo Bashō shū 1 (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1995), p. 70; Steven D. Carter,
Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991),
p. 349 (poem 815).
84 Christopher Drake, “Saikaku’s Haikai Requiem: A Thousand Haikai Alone in a Single Day,
The First Hundred Verses,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 52, No. 2 (December
1991), pp. 481–588.
Introduction 25

bunka (Parody and Japanese Culture) on establishing a definition of parody

broad enough to include works that do not “ ‘ridicule, satirize or criticize’ ” the
objects of their parody.85 Kristeva writes of the “possibility of parody already la-
tent in” the venerable Japanese poetic device of honkadori (allusive variation),
a potentiality that “gradually comes to the surface and increases its power as
[Japanese] literature develops.” She then cites fiction modeled on The Tale of
Genji, starting with medieval giko monogatari and continuing with the early-
Tokugawa Amorous Man and the late-Tokugawa Nise Murasaki inaka Genji
(The Rustic Genji, 1829–1842), as following the same developmental pattern as
honkadori, and comments that “Each of these expresses the ways of thinking
and values of a new age, but that does not mean that they make Genji their
‘victim.’ Rather, one could say that … they heightened its popularity.” Suematsu
Masako and Yoshikai Naoto make similar observations about, respectively,
Fake Tales and parodies of A Hundred Poems from a Hundred Poets, such as A
Mock One Hundred Poets. Suematsu calls into question the dichotomy between
“classical elegance” and “early-modern vulgarity” upon which have rested char-
acterizations of Fake Tales as a coarse “negation” or “overturning” of Ise. Listing
some of the numerous parodies of A Hundred Poems produced throughout the
Tokugawa period and beyond, Yoshikai writes that these both depended on
and maintained the fame of their source text. Kristeva continues the fine-tun-
ing of her definition of parody by observing that the examples she has given
demonstrate that there is not always a correspondence between the objects of
laughter and those of parody, notes the difficulty of determining what to inter-
pret as comical in works of another age, and concludes by cautioning against
viewing laughter as an indispensable element of parody.86
Linda Hutcheon, for her part, in a work focused primarily but not exclusive-
ly on twentieth-century art, provides a definition of parody useful for analysis
of Saikaku’s fiction and other Tokugawa-period literature when she terms it “a
form of repetition with ironic critical distance, marking difference rather than
similarity.” However, in the context of some of Saikaku’s fiction, specifically in
passages that appear to posit the bourgeois culture of its day as a successor to
the aesthetic achievements of the Heian-period aristocracy, I would modify

85 In this regard Hutcheon writes, for example, “It is the difference between parodic fore-
ground and parodied background that is ironically played upon in works like these.
Double-directed irony seems to have been substituted for the traditional mockery or ridi-
cule of the ‘target’ text” (Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, pp. 31–32).
86 Tzvetana I. Kristeva, “ ‘Hajime ni’ ni kaete—hatashite ‘parodi’ to wa?,” in Tzvetana I.
Kristeva, ed., Parodi to Nihon bunka (Tokyo: Kasama Shoin, 2014), pp. 13–14, 17; Suematsu,
“Nise monogatari kō,” pp. 1–2, 8–9; Yoshikai, Hyakunin isshu e no shōtai, pp. 164–65.
26 Introduction

Hutcheon’s definition by changing “rather than” to “both … and,” for here it is

with this double emphasis that we see realized what Hutcheon terms a ten-
sion between “the potentially conservative effect of repetition”—in this case
the transmission of aristocratic or high-samurai aesthetics and their ideologi-
cal concomitants, and “the potentially revolutionary impact of difference,” i.e.,
the implicit supplanting of heredity by money as a determiner of social status,
with all this entails for maintenance of the social order the Tokugawa were
desperately trying to reinforce with ever more sumptuary laws.87

Parody, Paradox, Sexuality and Non-Duality

Saikaku’s fiction frequently references, both directly and indirectly, Buddhist
teachings and practices in a manner that has met with widely varying schol-
arly interpretation, particularly in the case of Amorous Man. The inclusion of
such references in a novel largely dealing with prostitution and traditionally
interpreted as predominantly comical has given rise to a debate as to wheth-
er or not one should view it as attacking Buddhism through parody or satire.
Briefly touching upon Saikaku’s fiction in his examination of Buddhist topoi in
pre-modern and early-modern Japanese literature, William R. LaFleur charac-
terizes the courtesans of Saikaku’s fiction as “articulator[s] of mujō [imperma-
nence]” in the same Buddhist tradition as the medieval literature on which his
commentary has focused to that point. Incorporating observations by Saikaku
translator Wm. Theodore de Bary regarding the Buddhist content of Saikaku’s
fiction, LaFleur further writes that “Saikaku and his world represent no radical
departure from the structure implicit in earlier works.”88 In his Amorous Man-
focused dissertation, Jeffrey Johnson takes exception to this position, writing
of the “world of pleasure” treated by Saikaku’s fiction as “diametrically op-
posed to the absolutism inherent in Buddhism,” and characterizes Yonosuke’s
promiscuity as violating “the transcendental code of Buddhist morality,” citing
along the way Paul Schalow: “In Buddhism, all sexuality was evil; sexual desire
represented delusion of the sensual realm, and was incompatible with enlight-
enment and spiritual knowledge.”89 In an analysis of a passage in Amorous

87 Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, p. xii. Regarding the conservative aspect of the spread of
elite culture to the ranks of commoners, see also Hibbett, Floating World, p. 17.
88 William R. LaFleur, The Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Literary Arts in Medieval Japan
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 77–78; Ihara, de Bary, Five Women,
pp. 15–16 (translator’s introduction). The subtitle of LaFleur’s book gives as the object of its
scrutiny Japan’s “medieval” literature, but its temporal scope extends into the early 1700s.
89 Johnson, “Novelness,” pp. 120–23; Paul Gordon Schalow, “Literature and Legitimacy:
Uses of Irony and Humor in 17th-Century Japanese Depictions of Male Love,” in Wimal
Introduction 27

Man that he typifies as a “burlesque” of Buddhist doctrine, Johnson goes on to

write that “any observer of Saikaku’s treatment of Buddhism—unless they fall
for the moralizing extradiegetic voice—would have to conclude that Saikaku
is very far indeed from the position to which LaFleur relegates him.”90 In a
later work focusing on hierarchy-upending “turnabouts”91 in Saikaku’s œuvre,
Johnson softens this position, finding satire of Buddhism both in Saikaku’s hai­
kai poetry and his fiction, adding that Saikaku’s satire “focuses on the human
tendency to err” but, unlike satire as usually conceived of in the West, lacks a
“will to correct.”92 In the same text Johnson writes that Saikaku demonstrates
that the turnabouts in his works “oddly resonate with the Buddhist notion of
transience, an ephemerality of meaning.”93
This last assertion is on the right track, apparently referencing Mahayana
Buddhism’s capacity to generate and accommodate paradoxes, which Johnson’s
earlier position does not take into account. It resonates with various scholars’
observations regarding the tendency of Saikaku’s fiction to appear to take two
(or more) sides regarding the issues it confronts. As noted earlier, Daniel Struve
writes of Saikaku’s fiction as presenting us with a “dialogue of ideologies.”94
Someya Tomoyuki asserts that it is enriched by a multiplicity of points of view
that leaves one with an impression not of fragmentation but rather of overall
coherence despite internal contradictions.95 Sasaki Akio rates Saikaku’s Way of
the Warrior particularly highly precisely because of its diversity of value judg-
ments regarding its subject, and lauds such breadth of vision as a hallmark of
the best of Saikaku’s fiction.96 My concurrence with each of these character-
izations of Saikaku’s fiction is one reason I do not see its occasional inclusion
of potentially comical recontextualizations of Buddhist topoi as incompatible
with a Buddhistic worldview. Another is that, as detailed above, Saikaku’s fic-
tion arose in a medieval and early-modern Japanese tradition of literary works

