The Floating World of Ihara Saikaku

A study of a Japanese author by one who reads no Japanese may first be justified as a suggestion of reading for others with no access to the original, yet as a comparatist, I like to think that non-specialists can sometimes bring fresh insights of interest even to the experts.

Quotations are drawn from The Life of an Amorous Woman, translated and edited by Ivan Morris. Since the episodes are so brief and others may use different editions, I cite only the chapter.



     During the seventeenth century in Japan as in Europe printed books became widely available as the middle class increased in size and prosperity. Whereas much earlier literature had been either courtly (such as waka and sonnets) or popular (inaka bushi or ballads), a distinctly bourgeois literature then arose. Authors could make a living from the sale of their books rather than depending on noble patronage or the coins of onlookers. Accompanying the shift in audience and medium were new forms and values. In England one might think of writers like Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe, while in Japan Ihara Saikaku represented the taste of the chonin class, meaning “townsperson” (like bourgeois), producing work that was considered almost subliterary in its own day.
     Saikaku founded the ukiyo-zōshi (books of the floating world) prose genre, among the first Japanese works to be published for profit. After beginning his career as a poet, composing haikai, itself a colloquial and often comic form arising from the aristocratic renga, he turned to fiction. He found great popularity with his stories of the affairs of the middle class and the intrigues of the “floating world,” the pleasure districts with brothels, theaters, and places of entertainment, the same districts that inspired the ukiyo-e artists. He also wrote of most the popular genre categories, including romance, detective, and ghost stories.
     Ivan Morris did English-speakers a service with his edition of a number of Saikaku’s stories in The Life of an Amorous Woman with its helpful introduction and invaluable notes. I particularly applaud this careful annotation since the volume is clearly meant for the general educated reader rather than for specialists. (How many publishers today would expect such an audience for a centuries-old Asian writer? Though my British Corgi paperback from 1964 does promise “high eroticism” on its cover, it cost only six shillings.)
     Saikaku does write a good deal about the “floating world,” as the entertainment quarters were called. These were forbidden to samurai, the exclusive province of the middle-class patron, full of theaters, teahouses and drinking spots, as well as houses of prostitution catering to men looking for either female or male partners. Saikaku is also representative of his class in his interest in economic fortunes. One of his books focuses on ways of making money, emphasizing industry and straight dealing. Against the general backdrop of Buddhist truisms, his stories illustrate with lively realism the mores of his day.
     Saikaku sometimes drew his plots from what claimed to be accounts of real events and they can sometimes read like a Tokugawa edition of The National Inquirer, retailing the lurid stories of the entertainment world and the demimonde for readers to cluck at and condemn. His readers could enjoy the titillation of vicarious sins while neither practicing nor endorsing such behavior themselves. His style is colloquial and casual and accommodates miniature essays on topics such as bathhouse attendants or the decline of the priesthood, at times sounding like those urban American magazines with articles on food, entertainment, and style. Like much early fiction in China and in Europe his work is highly episodic, never approaching the unified structure of a more modern novel. Though Morris’s volume is called a “novel” on its covers, in fact, the brief narrations are self-contained. Morris, in fact, has included portions of four different publications here. Even those who eschew abridgments will find his selection satisfying, surely the best introduction to the author in English. [1]
     Saikaku’s stories are punctuated with Buddhist commonplaces commenting on the impermanence of worldly things and the prevalence of suffering in human life. Thus, the reader is reminded “evanescent is this Floating World and uncertain the life of man.” [2] “No life is more certain than a bubble on the river’s surface” in “this grief-laden world of ours” [3] “The blooms scatter, the trees wither away, and when evening comes all are thrown into the hearth and burned.” [4] The uncertainty of fortune is also a highly conventionalized theme: “little do we know what fate has prepared for us.” [5]
     This is the basis for his obeisance toward Buddhist ideals of detachment. The heroine of The Life of an Amorous Woman repeatedly blames the disorder and suffering of her life on her sexual desire. When she briefly works as a celibate seamstress she considers herself “innocent of sin” within view at least of “The state of True Buddhahood.” [6]
     Yet Buddhism is also criticized. Just as Chaucer and Langland attacked the corruption of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, Saikaku makes fun of hypocritical monks and describes “Worldly Temples.” He even suggests that the Buddha himself may have sexually indulged at least in his youth or would, at least not condemn those who do. The “amorous woman” becomes the mistress of a bonze in a decidedly “Worldly Temple.” In another tale, monks who receive a bequest instantly run off to the whorehouse to spend it. [7] Though Saikaku says it is “the noonday of Buddhism” he describes rampant dissipation among the monks and digresses on the decline of the priesthood. [8]
     The symmetrical sexual lust of both men and women is taken for granted in these stories, and most people, it seems, are bisexual. Saikaku wrote an entire volume of stories concerned with gay relationships. If a customer is offended by the woman whose favors he has purchased he may turn to young men. [9] In general men out for a night on the town often visit the gay brothels after they are sated in the straight ones. [10] “Great lords” are said to be difficult for women to reach as they are often attached to “young lads with their forelocks.” [11] “What difference does it make,” Saikaku says, “the love of men or the love of women?” [12]
     In general life at court is “ever flavoured with the spice of love.” [13] His The Life of an Amorous Woman is balanced by The Life of an Amorous Man in which the protagonist boasts of having had sex with more than 3,000 women and almost 900 men, apparently besting Don Giovanni in both quantity and variety. The “amorous woman” persists in her sexual adventures though her life is repeatedly disordered by her uncontrollable appetites. Combined with this intensity of desire in general is a certain casualness about individual liaisons. When the protagonist has sex with her employer she is sent away but his wife is said to simply be “amused” at the incident. [14]
     There is a sinister side to all this love-making. One man is enervated by too much sex to the point that his becomes ill, neglects himself, and, perhaps worst of all, when people speak of “delightful women,” he can only “shake his head with a bitter look.” [15] Another likewise becomes “haggard and uncomely.” [16] A relationship may lose passion and appeal, as is said to happen generally with married couples [17] or it may devolve into a dominance/submission: “I got him into my hands and made him my own creature.” [18] In the end physical relations are characterized in terms that would have been familiar to a medieval Christian monk: “carnal pleasure between man and woman is but the mutual embrace of stinking bones.” [19] Many of the stories have melodramatic folk-tale denouements. For following their passions one lover is imprisoned, others are executed, and another goes berserk. [20] Even the inveterate “amorous woman” eventually retreats to a hermitage to try to do penance for her errors after undergoing a vision of all the babies whom she has aborted [21] and sees old lovers in every image of Buddha. [22]
     The tensions inherent in Saikaku’s view of sexuality are encapsulated in a single dramatic line: “A beautiful woman is an axe that cuts off a man’s very life.” [23] Though many of his tales specifically suggest the hazards of transgressive behavior such as promiscuity or violation of class boundaries, his oeuvre as a whole accepts the peremptory demands of all-too-human love while also recognizing the Buddhist teaching that desire always brings suffering.
     Lives are lived in this ambivalence. Eros is thanatos. Benedick dies in Beatrice’s lap. La petite mort. If one believes Isolde, Tristan’s dying is his “höchste Lust” (“greatest joy”). Biologists tell us that it is literally true, while cells that reproduce by fission are essentially immortal, with sexual reproduction comes death. All corporeal bodies will walk the ridgepole of that duality until they dissolve “in des Welt-Atems wehendem All” (“in the blowing totality of the world’s breath”). Saikaku made of this contradiction some highly diverting stories to peruse while awaiting that dissolution.


