Ihara Saikaku

Japanese writer, poet, and playwright

  • Born: 1642
  • Birthplace: Ōsaka, Japan
  • Died: September 9, 1693
  • Place of death: Ōsaka, Japan

Saikaku was the first major Japanese writer to focus primarily on the lives of common people in his fiction and poetry. He also dealt with sexual relationships with a frankness new to Japanese literature.

Early Life

Ihara Saikaku (ee-hah-rah si-kah-kew) was born Hirayama Tōgo to a merchant family in Ōsaka, one of the chief commercial centers in Japan in the Genroku period (1688-1704). His family were probably sword makers and belonged to Ōsaka’s chōnin, or townspeople class. He was brought up in the family business and eventually took it over. He married and is said to have sired a daughter who was blind. (Another tradition speaks of multiple daughters.)

Saikaku’s business and familial duties did not prevent him from composing poetry, particularly rengae , or linked verse. He became known both for his prodigious output and for his willingness to tackle traditionally vulgar subjects (for which he earned the disdain of a contemporary, Matsuo Bashō). Although he used a number of literary pseudonyms, “Saikaku” (which translates freely as a “quick plan to make money” and suggests his chōnin background) is the one by which he is remembered. Saikaku was unusual in his refusal to collaborate with other poets in writing linked verse. In a single day, he is said to have composed by himself more than twenty thousand linked verses (a record that apparently still stands).

When he was approaching forty, Saikaku’s beloved wife died suddenly. He commemorated her in a linked verse elegy, one of the few written on the loss of a wife in Genroku Japan. He is said to have lost his daughter not long after that. He turned his business over to associates and retired. Just as his poetry was unorthodox, so was his retirement. A man in his station might have been expected to join a monastic community or take on the role of a wandering Buddhist monk. After his wife’s death, however, although Saikaku did travel incessantly around Japan, particularly to the urban areas such as Edo (modern Tokyo), he did so as a decidedly secular observer rather than as a spiritual pilgrim.

Life’s Work

Saikaku was likely Japan’s first professional writer. He used his retirement to begin a second career as prose chronicler of the ukiyo, or “floating world,” the dynamic, rapidly expanding, and unstable urban culture of Genroku Japan. Although the term ukiyo was originally derived from the Buddhist notion of the transience of all things, it quickly came to connote the secular hustle and bustle of a city life built upon the pursuit of fleeting pleasures. Saikaku’s ukiyozoshi (literally, stories of the floating world) departed from the upper-class setting and characters of Japan’s classic narrative traditions. Rather than recount the distant exploits of the samurai class, he recorded the contemporary chōnin society centering on the Kabuki theater, the marketplace, the urban slums, and even the brothel.

Saikaku did not abandon poetry for prose; rather, he redirected his poetic attention to detail in order to paint vivid prose portraits of his contemporary society. His first work in prose was the novel Kōshoku ichidai otoko (1683; The Life of an Amorous Man , 1964). Its subject, the sexual biography of its hero, and its structure, divided into fifty-four chapters, is modeled on the classic Genji monogatari (1021; The Tale of Genji, 1921-1933). However, its hero, Yonosuke, is a sort of anti-Genji, whose exploits are often comic rather than heroic, frankly sexual rather than romantic. In one episode, Yonosuke attempts to ravish a woman who will not submit to him; in another, he marries a prostitute. At the end of the novel, the confirmed libertine sets sail on a quixotic quest for an island of amazon women.

Saikaku later authored a companion work, Kōshoku ichidai onna (1696; The Life of an Amorous Woman , 1963). The heroine of this work is a female Yonosuke, whose picaresque adventures include stints as court concubine, dancer, nun, tea server, and prostitute. As in Daniel Defoe’s The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, Written from Her Own Memorandums (1722, commonly known as Moll Flanders), the heroine confesses the error of her ways at the end of the novel, but an aura of irony prevents the reader from accepting this confession at face value.

Although Saikaku’s protagonists pay lip service to the Buddhist notion that desire is at the root of suffering, they live life to the hilt, actively pursuing their desires to the end. In this respect, his work seems quite modern, as his protagonists rely on personal codes rather than received traditions to give their lives meaning and value. A note of pessimistic absurdity creeps into Kōshoku gonin onna (1686; Five Women Who Loved Love , 1956), a collection of stories about the loves and travails of working-class women. In one of the stories, which Saikaku adapted from a tawdry popular ballad, he reimagines the heroine as an almost existential figure who loves her husband dearly but commits adultery and then suicide as a way of controlling her destiny.

