NOTES ON IHARA SAIKAKU AND MATSUO BASHO
Read also Section Intro: "The Rise of Popular Arts in Premodern Japan." (Vol. D, 583-87)
Ihara Saikaku. The Barrelmaker Brimful of Love (Vol. D, 588-603).
Merchant class or bourgeois literature – interested in common culture and people: for love and money. I suppose this is a sort of literature that doesn't aim to elevate so much as to entertain, to reflect the mores and manners of the people back to them in a realistic way. Hibbett calls this work "cheerfully indecent," and that sounds right.
The Genroku Era (1680-1740), as Hibbett explains, occurs during the Tokugawa Samurai Shogunate (1600-1868), and I'd say Genroku's ukiyo-zoshi (tales) have something of the Regency flavor about them, retailing for ordinary people the pleasures of the ukiyo, or floating world of transitory pleasures: courtesans, actors, red-light-district panderers, rakes, dandies, shopkeepers and their brats and vain spouses are the stars of this kind of literature. The merchant classes or Chonin were pretty low on the scale of things in the feudal Shogunate, but of course that affords one a kind of freedom due to the contempt of the beautiful people. But the Shogun edicts couldn't really deal with the mercantilist wealth that people like Saikaku were building up in places like Osaka, Edo, and the capital Kyoto. Japan's Shogunate had become rather insular, not really threatened by the outside world: stasis led to luxury for certain classes. Refined hedonism, in other words, carpe diem but not stupidly so. These were fashionable people: parvenus showing a creative mixture of aristocratic and plebeian tastes. Hibbett describes the glittery nostalgia for this period as something of an illusion since the political culture was actually repressive, but the illusion was a powerful one with a lot of resonance even today.
Still, there's also a Buddhist tinge to this work – Saikaku isn't entirely a scoffer, it seems. So as with our previous work Monkey by the Chinese author Wu Ch'Eng-En, there's at least something halfway serious about "Barrelmaker": the Buddhist emphasis on the impermanence of everything in life, both the material and the aspirational and erotic. This emphasis is somewhat reduced to the level of silliness at times, but it's there for the reflective to ponder, I suppose. To the story:
Part 1 (591-93)
The poor cooper's sense of life's impermanence comes from his material trade, that of making barrels and more particularly coffins. Saikaku's treatment of him and his love for the poor maiden Osen begins in a generic way – he mentions both characters and only after the introduction of the old "Nanny" during the well repair do we find out that the cooper has nursed a great love for Osen without success, and his letters have gone unanswered.
Part 2 (593-95)
Nanny carries out her promise to the cooper by means of her deceptive arts. She tricks the landlord into believing that the cooper will die and haunt everyone if something isn't done soon, and they fall for it. Then Osen visits her, and Nanny's threats of resentment induce the young lady to fall in love with the cooper, sight unseen. A pilgrimage to Ise is set up to hasten the affair along.
Part 3 (595-99)
Here the wealthy are introduced in all their frivolous pleasures – jaunts to look at morning glories and hirings of courtesans are the order of the day with the couple for whom Osen works. Osen and Nanny set out on their pilgrimae, and soon Kyushichi the servant causes a problem since he joins them, desirous of Osen's favors. The cooper realizes something is awry, but is invited to join the travelers, who now make an uneasy foursome. The sleep together warily in inns, and finally make it to Ise, about which location it's clear they have no pious feelings. This part of the story is almost Chaucerian, bawdy. Anyhow, the cooper and Osen plight their troth above a shop.
Part 4 (599-601)
Osen goes back to work, but househod misfortunes provide a superstitious opportunity to effect the marriage between her and the cooper. Nanny's plot comes to fruition thereby since she convinces the wealthy landord couple to marry off their servant Osen. Here the author makes a gesture towards conventional piety, with the usual lament about the faithlessness of women – even Osen, who lived so faithfully for a long time, bearing two children and taking good care of the cooper.
Part 5 (601-03)
Chozaemon the Yeastmaker's ceremony to honor his father who passed away 50 years ago proves the undoing of Osen. She happens to know the family, and he accidentally drops a bowl on her head and messes up her hairdo, which the man's jealous wife takes as a sure sign that the two have slept together. Osen is angry and decides to sleep with Chozaemon, but the two are caught. She ends up committing suicide and he is caught and executed.
Matsuo Basho. The Narrow Road of the Interior (Vol. D, 604-29).
This work has a bit of Henry David Thoreau about it, though obviously it doesn't have the American Transcendentalist or late-romantic emphasis on individualism and self-expression. What it has in common is that it's sort of a literary pilgrimage, not just an unadorned trek through nature. Thoreau's Walden wasn't only about nature, and neither was A Week on the Concord and Merrimac just a simple nature jaunt with no ulterior motive.
Concentrate on the near-constant mingling of natural description/interpretation and Basho's interactions with worthy people he meets along the way, monuments, and so forth. Consider why this is especially appropriate in an island country such as Japan, one with a lot of people in a fairly small amount of space. Comment on Basho's haiku origins and how they fit into his travel narrative as focal points or summing-up and memorializing of his experiences.
A thought about Japan and the concept of "nature": authors like Basho and Sei Shonagon are very conscious of nature’s presence in literary tradition, both Japanese and Chinese, and they mix in this awareness with naturalistic descriptions. In Sei's example of the pear blossom, it is Chinese literature that leads her to make a close examination of the blossom itself. She does not hesitate, either, to mingle observation of nature with comments about human affairs like coming home from a festival. She is not, in other words, a purist who must block out all things human to talk about nature—that is probably more a product of modern necessity. In Japan , as I’ve read, people once lived very close to nature, and then when the island became crowded, they had to work hard to recreate a sense of the natural by means of artifice. Zen gardens epitomize this kind of artifice—they are at once natural and artificial, we might say.
For further discussion, refer to the audio mp3 file of my comments in class, available from www.ajdrake.com/wiki.
