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Five Women Who Loved Love: Amorous Tales from 17th-century Japan

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Ihara Saikaku understood his modern world. A writer of the Genroku Period, considered the golden age of the Edo era, he lived in the perfect flicker of a moment when peace was reigning, arts and leisure were refined, and the flower of the modern era was slowly starting to unfold into what would be the strife that would follow. Ihara knew that the time of the martial masters, the samurai and the daimyo, were over, and the merchant and the golden coin were the true rulers of Japan. Instead of the aristocracy, with their strict Confucian codes of honor and filial piety, he wrote of the townspeople, the rascals and pleasure seekers, the ones who did most of the real living and dying in Japan.

Like in his The Life of an Amorous Man and This Scheming World (Tuttle Classics of Japanese Literature), "Five Women who Loved Love" is about these average folks, specifically of the lives of five woman who were so bold as to seek love and pleasure, in spite of social attitudes about such things. They are not always admirable women, and their loves are not always beautiful. These are not role models for romanticists, and some of them are little more than aggressive pleasure seekers.

But their stories and real. Saikaku often based these stories off of real accounts, writing up semi-fictional versions of them, in order to flesh out the tale and make sure that a nice little moral lesson was included. This was important, as in order to get by the Shoganate censors it was necessary that all the characters were punished for their breaking the rules of society. But these little moral come-uppances are often just tagged on at the end, and one gets the feeling that Saikaku doesn't really feel that the punishment is fitting the crime. The only crime, in fact, is that these woman wanted love, by whatever definition they applied it.

This Tuttle Press version is also nice in that it contains the original illustrations that were included with Saikaku's version from 1686. There is also a good essay in the back, by Richard Lane, where the original stories of Saikaku's Five Women are told, and the real facts are sifted from the fiction. It provides a nice background to the book, and was very enjoyable.

These stories are beautifully written, with lively characters, witty plots, and a good mix of humor and tragedy. Moreover, the translation is masterful. This book is an under-recognized gem.

Ihara Saikaku was a a very gifted writer during Japan's Genroku Period. After a very successful career as a haikai poet, Saikaku decided to start writing prose. His first book was _The Life of an Amorous Man_ A few years later he wrote this book, which is really in fact 5 independent stories. They all have one unifying feature and that feature is love, Saikaku is also revolutionary with these stories because they are the first in Japanese literature in which females take the lead role and are agressive. Thi book is not _The Tale of Genji_ in which the man makes his move on docile women, but a book in which the women take the motive. The stories deal with young love, infidelity, and the consequences of these loves. Saikaku, the master story teller that he is shows us these characters in a humorous light, and although a few of the characters come to a bad end, the reader is not depressed over their demise, but in fact is happy to have gotten to know the characters even if just for a little while.

As the title suggests, this is a set of five short stories, related in theme. In each a woman is carried away by her passion for the wrong man; in most, the woman dies or comes to a bad end. Only one of the stories has a happy finish, the one in which the leading lady 'cures' a man who loved other men.

The moral tone is clear: punishment surely follows from wantonness. Either civil law or heaven's law may execute the sentence. Suicide, wasting away, execution, or monastic poverty, the general result was the same. The moralistic tone may seem natural, given a society with many conservative elements and given that Saikaku did much of his writing after taking holy orders.

The tone rings just a little false, though. On the whole, Saikaku's writing sounds sympathetic towards the people involved. He was very well aware that men and women are flawed beings, and had a monk's awareness of how material concerns can control a person. Also, Saikaku's "Life of an Amorous Man" must be taken as part of the stories' context. In that book, the wastrel hero ends up an old man, happy, and still seeking the next day's material happiness. The women in four of these stories end badly, even though their equally guilty men sometimes do not. It's never said in quite these words, but Saikaku seesm to hold women and men to different standards of behavior.

Like some of Saikaku's other writing, these stories have a drifting quality about them. The plots, to my Western eye, wander where they will. I don't read these for their stories, though. I read them for their travelogues and impressions of people and events.

//wiredweird