Dissanayake, Steven Bradbury, eds., Literary History, Narrative and Culture: Selected
Conference Papers (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1989), Vol. 2, p. 54. Schalow im-
mediately qualifies this assertion, continuing, “Because all sexuality was suspect, except
in the Tantric and Esoteric schools … ”
90 Johnson, “Novelness,” p. 214.
91 A term borrowed from Bakhtin (Johnson, “The Carnivalesque in Saikaku’s Œuvre,” p. 19).
92 Johnson, “The Carnivalesque in Saikaku’s Œuvre,” p. 37.
93 Johnson, “The Carnivalesque in Saikaku’s Œuvre,” p. 43.
94 Struve, Ihara Saikaku, pp. 218–45.
95 Someya, Saikaku shōsetsu ron, p. 460.
96 Sasaki, Kinsei shōsetsu o yomu, pp. 72–74.
28 Introduction

that, to paraphrase Tzvetana Kristeva, do not “victimize” the objects of their

imitation and parody.97
Mahayana Buddhism’s comfortable relationship with paradox (and perhaps,
ultimately, that of Saikaku’s fiction) is rooted in its doctrine of non-duality.
Relating it to the Buddhist concept of “emptiness,” i.e., the non-independent
arising of all phenomena, Burton Watson elucidates this doctrine in an intro-
duction to his translation of the Vimalakirti Sutra:

Because of its underlying unity, all things in [this world of emptiness]

interpenetrate with one another and share one another’s identity, which
leads the Mahayana proponents to assert that all beings partake of the
Buddha nature and hence have the potential to attain Buddhahood. And
the same reasoning leads them to proclaim that earthly desires are none
other than bodhi or the state of enlightenment, and that samsara, the
ordinary world of suffering, is none other than nirvana.98

In an examination of some of the more extreme manifestations of this doctrine,

Bernard Faure writes, “The logic of transcendence that characterizes Buddhist
concentration and wisdom implies, in its very principle, a transgression of all
fixed rules.”99 Faure then goes on to observe, “A paradoxical justification for
Buddhist transgression appears in some Buddhist texts: one may kill, steal and
have sex to the extent that one realizes that everything is empty.”100 The doc-
trine of non-duality is also expressed in the familiar Mahayana Buddhist for-
mula “the passions are enlightenment,” recorded in The Platform Sutra of the
Sixth Patriarch101 and various other Chan texts,102 and referenced, significantly,
in the famous defense of fiction by the title character of that great novel of
erotic intrigue and source of numerous allusions in Amorous Man, The Tale
of Genji, a passage that also posits fiction (like the intricate love story one is
reading, which features characters who are tormented by desire and eventually
grasp its futility) as an example of the “expedient means” defended in the Lotus

97 Kristeva, “ ‘Hajime ni’ ni kaete,” pp. 13–14, 17; Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody.
98 Burton Watson, “Introduction,” in Kumarajiva, trans. Burton Watson, The Vimalakirti
Sutra (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 11.
99 Bernard Faure, The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1998), p. 99.
100 Faure, Red Thread, p. 100.
101 Philip B. Yampolsky, trans., The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1967), p. 148.
102 Yampolsky, Platform Sutra, p. 148, note 120.
Introduction 29

Sutra, i.e., narratives that are not, strictly speaking, factually true, but that lead
their audiences toward enlightenment.103
One possible interpretation of this formula is that the pursuit of the pas-
sions can prove a means to enlightenment, as occurs in medieval narratives
of pederastic love among Buddhist monks that have come to be designated
chigo monogatari (acolyte tales), such as Aki no yo no nagamonogatari (A Long
Tale for an Autumn Night, 1300s), in which, as is typical of this genre, love for
a doomed young boy leads the monk protagonist to enlightenment.104 (As
we shall see, the story is directly, albeit jokingly, referenced in Amorous Man,105
and resonates with two tragic episodes in the final story of Five Women.106)
Giving as an example the nō drama Eguchi (1300s), in which a courtesan

103 Murasaki Shikibu, Genji monogatari 3, in Abe Akio, Imai Gen’e, Akiyama Ken, Suzuki
Hideo, eds., Shinpen Nihon koten bungaku zenshū, Vol. 22 (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1996),
pp. 210–14; Murasaki Shikibu, trans. Royall Tyler, The Tale of Genji (New York: Penguin,
2003), pp. 460–62; Burton Watson, trans., The Lotus Sutra (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1993), pp. 56–79.
104 Aki no yo no nagamonogatari, in Nakayama Yasumasa, ed., Kōchū Nihon bungaku taikei,
Vol. 19 (Tokyo: Seibundō, 1932), pp. 693–717. Margaret Childs has included a transla-
tion of the tale in “Chigo Monogatari: Love Stories or Buddhist Sermons?” (Monumenta
Nipponica, Vol. 35, No. 2 [Summer 1980], pp. 132–51). Childs has pointed out the prob-
lems with the retroactively applied genre label of chigo monogatari (“Chigo Monogatari,”
pp. 130–31). For more on such narratives, see Paul S. Atkins, “Chigo in the Japanese
Imagination,” The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 67, No. 3 (August 2008), pp. 947–70; Childs,
“Chigo Monogatari,” pp. 127–51; Margaret Helen Childs, Rethinking Sorrow: Revelatory Tales
of Late Medieval Japan (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan,
1991), pp. 15, 26–27, 31–52, 145–46; Leupp, Male Colors, p. 40; Pflugfelder, Cartographies,
pp. 46, 74–75; Paul Gordon Schalow, “Introduction,” in Stephen D. Miller, ed., Partings
at Dawn: An Anthology of Japanese Gay Literature (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press,
1996), p. 14; Sachi Schmidt-Hori, “The Boy Who Lived: The Transfigurations of Chigo in the
Medieval Japanese Short Story Ashibiki,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 75, No. 2
(December 2015), pp. 299–329; Sachi Schmidt-Hori, “The New Lady-in-Waiting Is a Chigo:
Sexual Fluidity and Dual Transvestism in a Medieval Buddhist Acolyte Tale,” Japanese
Language and Literature, Vol. 43, No. 2 (October 2009), pp. 383–423. Childs’s Rethinking
Sorrow contains a translation of Genmu monogatari (The Tale of Genmu, 1400s, pp. 31–52);
the latter translation is also included in Partings at Dawn (pp. 36–54) along with her trans-
lation of Chigo Kannon engi (The Story of Kannon’s Manifestation as a Youth, early 1300s,
pp. 31–35). Schmidt-Hori’s JLL article includes a translation of Chigo imamairi (The New
Lady-in-Waiting is a Chigo) (Schmidt-Hori, “Lady-in-Waiting,” pp. 393–411).
105 Ihara Saikaku, Kōshoku ichidai otoko, in Higashi Akimasa, Teruoka Yasutaka, eds., Shinpen
Nihon koten bungaku zenshū, Vol. 66: Ihara Saikaku shū 1 (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1996), p. 32.
106 Ihara Saikaku, Kōshoku gonin onna, in Higashi, Teruoka, eds., Shinpen Nihon koten bun­
gaku zenshū, Vol. 66, pp. 368–77; Ihara, de Bary, Five Women, pp. 195–211.
30 Introduction