1. A good many other translations of Saikaku exist, including those by Mary Holman, Kenji Hamada, Paul Gordon Schalow, Wm. Theodore deBary, E. Powys Mathers, Thomas M. Kondo and Alfred H. Marks.

2. “The Tale of Gengobei, the Mountain of Love”

3. “The Tale of Seijuro”

4. “An Old Woman’s Hermitage”

5. “A Beauty of Easy Virtue.” Similarly “there is no telling a man’s destiny in this world” in “The Wind that Destroyed the Fan Makers Shop in the Second Generation.”

6. “The Drawing Found in a Wanton Robe”

7. “The Ten Virtues of Tea That All Disappeared at Once”

8. In “A Bonze’s Wife in a Worldly Temple.” In fact Saikaku’s era was a time of decline for Buddhism, both in purity and in influence.

9. “A Beauty of Easy Virtue”

10. “What the Seasons Brought the Almanac Maker”

11. “The Fair Mistress of a Provincial Lord”

12. In “The Tale of Gengobei, the Mountain of Love.” The predominance of bisexuality here as well as in ancient Greece and Rome, in medieval Muslim courts, Renaissance Florence, and other cultures implies a more fluid sexual identity than many would assume today.

13. “An Old Woman’s Hermitage”

14. “The Pleasures of the Maiden Dance”

15. “The Woman’s Secret Manual of Etiquette”

16. “The Fair Mistress of a Provincial Lord”

17. “A Townsman’s Parlourmaid”

18. “A Paper String Cord of Guilt”

19. In “Mystery Women Who Sing Ditties” the line is quoted from Su Tung-p’o.

20. In order the stories of which I am thinking are “The Tale of Seijuro,” “What the Seasons Brought the Almanac Maker,” and “A Townsman’s Parlourmaid.”

21. “Song for a Woman of the Streets”

22. “The Five Hundred Disciples Who Found a Place in My Heart”

23. “An Old Woman’s Hermitage”