Saikaku was also an innovator in his frank and nuanced depiction of homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan. Prior to the criminalization of homosexuality during the Meiji restoration in the 1860’s, Japanese culture exhibited considerable tolerance, and even encouragement, of same-sex love—particularly in the idealized relationships between mentor and student, samurai and page, and priest and novice. The Kabuki theater (in which men played female roles) became a locus for an emerging gay subculture. Saikaku’s Nanshokuōkagami (1687; The Great Mirror of Male Love , 1990) is a virtual compendium of this subculture, but as with heterosexual love, Saikaku maintains an ironic perspective on the divagations of human desire.

Not all Saikaku’s works can be strictly classified as poetry or narrative prose fiction. He exploited the epistolary form in a number of works, most notably Yorozu no fumihōgu (1696; partial translation as “A Miscellany of Old Letters,” 1985), published after his death. The introduction to Yorozu no fumihōgu claims the work was derived from a packet of random letters found tied up in a broom, and this gimmick allows Saikaku to create a series of fictional vignettes in epistolary form, some of which tell complete stories, while others merely adumbrate them. Within the strict confines of the epistolary form, Saikaku reveals the inner life and longings of the chōnin class.

Other works dispense with narrative altogether. Saikaku ventured into broad social satire with Nippon eitaigura: Daifuku shin chōja-kyō (1688; The Japanese Family Storehouse: Or, The Millionaire’s Gospel Modernized , 1959) and even wrote travel books that mixed poetry with descriptions of various places. As a professional writer, he exhibited both innovation and productivity, clearly living up to a pseudonym that meant “quick plan to make money.”

Significance

Saikaku influenced the form and content of Japanese literature. He transformed the linked verse form from a game-like interplay of various poets into an extended meditation by a single writer. He also fathered the ukiyozoshi form, presenting realistic fictional stories of the floating world. He even flirted with the epistolary novel. In terms of content, Saikaku tackled formerly taboo subjects, such as homosexuality and prostitution. As Japan’s first professional writer, he was driven by novelty to provide literary works that were exciting and accessible to the newly literate chōnin class and that reflected its lives and values. He combined a journalist’s narrative zest with a poet’s eye for details and a master storyteller’s ability to transform the mundane into the magical. Moreover, he did not exploit taboo subjects so much as portray them with a realism and depth of understanding that allowed his socially marginalized characters to speak for themselves.

Ihara Saikaku’s Major Works

1673

  • Ikudama manku

1675

  • Dokugin ichinichi Senku

1677

  • Saikaku haikai fkukazu

1681

  • Saikaku fyakazu

1683

  • Kfshoku ichidai otoko (The Life of an Amorous Man, 1964)

1683?

  • Yakusha hyfbanki

1684

  • Shoen fkagami

1685

  • Gaijin Yashima

1685

  • Koyomi

1685

  • Saikaku Shokoku-banashi

1685

  • Wankynisse no monogatari

1686

  • Kfshoku gonin onna (Five Women Who Loved Love, 1956)

1686

  • Honchfnijnfuko

1687

  • Futokoro Suzuri

1687

  • Nanshoku fkagami (The Great Mirror of Male Love, 1990)

1687

  • Budfdenraiki

1688

  • Buke giri monogatari (Tales of Samurai Honor, 1981)

1688

  • Nippon eitaigura: Daifuku Shin chfja-kyf(The Japanese Family Storehouse: Or, The Millionaire’s Gospel Modernised, 1959)

1689

  • Honchffin hiji (Tales of Japanese Justice, 1980)

1692

  • Seken munezan yf(Worldly Mental Calculations, 1965)

1693

  • Saikaku okimiyage

1694

  • Saikaku oridome (Some Final Words of Advice, 1980)

1695

  • Saikaku zoku tsurezure

1696

  • Kfshoku ichidai onna (The Life of an Amorous Woman, 1963)

1696

  • Yorozu no fumihfgu

Bibliography

Drake, Christopher. “Collision of Traditions in Saikaku’s Haikai.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 52, no. 1 (June, 1992): 5-75. A good place to start to review Saikaku’s achievements as a poet and literary innovator. Includes a detailed comparison of Saikaku and Bashō.

Hibbett, Howard. The Floating World in Japanese Fiction. London: Oxford University Press, 1959. Excellent introduction to the Genroku period and the development of ukiyozoshi, with a major focus on Saikaku. Includes reproductions of ukiyo-e illustrations that accompanied Saikaku’s original Japanese texts.

Richie, Donald. Japanese Literature Reviewed. New York: ICG Muse, 2003. This history of Japanese literature from the beginnings to the present includes a chapter on Saikaku and Edo literature.

Schalow, Paul Gordon. “Introduction.” In The Great Mirror of Male Love. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990. Schalow’s fifty-page introduction to his translation of Saikakus’s Nanshokuōkagami is one of the best scholarly works on Saikaku in English. It both provides an overview of homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan and offers a detailed cultural context that illuminates his translation.