dispensing Buddhist doctrine is revealed to be a manifestation of the bod-

hisattva Fugen (Samantabhadra), as well as the legend and poetic exchange on
which the drama is based, LaFleur writes of how in medieval Japanese litera-
ture “the prostitute increasingly takes on the role of tutor of men—particularly
for the Buddhist teaching of mujō [impermanence].”107 Also invoking Eguchi,
Someya Tomoyuki constructs a longer narrative of the evolution of this topos,
seeing its origins in a passage in the Lotus Sutra regarding the many non-sacred
and even demonic forms the bodhisattva Kannon (Avalokiteśvara) takes to
save sentient beings, and linking it ultimately to the Edo-period phenomenon
of ukiyobikuni (floating world nuns), women who dressed as Buddhist nuns
and sold sexual services under the pretext of raising funds for temples, a prac-
tice that he speculates arose due not just to economic factors but also to the by
then well-established tradition of positing desire as a means toward salvation.108
For all of these reasons I am not inclined to see the often (but certainly
not always) joyful treatment of sex in Saikaku’s fiction as antithetical to a
Buddhistic worldview, even when it is tied to seemingly parodic references to
Buddhist texts or practices, and in some cases find that the portrayal of sexual-
ity in Saikaku serves to propagate Buddhist teachings. Furthermore, the aes-
thetics and eroticism of these works bear the mark of Buddhist origins.

Buddhism and “Floating World” Aesthetics

Pace those who posit what Ōshiki Zuike refers to as a “thoroughly atrophied”
Buddhism at that time,109 Saikaku’s fiction was written near the close of a
first Tokugawa century that also produced many popular narratives featuring
prominent Buddhist elements, such as the Grand Guignol-like puppet dra-
mas analyzed and translated in Keller Kimbrough’s Wondrous Brutal Fictions
and the Buddhist “didactic question-and-answer fiction” that Wada Yasuyuki,
perhaps rebutting Ōshiki et al., describes as having “sold surprisingly well.”110
(Someya Tomoyuki, for his part, asserts that important popular-Buddhist influ-
ences on Saikaku’s writings and other Genroku-period literature have gotten

107 LaFleur, Karma of Words, pp. 71–74.

108 Someya, Saikaku shōsetsu ron, pp. 127–28.
109 Ōshiki Zuike, Kinsei no bungaku, Vol. 1 (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1997), p. 6.
110 R. Keller Kimbrough, trans., introduction, Wondrous Brutal Fictions: Eight Buddhist Tales
from the Early Japanese Puppet Theater (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Wada
Yasuyuki, “Kanazōshi to Bukkyō,” in Kusumoto Mutsuo, ed., Edo bungaku kara no kake­
hashi: Cha • sho • bijutsu • Bukkyō (Tokyo: Chikurinsha, 2009), pp. 363–65. Regarding the
popularity of Buddhism-related books and those comparing Buddhism and other reli-
gious traditions, see also Nakajima, Saikaku to Genroku media, p. 14.
Introduction 31

short shrift from other scholars.111) The mass audience for which Saikaku’s
books were published would thus have been accustomed to seeking and find-
ing Buddhist content in their entertainment.
Despite the fact that like these predecessors they did not enjoy a high status
at the time they were first published and read,112 Saikaku’s fiction is today gen-
erally recognized as more sophisticated than the commercial fiction produced
in Tokugawa Japan up to that point.113 Moreover, I contend that his fictional
works are inscribed in a subtly Buddhism-informed elite Japanese aesthetic
tradition extending at least as far back as aristocratic Heian-period poetry and
narrative purveying an aestheticized impermanence,114 and continuing with
the medieval literature that LaFleur characterizes as wedding unobtrusive
(Buddhist) didacticism to “splendid verbal combinations.”115
After acknowledging Heian-period poetry’s debt to Chinese poetry, espe-
cially to the Buddhist- and Daoist-influenced poetry of the Six Dynasties pe-
riod, Helen Craig McCullough remarks that “an unusual preoccupation with
the concept of impermanence in nature and in human affairs” distinguishes
the Buddhism of Heian-period Japan from that of Six Dynasties and early
Tang China, and posits this idiosyncrasy as a key factor in the distinctive
qualities of Heian culture and Japanese court poetry.116 The artistic strategy

111 Someya, Saikaku shōsetsu ron, pp. 141–42.

112 Someya Tomoyuki attributes the fact that Saikaku affixed his name seal to few of his fic-
tional works to the low status of books of this type (sōshi) in his day (Someya, Saikaku
shōsetsu ron, p. 250).
113 See, for example, Wada, “Kanazōshi to Bukkyō,” p. 362.
114 This includes an element of aestheticization of impermanence and instability in the
erotic love portrayed in texts like Genji, Tales of Ise, Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book, and waka.
When Saikaku’s depictions of prostitution employ a similar aesthetic, one key factor
distinguishing them from these predecessors is that whereas in their Heian antecedents
male fickleness is the primary source of instability/impermanence, in Saikaku’s pleasure-
quarter narratives false, or potentially false, declarations of love on the part of (prosti-
tuted) women play a major role in this regard.
115 LaFleur, Karma of Words, p. 79.
116 Helen Craig McCullough, trans., introduction, notes, Tales of Ise: Lyrical Episodes from
Tenth-Century Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), pp. 18–25 (translator’s
introduction). See also Helen Craig McCullough, Brocade by Night: ‘Kokin Wakashū’ and
the Court Style in Japanese Classical Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985),
pp. 15, 20–21, 24, 32–33, 35, 71–72, 94–95, 142, 148, 150–51, 171, 512, 519. My own familiarity
with impermanence-related topoi in the famed eighteenth-century Chinese novel The
Story of the Stone (also known as The Dream of the Red Chamber) makes me wish for a
parallel study of the development of these topoi in the literature and art of China and
Japan up to the modern period.
32 Introduction

