The Life of an Amorous Woman and Other Writings (UNESCO Collection of Contemporary Works) [Paperback]

Ihara Saikaku (Author), Ivan Morris (Author)

Book Description

Series: UNESCO Collection of Contemporary Works | Publication Date: January 17, 1969

This book is a replica of the original from the collections of The New York Public Library; it was produced from digital images created by The New York Public Library and its partners as part of their preservation efforts. To enhance your reading pleasure, the aging and scanning artifacts have been removed using patented page cleaning technology. We hope you enjoy the result.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Japanese

Product Details

• Paperback: 403 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (January 17, 1969)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811201872
• ISBN-13: 978-0811201872
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #415,136 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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32 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A poetic portrait of Japan that many don't know exists., May 3, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Life of an Amorous Woman and Other Writings (UNESCO Collection of Contemporary Works) (Paperback)

I stumbled on to Saikaku's writings while looking for another novel by another author for my book club. After briefly reading some of the summaries and glimpsing thru the stories I knew I would be intrigued.

Let me describe who I, as the reader, am. I am a 30 year old, black female born in Los Angeles, CA. Some people would ask why or how I could have ever found Saikaku's writings to begin with, but I am a person who appreciates the universals that exist between human beings. And as I get older, I still believe in fairytales and I am fascinated by fairytales with adult themes.

The Life of An Amorous Woman and other writings, provides us a snapshot of human nature, and what's even better, it provides some of the timeliest as well as most humorous observations of human nature we as readers are going to find. And unlike Shakespeare, there are no hidden euphemisms here: Many of the encounters, be they erotic, sexual,heterosexual, homosexual, or auto-sexual are direct and free of any "family values" or "hide this one from the church" type of encryption.

The characters' identities are not as deeply sculptured to the demands or standards of the modern novel--like Holden Caufield is in Catcher in the Rye, but they aren't caricatures of the modern novel either. Saikaku's characters, from story to story might seem familiar, but their paths are different, and I felt like Alice in Wonderland on a lazy day on a dreamy riverbank, listening to friend or a fascinating stranger tell me fables about many people's lives. Maybe they existed but even if they did not some sense of them exists inside of me. And I learned, and I compared our situations.

The Cons?: Saikaku's writing does rely heavily on a symetry of style carried from one story to the next, and sometimes you might wonder how one segment of the story relates to the next. Sometimes, it might not.

Be that as it may Saikaku still fills his short stories and his longer work, The Life of An Amorous Woman, with some great details, and definitely unexpected twists of plot (because it's human nature--not the nature of the Formula movie--sorry I'm preaching I know) which I expect from a non-American work. It is actually quite alright to stray to an isolated moment and take it in for what it is.

By the way, you won't find the stereotypically submissive Japanese women that stupid men at stupid bars talk about. But they aren't the iconoclastic type of Japanese female Ling portrays on Ally McBeal either. These are simply women who are existing, surviving, falling in and out of love, or just falling. The men treat women with respect and the fact that a man created this story really does impress me about his insightfulness and love for human beings. One is especially fortunate to have this particular edition, translated by Ivan Morris. There is a line by line glossary of notes at the end of the book, explaining many of the details that we may not understand from styles of dress (Fashion Do's and Dont's) to currency exchange to Saikaku's symbolism and development of imagery. Some of the more fascinating details I discovered was that women who conquered men in Houses of Pleasures could become as famous as men who conquered territories on the battlefield. But you can take the extra explanations or leave them because the writing and the translation stands on it's own without much clarification.

I highly recommend it for those who yearn to be transported to a time period that really did exist before authors knew the significance of "Hollywood Rights".

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A collection of collections, May 23, 2005

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wiredweird "wiredweird" (Earth, or somewhere nearby) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Life of an Amorous Woman and Other Writings (UNESCO Collection of Contemporary Works) (Paperback)

Saikaku was a popular writer of the seventeenth century, and also a populist writer. These aren't high tales of courtly romance, but more realistic tellings of more realistic stories, generally with a bawdy side.

The first group of stories has been published elsewhere as "Five Women Who Loved Love," not the title used here. Using one story for each, it describes five women overcome by their passion, then overtaken by their fates. These have a moralizing tone - except for the one woman who converted a lover of men, they all end badly.

The next clutch of stories trace the life of the title's "Amorous Woman." The setting is a monastic hovel, where the now-old woman lives in retreat. Some young men bring her gifts, and ask for adivce in the ways of the world. She replies, starting with her own earliest stirrings for men at an improbably young age. The ancdotes wander through marriage, courtly life, prostitution, and work as a seamstress, teacher, and scribe. The general tone is amusing as she enters each new passion or strategem but ambiguous as a whole, tinged but not drenched with regret.

Finally, "The Eternal Storehouse" and "Reckonings" each present a few short tales. One of those short stories, "Daikoku" is itself an exchange of stories among travelers, a little like Chaucer. The final segment presents unrelated anecdotes, tied together by the common theme of resolving debts when entering the New Year. These are mostly stories of tricks used to avoid paying, or the trickier business getting payment anyway. Some, Dickens-like, just relate moments of the sadness of poverty.

Between the preface and the appendices, explanatory material weighs in around 175 of the 400 pages or so. It would have been a bit easier to chase the 800+ footnotes if they had been presented page by page instead of segregated in the back. Still I prefer the author's decision to let the text appear uninterrupted, except for a few enjoyable block prints of line drawings. The notes are not just filler, by the way. They really do help to fill in the cultural background that makes the stories make sense.

This is a very readable, very enjoyable set. The times, people, and moods all vary from story to story, but the collection as a whole gives interesting insight into Saikaku's times.

//wiredweird

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Be aware..., June 2, 2006

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frumiousb "frumiousb" (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Life of an Amorous Woman and Other Writings (UNESCO Collection of Contemporary Works) (Paperback)

This is not a complete translation of The Life of an Amorous Woman. Instead, it is actually a selected anthology that excerpts from four of Saikaku's work. In the preface, Ivan Morris (translator and editor) says: "The translator's aim has been to give as wide a view of Saikaku's prose as is practical within the confines of a single volume." This book pulls from the writer's erotic works and townsman works. It does not contain any of his samurai or provincial stories or poetry.

While for me it was fine that it was an anthology, it would be frustrating to buy this book if you thought that you were going to get the entirety of The Life of an Amorous Woman.

Aside from the title work, the works excerpted include: Five Women Who Chose Love, The Eternal Storehouse of Japan, and Reckonings that Carry Men Through the World.

The book is bound with three detailed appendices: Sources, Money in Saikaku's Time and the Hierarchy of Courtesans.

Although I was not aware that this was an anthology when I bought it, I still enjoyed reading it. I had been refered to Saikaku as a counterpoint after having read The Pornographers by Nozaka. As the credited inventor of the "floating world" genre, much of Japanese literature with an adult theme owes a debt to Saikaku.

The notes were richly detailed. I probably would have preferred to either have them at the end of the section or under the page rather than at the end of the book. But that is a general complaint of mine-- I always like to know the detail, and do not enjoy flipping back and forth to the back of the book. The illustrations that were reproduced are well-chosen, and add quite a bit to the understanding of the text.

Recommended, if you have an interest in the subject area.