of portraying the knowledge of an object’s evanescent (i.e., conspicuously im-

permanent) nature and anticipation of its disappearance or transformation
as intensifying an aesthetic experience is familiar to anyone who has read a
smattering of Japanese court poetry on cherry blossoms or autumn leaves. As
an examination of the Japanese Buddhist tradition of poetry (in Chinese and
Japanese) and gruesome images on the subject of the “Nine Stages of Death”
(or more specifically, of bodily decay after death) would confirm,117 delicate
poems on the inevitable scattering of cherry blossom petals or crimson maple
leaves were neither the only nor the most obvious artistic vehicle for Buddhist
doctrine regarding impermanence, i.e., that all phenomena are transient and
therefore attachment to anything or anyone will inevitably cause suffering.
Although the prettier approach to impermanence is featured in some poems
of the Man’yōshū (compiled 759 or later) as well,118 it gained in importance in
the context of the stringent rules of decorum determining acceptable vocabu-
lary and topics that, by the time of the compilation of the first imperially com-
missioned Japanese poetry anthology, the Kokin waka shū,119 in the early 900s,
governed the production of Japanese-language poetry by aristocrats of the
imperial court, rules that are not embodied in the poetry of the Man’yōshū.120
These rules acted as a filter refining and aestheticizing the treatment of im-
permanence in court poetry; mention of something no more indelicate than a
crow or a cow would have violated them, let alone the descriptions of rotting
corpses one is subjected to in Buddhist “Nine Stages of Death” poetry.121
In contrast, poems on blossoms and leaves falling (or bound to fall) from
the branch, beads of morning dew not long for this world glistening jewel-like
on a fragile spider’s web, or wispy clouds dissolving into nothingness evoked
impermanence, and thus served a didactic purpose, while preserving decorum

117 James H. Sanford, “The Nine Faces of Death: ‘Su Tung-po’s’ Kuzō-shi,” The Eastern Buddhist,
Vol. 21, No. 2 (1988), pp. 54–77.
118 See, for example, McCullough, Brocade by Night, pp. 142, 148.
119 Henceforth referred to by the shortened form of its title, Kokinshū.
120 See, for example, Edwin A. Cranston, A Waka Anthology, Volume 1: The Gem-Glistening Cup
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 354–56, 359–63.
121 Significantly, as Sanford notes, in the cycle of Chinese and Japanese poems regarding
bodily disintegration after death on which his article focuses, the Japanese poems are
more restrained in their depictions thereof than either the Chinese poems or the illustra-
tions (Sanford, “Nine Faces of Death,” pp. 63–75). Further study might determine if this
can be attributed to an influence of the rules of decorum of Japanese court poetry on this
decidedly indecorous genre of religious poetry when the poem in question was written in
Japanese.
Introduction 33

and calling to mind lovely images to boot.122 The resulting positive aesthetic
valuation of evanescence in such contexts is made explicit in the latter entry
in the following poetic exchange from the eighty-second chapter of that classic
of Heian-period romance and primer in aristocratic sensibility Ise monogatari
(Tales of Ise, 900s):

Yo no naka ni
taete sakura no
nakariseba
haru no kokoro wa
nodokekaramashi

If in all the world

there were no cherry blossoms
what tranquility
the heart would surely know
whenever springtime comes.

Chireba koso
itodo sakura wa
medetakere
ukiyo ni nanika
hisashikarubeki

Precisely because
the cherry blossoms scatter
do we prize them so;
nothing in this wretched world
can be counted on to last.

In addition to positing evanescence as an aesthetic desideratum, the latter

poem also contains an expression that, famously, undergoes a similar revalu-
ation: “ukiyo,” which, depending on the manner in which its first two syllables
are written, can, if one or another Chinese character is used, designate the
“wretched world” (憂世) of Buddhist pessimism, an equally Buddhistic but less

122 For listings of various more or less attractive signifiers for impermanence, see Haruo
Shirane, Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), pp. 43, 80, 124, 134, 152, 180.
34 Introduction

unambiguously negative “floating world” (浮世) of unstable phenomena,123 or,

if at least the first part of the compound is written in phonetic script, both.
Hashimoto Mineo, having asserted that rather than deriving from (imported)
Buddhist scriptures or commentary, the term was the invention of Japanese
familiar with Buddhist thought, remarks that the poem, written no later than
872, probably contains the first use of “ukiyo” on record. Citing a poem in
Chapter 157 of Yamato monogatari (Tales of Yamato, mid 900s) in which both
meanings of “ukiyo” apply, Hashimoto further speculates that the “wretched/
floating” duality of the word pertained from the start, or at the latest by the
early Heian period, and that the aquatic metaphor inherent to “floating world”
caused the expression to become associated with the idea of “traversing” (i.e.,
navigating) this life from birth to death.124 Indeed, in the second poem quot-
ed above, the reason why it is “precisely because” they scatter that one prizes
cherry blossoms becomes clearer if one replaces “wretched” with “floating”
(i.e., unstable, impermanent125); this aids one in interpreting the poem as pos-
iting the experience of contemplating cherry blossoms as deepened by the fact
that anticipation of their scattering functions as a reminder of a fundamental
Buddhist truth.
In his thorough and complex examination of the evolution of what he
terms “ukiyo thought,” Hashimoto posits Yoshida Kenkō’s (c. 1283–c. 1350) col-
lection of miscellaneous observations and primer in good taste Tsurezuregusa
(Essays in Idleness, c. 1330–1331) as a further milestone in the emergence of a
world-affirming take on the instability of this world. Hashimoto places spe-
cial emphasis on the seventh chapter of Essays in Idleness, which contains an
ambiguously worded sentence that asserts, “It is precisely the impermanence/

123 The term also has a Daoist connection; Hashimoto Mineo writes that in China “浮世,” the
pairing of characters later used, with a Japanese reading, to designate “ukiyo” in its latter,
“floating world” sense, occurs in the Zhuangzi (late Warring States Period [475–221 BCE]),
and then in Tang-period (618–907) poetry (Hashimoto Mineo, Ukiyo no shisō [Tokyo:
Kōdansha, 1975], p. 21).
124 Hashimoto, Ukiyo, pp. 40–42, 45–46, 94–95.
125 William R. LaFleur points out that spatial instability comes to be included under the
(Buddhist) rubric of temporal impermanence, and posits the twelfth century as the point
by which this conflation becomes established (LaFleur, Karma of Words, p. 61). I believe
that this inclusion is evident as early as the time of composition of the poem being dis-
cussed here, at least if, as seems plausible, one accepts, as Hashimoto suggests, that the
“wretched/floating” duality of “ukiyo” already applies. In any case, as cherry blossoms fa-
mously do not wither before falling, the sudden disintegration at a predictable point in
time of each blossom as a unified whole is synonymous with the manifestation of the
spatial instability of its component petals, which are still intact as such.
Introduction 35

instability/uncertainty (定めなき) of the world/life (世) that makes it

wonderful.”126 Hashimoto quotes Nagazumi Yasuaki along the way as he al-
ludes to the fact that impermanence also includes the arising of phenomena,
not just their extinction, implying that this aspect of impermanence contrib-
uted to a positive revaluation of it.127
By the Tokugawa period it is with the relatively (but not unambiguously)
positively valued “floating” meaning that “ukiyo” eventually becomes associat-
ed with the popular culture of that era, forming part of the genre designations
“ukiyoe” (floating world pictures, a term first occurring in print in Amorous
Man, writes Hashimoto128)—woodblock prints that focused largely on the
world of prostitution and entertainment, and “ukiyozōshi” (floating world fic-
tion), applied after the fact to the stories of Ihara Saikaku and his imitators,
which often treated the same themes as ukiyoe.
Buddhism was originally an elite phenomenon in Japan, one among many
continental Asian imports adopted by the imperial court aristocracy, and
took centuries to become firmly established at the base of the social pyra-
mid. Likening the two takes on “ukiyo” to both sides of a single sheet of paper,
each visible through the other, Hashimoto Mineo links the shift in emphasis
over time from its negative “wretched world” side to its more life-affirming
“floating world” aspect to a process of “commonerization and layification” of
Japanese Buddhism, seeing here parallels to cultural changes associated with
the Protestant Reformation in Europe, which occurred at about the same
time.129 He also writes of an aristocratic mentality according to which one
should enjoy this world precisely because it is all a dream as evolving into the
Edo-period ukiyo mentality as it spread to the mass of commoners, and implies
that the spread of salvific schools of Buddhism contributed to sexual hedo-
nism during the early Tokugawa period by assuring believers that faith would
guarantee them a favorable rebirth, freeing them to pursue pleasure in this
life.130 Earlier in the same work he writes of the mindset reflected in the term
“ukiyo” as evidence of Buddhism’s naturalization in Japan: “I think that it is pre-
cisely the permeation of the word ‘ukiyo’ into the Japanese consciousness that

126 Yasura Okakō, Tsurezuregusa zen chūshaku, Vol. 1 (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1976), pp.
42–43; Yoshida Kenkō, trans. G. B. Sansom, Essays in Idleness (New York: Cosimo Classics,
2005), p. 5.
127 Hashimoto, Ukiyo, p. 79. In contrast to Hashimoto, Howard Hibbett dates positive valua-
tions of the term “ukiyo” to the early seventeenth century (Hibbett, Floating World, p. 11).
128 Hashimoto, Ukiyo, p. 109.
129 Hashimoto, Ukiyo, pp. 94–95.
130 Hashimoto, Ukiyo, pp. 98, 103–4.
Other documents randomly have
different content
Essex, James, 362.
Estaing, admiral d', 185, 486.
Este, Mary d', 462.
Esterhazy, prince, 246.
Esterhazy, N., 449.
Estouteville, W. d', 480.
Estrades, count d', 85, 453.
Estrange, Roger l', 468.
Estrees, Cæsar d', 475.
Estrees, F. A. d', 180.
Estrees, Gabrielle d', 142.
Estrees, V. M. d', 486.
Ethelred I, 166.
Ethelred II, 149, 162, 164.
Ethelwulf, 25.
Etmuller, M., 97.
Ettmuller, M. E., 375.
Ettrick shepherd, 444.
Euclides, 316.
Eudes, John, 327.
Eugene, Francis, 142.
Eugene, prince, 48.
Eugenius IV, pope, 80.
Euler, Leonard, 352.
Euripides, 454.
Eusden, Lawrence, 377.
Eustace, J. Skey, 336.
Eutyches condemned, 391.
Evald, Johannes, 106.
Evans, Morris, 336.
Evelyn, John, 86.
Evelyn, John, 116.
Everard, John, 391.
Everett, A. H., 252.
Evremond, St. Denis, 355.
Excelmans, Gen., 288.
Exiles, A. F. d', 446.
Eylau, 221.
Eyre transported, 419.

Faber, N. le, 423.

Fabricius, G., 274.
Fabricius, J. A., 132.
Fabricius, J. C., 92.
Fabroni, Angiolo, 372.
Fabyan, Robert, 85.
Fagius, Paul, 432.
Fahrenheit, 364.
Fairfax, lord, 171.
Fairfax, Thomas, 431.
Falck, Victor, 74.
Falconberg, countess, 102.
Falkland, lord, 369.
Fallopius, Gabriel, 393.
Falstaff, John, 237.
Fanshawe, Richard, 235.
Farel, William, 360.
Farinelli, 364.
Farmer, John, 319.
Farmer, Richard, 354.
Farmer, W. W., 416.
Farnaby, Thomas, 230.
Farnese, Alexander, 480.
Farnese, pope, 429.
Farnese, P. L., 356.
Farneworth, Elias, 117.
Farrar, John, 185.
Farren, Miss, 143.
Farquhar, G., 172.
Fastolff, John, 425.
Faulkner, captain, 18.
Faulkner, George, 339.
Faunce, Thomas, 86.
Faust's Psalter, 320.
Faustin I, 335, 338, 467.
Favras, marquis de, 75.
Fawkes, Francis, 337.
Fawkes, Guido, 46, 424.
Felibien, Andrew, 228.
Fell, John, 270.
Fell, John, 360.
Felton, John, 440.
Fenelon, 19.
Fenn, John, 69.
Fenton, Elijah, 274.
Ferdinand of Arragon, 250.
Ferdinand I, Austria, 458.
Ferdinand I, Germany, 291.
Ferdinand II, Germany, 59.
Ferdinand III, 61.
Ferdinand Louis, 395.
Ferdinand IV, Naples, 15.
Ferdinand V, 37.
Ferdinand VI, 314.
Ferdinand VII, 117, 380.
Ferdinand XII, 11.
Ferdinand, king of Rome, 16.
Ferguson, Adam, 80.
Ferguson, David, 309.
Ferguson, James, 437.
Ferguson, Robert, 401.
Fernow, C. L., 460.
Ferriol, Anthony de, 347.
Fessenden, T. G., 432.
Fevre, N. le, 423.
Fevre, St. Mark de, 442.
Fevre, Tannegui le, 359.
Field, George, 380.
Field, Richard, 443.
Fielding, admiral, 12.
Fielding, Henry, 392.
Fielding, John, 348, 405.
Fiennes, William, 149.
Fieschi executed, 69.
Fiesco, J. L., 12.
Fiesque, Sinibaldi de, 470.
Fife, countess, 27.
Filangieri, Gaetano, 286.
Fillmore, Millard, 40.
Finch, Heneage, 475.
Finch, John, 439.
Finden, William, 380.
Fingal, 52.
Fink executed, 143.
Firmin, Thomas, 478.
Fisher, Henry, 58.
Fisher, John, 244.
Fisher, Edward, 196.
Fisk, Pliny, 409.
Fitch, steam boat, 219.
Fitzempress, Henry, 375.
Fitzgerald, Gerald, 375.
Fitzgerald, lady, 203.
Fitzgerald, Robert, 174.
Fitzherbert, A., 207.
Fitz-Simeon, 149.
Fitzwilliam, viscount, 55.
Fixmilner, 338.
Flaccus, A. P., 447.
Flaccus, Q. H., 450.
Flag, major, 191.
Flamstead, John, 490.
Flavel, John, 249.
Flaxman, John, 459.
Fleetwood, Charles, 386.
Fleetwood, bishop, 306.
Fleetwood, William, 87.
Fleming, captain, 24.
Flemming, Paul, 130.
Fletcher, Benjamin, 340.
Fletcher, G., 51.
Fletcher, Gov. Pa., 407.
Fleury, 234.
Fleury, A. de, 433.
Fleury, cardinal, 44.
Fleury, Claude, 232.
Flinders died, 284.
Flint, Timothy, 327.
Flipart, J. J., 271.
Flood, Henry, 458.
Florian, J. P. C. de, 360.
Flower, Benjamin, 178.
Floyd, general, 42.
Floyd, Henry, 366.
Floyd, William, 301.
Flurieu, C. P. C. de, 326.
Folio, Tom, 308.
Folque, general, 182.
Folsom, David, 374.
Folsom, J. L., 284.
Fontana, Gregory, 335.
Fontaine, J. de la, 101.
Fontaines, des, 474.
Fontanier, 58.
Fontenelle, 21.
Foote, Samuel, 407.
Forbes, Arthur, 394.
Forbes, Duncan, 467.
Forbes, James, 301.
Forbes, Patrick, 107.
Force, C. L., 71.
Ford, Gabriel H., 339.
Fordyce, George, 205.
Fordyce, James, 383.
Fordyce, William, 460.
Forman, Joshua, 307.
Forrest, Robert, 488.
Forskal, Peter, 271.
Forster, J. G. A., 24.
Forster, J. R., 465.
Forsyth, John, 407.
Forsythe, Capt., 58.
Forthon, James, 62.
Fortiguerra, N., 72.
Forward, Walter, 448.
Foscolo, Ugo, 357.
Foster, John, 355.
Fothergill, John, 485.
Fouche, Joseph, 485.
Foulis, Andrew, 363.
Foulon massacred, 286.
Foulques, Guy de, 452.
Fountaine, Andrew, 348.
Fourcroy, A. F., 474.
Fourier, Charles, 392.
Fowler, John, 65.
Fox, Cha. J., 39, 366, 205.
Fox, Edward, 184.
Fox, George, 25, 126.
Fox, H. S., 398.
Fox, John, 155.
Fox, Richard, 361.
Foy, M. S., 452.
Francia, dictator, 50, 369.
Francis I, Austria, 91.
Francis I, France, 26, 126, 334.
Francis I, Germany, 326.
Francis II, Germany, 309.
Francis II, France, 461.
Francis, G. Y., 429.
Francis, of Paula, 130.
Francis, Philip, 481.
Francis, Philip, 94.
Francke, A. H., 223.
François murdered, 405.
Frank, Andrew, 473.
Franklin, 14, 23, 30, 154, 293.
Franklin, James, 323.
Franklin, Sir John, 68, 188, 203.
Franklin returned, 380.
Franklin, Thomas, 104.
Franklin, William, 437.
Fraser, James, 385.
Frazer, Lieut., 11.
Frazer, Simon, 141.
Frederick, Augustus, 160.
Frederick Augustus I, 181.
Frederick, elector, 33.
Frederick I, Prussia, 31, 84.
Frederick I, 79.
Frederick I, Barbarossa, 226.
Frederick II, Germany, 470.
Frederick II, Denmark, 133.
Frederick III, Denmark, 60.
Frederick III, Germany, 327.
Frederick IV, do 352.
Frederick V, Denmark, 30.
Frederick VI, do 459.
Frederick III, Brandenburg, 31.
Frederick the Great, 39, 325.
Frederick Louis, 69.
Frederick of Sweden, 137.
Frederick William, 213.
Frederick Wm. II, 430.
Frederick III, 222.
Frederick, prince of Wales, 110, 116.
Frederick the wise, 180.
Frederick of York, 17.
Freeman, James, 435.
Freher, Marguard, 190.
Freinshemius, 343.
Frend, William, 79.
Freneau, Philip, 476.
Freron, E. C., 98.
Fresch, Joseph, 191.
Frescobaldi, B., 220.
Fugger, A. M., 445.
Fulke, William, 99.
Fuller, d'Ossoli, 288.
Fuller, Thomas, 322.
Fulton, George, 345.
Fulton, Robert, 83.
Funes, Gregorio, 24.
Furgler, Francis, 33.
Furstenberg, prince, 117.
Fuseli, Henry, 152.
Furneaux returned, 276.
Friedland, 233.
Frisi, Paul, 445.
Frith, John, burnt, 287.
Frobisher, Martin, 211, 228, 271, 315, 343, 426.
Frontenac, 265, 306, 375.
Frost, rioter, 423.
Frotte, Louis le, 74.
Frowde, Philip, 470.
Fry, Edmund, 481.
Fry, William H., 343.
Fryth burnt, 260.

Gadsden, C. E., 247.

Gage, Gen., 85, 108, 395.
Gagna, Antonio, 247.
Gahagan, Usher, 77.
Gainas killed, 483.
Gainsborough, Thos., 302.
Galba, Sergius, 27.
Gale, Roger, 248.
Gale, Thomas, 140.
Galen, B. van, 368.
Galiani, F., 417.
Galilei, 19, 20.
Galileo, 25, 85.
Galileo condemned, 244.
Galissoniere, de, 402.
Galitzin, D. A., 182.
Gall, 332.
Gallatin, Albert, 318.
Gallaudet, P., 196.
Gallaudet, T. H., 356.
Gallienus, Publius, 110.
Galt, John, 147.
Galvani, Lewis, 55.
Galvani, Lewis, 424.
Gama, Vasquez de, 194, 201.
Gama sailed, 266.
Gama returned, 361, 442, 482.
Gambier, James, 158.
Gambold, John, 360.
Ganganelli, cardinal, 198.
Ganganelli, John, 372.
Gansevoort, Peter, 258.
Garasse, Francis, 232.
Gardiner, David, 270.
Gardiner, Stephen, 432.
Garfield, Benjamin, 294.
Garnerin, æronaut, 348.
Garnerin, M., 252, 270.
Garibaldi escaped, 303.
Garland, H. A., 400.
Garnet, Henry, 245.
Garnet, Thomas, 252.
Garrick, 33, 90.
Garth, Samuel, 31.
Gascoine, George, 390.
Gasparis, prof., 136, 147.
Gassendi, Peter, 410.
Gast, Pierre du, 421.
Gaston de Foix, 144.
Gaston, William, 38.
Gates, Horatio, 143, 231.
Gates, John, 371.
Gates, Thomas, 215.
Gataker, Thomas, 297.
Gaubius, J. D., 449.
Gauden, John, 369.
Gaunor, Fychan, 364.
Gaunt, John of, 51, 323.
Gavazzi at Quebec, 221.
Gaveston, Piers, 239.
Gay, John, 460.
Geary, admiral, 58.
Gebelin, A. C. de, 187.
Ged, William, 405.
Geddes, Alexander, 85.
Gell, William, 54.
Gellert, C. F., 470.
Geminiani, 365.
Gendre, Lewis le, 471.
Genet, E. C., 140, 193, 277.
Gengis-Khan, 334.
Genlis, madame, 483.
Genlis guillotined, 313.
Genovesi, Anthony, 372.
Genseric, 409.
Geoffry, 326.
George of Cappadocia, 482.
George of Denmark, 414.
George I, 51, 228, 325, 348, 406.
George II, statute, 87, 411.
George III, 17, 44, 48, 52, 146, 218, 269, 372.
George IV, 74, 249.
Geo. Wm. Frederick, 242.
Georges guillotined, 292.
Gerard, Balt., 275.
Gerard, Sieur, 308.
Gerbillon, pere, 129, 204, 212, 398.
Gerry, Elbridge, 446.
Gerstner, F. A., 147.
Gervais, Nicholas, 442.
Gervinus, 94.
Gesner, Conrad, 470.
Gesner, J. J., 181.
Gesner, J. M., 304.
Gesner, Sol., 90.
Geta, 52, 86.
Ghisleri, Michael, 172.
Gibert, Balthazar, 414.
Gibbon, Edward, 29, 175, 400.
Gibbon, Grinlin, 304.
Gibbon, James, 257.
Gibbs, James, 307.
Gibbs, George, 308.
Gibson, Edmund, 351.
Gibson, John B., 178.
Gibson, Thomas, 169.
Gifanius, Hubertus, 323.
Gifford, John, 376.
Gifford, William, 490.
Gilbert, 76.
Gilbert, Bartholomew, 297.
Gilbert, Humphrey, 228, 306, 355.
Gilbert, William, 454.
Giles, W. B., 461.
Gill, John, 398.
Gillies, John, 69.
Gilpin, Bernard, 92.
Gilpin, Sawrey, 97.
Girandon, Francis, 344.
Girard, Stephen, 485.
Girten, Thomas, 428.
Glanvil, Joseph, 423.
Gleig, George, 98.
Glendower, Owen, 369, 381.
Gloucester, duke, 87.
Gloucester, earl, 49.
Glover, Richard, 448.
Gluck, C., 436.
Gmelin, S. T., 294.
Goadby, Robert, 318.
Gobel, J. B., 150.
Goddard, Jonathan, 116.
Godeau, Anthony, 160.
Godfrey, Bouillon, 282, 316.
Godfrey, code of, 421.
Godfrey, Deborah, 423.
Godfrey, Edmund, 402.
Godfrey, Thomas, 304.
Godolphin, earl, 363.
Godonoff, Fedor, 231.
Godoonoff, Boris, 148.
Godoy, Emanuel, 387.
Godwin, Mary W., 357.
Godwin, William, 139.
Godyn, Samuel, 469.
Görgey, 316.
Goertz, G. H., 74.
Goethe, 114.
Goff, Thomas, 294.
Goffe at Hadley, 230.
Goffe & Whalley, 95.
Goldsborough, C., 472.
Goldsborough, R., 382.
Goldschmidt, 113.
Goldsmith, Oliver, 133.
Golius, James, 379.
Goltzius, Henry, 9.
Gomarra, president, 311.
Good, J. M., 13.
Goodacre, R., 449.
Goodrich, Elizur, 420.
Goodwin of Kent, 150.
Goodwin, Thomas, 80.
Gookin, Daniel, 109.
Gordian killed, 459.
Gordon, Adam, 394.
Gordon, George, 179.
Gordon, George, 31, 419.
Gordon, George, 157.
Gordon, John, 394.
Gordon, Thomas, 296.
Gordon, William, 405.
Gorsas, A. J., 391.
Gosnold, B., 118, 191.
Gosnold's settlement, 207.
Gossec, F. J., 71.
Goth, Bertrand de, 158.
Goudelin, Peter, 356.
Gouge, Joseph, 39.
Gouge, William, 474.
Gouges, M. O., de, 422.
Gough, Hannah, 405.
Gough, Richard, 77.
Gourgaud, baron, 292.
Gourges, Dom. de, 177, 331.
Gouvion, N., 228.
Gower, John, 324.
Graaf, R. de, 324.
Grabe, J. E., 433.
Grabouski, count, 389.
Græme, John, 293.
Graham, Dougal, 285.
Graham, Dr., 305.
Graham, George, 447.
Graham, James, 200.
Grahame, James, 362.
Grainger, James, 474.
Grainger, vicar, 135.
Grand Maison guillotined, 473.
Granger, James, 151.
Grant, Anne, 427.
Grant, Robert, 269.
Granville, George, 45.
Grasse, count de, 17, 156.
Gratianus, 335.
Grattan, Henry, 191.
Gravier, Charles, 66.
Gray, captain, 313.
Gray, Jane, 285.
Gray, Thomas, 298.
Greatbreakes, 446.
Greathead, Robert, 393.
Gregori, Olinthus, 51.
Gregory, David, 394.
Gregory III, 451.
Gregory VII, 203.
Gregory IX, 316.
Gregory XII, 398.
Gregory XIII, 144.
Gregory XV, 267.
Gregory XVI, 215.
Gregory, John, 61.
Gregory, Mathew, 218.
Green, Bart., 365.
Green, Robert, 346.
Green, Valentine, 253.
Green, whipped, 409.
Greene, Chris., 191.
Greene, Maurice, 344.
Greene, Nathaniel, 239.
Greene, Robert, 346.
Greenhill, John, 198.
Greenleaf mobbed, 293.
Greenleaf, Simeon, 390.
Greenough, G. B., 131.
Greenough, H., 463.
Greenwood, F. W. P., 303
Greig, admiral, 462.
Grenville, Richard, 335, 346.
Gresham, Thomas, 443.
Gresset, J. B. L., 235.
Greville, Fulk, 381.
Grew, Nehemiah, 117.
Grey, Jane, 64, 433.
Grey, Richard, 87.
Grey, Zachary, 448.
Grierson, James, 467.
Griffin, E. D., 428.
Griffiths, Alex., 248.
Griffiths, Ralph, 379.
Grimaldi, 242.
Grimke, T. S., 397.
Grindal, Edmund, 264.
Grindell, Eliz., 244.
Grisi in New York, 328.
Griswold, Rufus W., 339.
Gronovius, 407.
Groombridge, 167.
Grose, Francis, 189.
Grosseteste, 386.
Grotius, Hugo, 339.
Grout, Hilkiah, 294.
Grove, Henry, 86.
Grufydd, L. ap, 466.
Grundy, Felix, 477.
Gruner, C. J., 60.
Gruner, C. G., 461.
Gruterius, Janus, 369.
Guarini, G. B., 390.
Guerazzi exiled, 229.
Guelph I, 375.
Guericke, Otho, 188.
Guerrero shot, 68.
Guillim, John, 182.
Guillotin, J. I., 206.
Guillotine, J. B. V., 122.
Guion, John J., 250.
Guiscard, Robert, 281.
Guise, duke of, 82.
Guise, duke of, 481.
Gunilda, 433.
Gunnison, J. W., 449.
Gunter, Edmond, 466.
Gustavus III, of Sweden, 105, 123.
Gustavus Adolphus, 425.
Gustavus Adolphus IV, 59, 100, 104, 110, 187.
Gustavus, revolution, 327.
Gutenberg, 81, 425.
Guthrie, G. J., 175.
Guthrie, John, 187.
Guthries, William, 97.
Guy, Thomas, 475.
Guyet, Francis, 146.
Guyot, Gen., 50.
Guyot des Fontaines, 474.
Gwinnett, Button, 208.

Habington, William, 433.

Hachette, Jeane, 270.
Hacker executed, 405.
Hacket, John, 414.
Hackett, William, 295.
Hadley attacked, 230.
Hafalgar slain, 375.
Hagan, James, 215.
Hagen, counsellor, 190.
Hager, J. von, 251.
Hahnemann, 280.
Haillan, 446.
Hakluyt, R., 446.
Halde, J. B. du, 386.
Hale, Alexander, 333.
Hale, Matthew, 484.
Hales, John, 198.
Hall, F. X., 95.
Hall, Frederick, 295.
Hall, Joseph, 353.
Hall, Robert, 79.
Hall, Thomas, 382.
Hallam, Lewis, 108, 349, 365.
Halle, Peter, 485.
Haller, Albert, 469.
Halley, Edmund, 26.
Halliday, Andrew, 353.
Halloran, H., 127.
Halsam, John, 285.
Halstead, M., 127.
Halsted, C. A., 258.
Hambden, John, 133.
Hamel, H. L. du, 319.
Hamel, J. B. du, 308.
Hamilton fell, 271, 273.
Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh, 37.
Hamilton, duke, 97.
Hamilton, duke, 436.
Hamilton, Eliz., 289.
Hamilton, Eliz., 429.
Hamilton, James, 363.
Hamilton, Thomas, 464.
Hamilton, William, 117.
Hamilton, William, 182.
Hammett, Benjamin, 398.
Hammond, Henry, 165.
Hammond, J. D., 327.
Hammond burnt, 158.
Hampden, John, 246.
Hamtramck, J. F., 150.
Hancock, John, 48, 204, 230, 392, 411, 416.
Handel, G. F., 82, 148, 206.
Hanmer, Thomas, 135.
Hansard, Luke, 416.
Hanway, Joseph, 349.
Hardenberg, F. von, 109.
Harding, 342, 345.
Harding, F. A., 306.
Harding, Stephen, 121.
Hardinge, George, 167.
Hardinge, Nicholas, 141.
Hardicanute, 223.
Hardouin, John, 347.
Hardy, Charles, 184, 346.
Hargrave, Francis, 330.
Hariot, Thomas, 274.
Harlan, Richard, 381.
Harley, Francis de, 308.
Harley, Achille, 288.
Harley, A. de, 409.
Harley, Robert, 200.
Harman, Thomas, 451.
Harold, 357, 398.
Harold I, 194.
Harpe, J. F., 63.
Harper, Robert G., 28.
Harrington, James, 357.
Harrington, John, 320.
Harrington, Jon., 119.
Harris, James, 479.
Harrison, John, 116.
Harrison, Mr. 126.
Harrison, William, 67.
Harrison, W. H., 134.
Harrod, William, 11.
Harry of Winchester, 305.
Hart, J. C., 289.
Hart, John, 169.
Hartley, D., 477.
Hartstein, Lieut., 213.
Hartwick, J. C., 281.
Harvard, John, 377.
Harvey, Thomas, 209.
Harvey, William, 217.
Haskel, Samuel, 335.
Hasselquist, Fred., 60.
Hassler, F. R., 443.
Hassel, J. G. H., 32.
Hastings, Thomas, 318.
Hastings, Warren, 163, 332.
Hatchcock, Thomas, 149.
Hatton, Christopher, 442.
Haurane, de, 396.
Haversham, lord, 419.
Haviland, John, 122.
Hawke, Edward, 402.
Hawkesworth, 426.
Hawkesworth, J., 437.
Hawker, Robert, 130.
Hawkins, J., 21, 403, 432.
Hawkins, John, 200.
Hawksmoor, N., 109.
Hawkwood, John, 94.
Hawes, Aylet, 152.
Hawes, William, 462.
Hawley, Edmund, 454.
Haworth, A. H., 335.
Hay, James, 165, 215.
Hay, William, 239.
Haydn died, 206.
Hayer, J. N. H., 280.
Hayes, Charles, 476.
Hayes, Jacob, 243.
Hayley, William, 433.
Haynau mobbed, 348.
Hayne, Isaac, 306.
Hayne, Robert Y., 374.
Hayward, John, 250.
Hazan, 211.
Hazelrig, Arthur, 133.
Hazlitt, William, 367.
Head, George, 177.
Hearne, Thomas, 226.
Heath, general, 31.
Heathfield, George, 364.
Heber, Reginald, 132.
Heber, Richard, 387.
Heberden, William, 195.
Hecquet, Philip, 144.
Hedge, Levi, 14.
Hedwig, John, 58.
Heemskerk, 196, 219.
Hegel, G. W. F., 435.
Heidegger, J. J., 53.
Heine, Heinrich, 75.
Heinecken, C. H., 250.
Heinse, William, 244.
Heinsius, N., 304.
Heinsius, Daniel, 27.
Heinsius, Nich., 390.
Helen and Judith, 412.
Helena, empress, 326.
Heliogabalus, 98.
Hellot, John, 68.
Helmont, J. B. van, 489.
Heloise, 194.
Helvetius, 10, 484.
Hemans, F. D., 194.
Hemsterhuys, T., 139.
Henault, C. J. F., 482.
Henderson, general, 77.
Henderson, John, 421.
Henderson, P., 467.
Hendricks, William, 194.
Hendrik, King, 353.
Heneage, 439.
Henley, captain, 30.
Henley, John, 399.
Hennessin, 87.
Henrietta Marie, 314.
Henry, John, 97.
Hentz, C. Lee, 64.
Heraclius, 63, 471.
Herard, 113.
Herbelot, B. d', 464.
Herbert, Edward, 328.
Herbert, George, 91.
Herbert, Thomas, 89.
Herbert, William, 142.
Herbin, A. F. J., 489.
Herbois, Collot de, 134.
Herder, J. G., 476.
Heriter, de Brutelle, l', 322.
Herkimer, general, 308.
Herkimer, Nicholas, 328.
Heresy, burning for, 158.
Herissant, 314.
Herod, birthday, 340.
Herodotus, 229.
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