Saikaku life of a sensuous woman

82 IHARA SAIKAKU AND THE BOOKS OF THE FLOATING WORLD IHARA SAIKAKU AND THE BOOKS OF THE FLOATING WORLD became a legend. Even now people talk about Osan and describe. her a'. if she were again before their eyes riding along in her plain blue green pnsoner s robe. [Saikaku shil jo, NKBT 4T 260-280, translated by Chris Drake] LIFE OF A SENSUOUS WOMAN (KOSHOKU ICHIDAI ONNA, i686) Ihara Saikaku wrote Life of a Sensuous Woman at the peak of his career. in Osaka the work in six volumes and twenty-four chapters, marks one of the last in a series 'of "books 'on love" (koshoku-mono), a subgenre of books of the floating world (ukiyo-zOshi), \vhich began with Life of a Sensuous Man. Life of a is an aging woman's extended confession to two young men. She descnbes h_er experiences, beginning with her childhood (as the daughter of a in K to) and her life as an attendant in the imperial palace through a senes of 1ncreasi::iy low positions, until in the end she falls to the position of a streetwalker. of a Sensuous Man is seen as a parody of the noted Heian male lovers Gen11 Narihira, Life of a Sensuous Woman can be regarded as a of the legendary Ono no Komachi, known for her transformation a stunning beauty with many lovers to an unattractive old woman. In contrast to Man about a man who seems to remain forever young and ophm1shc, Life of a Woman looks at the world of love and sexuality from the perspective of a woman who is growing older and whose outlook is becoming increasingly Life of a Sensuous Woman, the only major narrative that Saikaku wrote in the first person, structurally echoes the Buddhist zange, or confession as found, for example, in the late medieval tale The Three Priests (Sannin hoshz) or the earlyseventeenth-century Two Nuns (Nininbikuni, ca. 1632), in -which someone who has become a priest or nun recounts a past life of sin, particularly the crisis that led spiritual awakening. Instead of a religious confession, the aged woman narrator IS implicitly initiating the two young men visitors into the secrets_ of the way love, fact, describing a life of vitality and sexual desire. Some of the earlier chapters, reveal the influence of courtesan critiques. It is not until the end, when the sight of the statues of the five hundred disciples causes the woman to have a vision of many of the men with whom she has had relations, that the narrative takes the form of a Buddhist confession. abo_ut Significantly, the two young male listeners ask the aged woman to her past experience in "the style of the present" (imayB). Instead her life in the past as it happened, she transforms it into the present, telling it as were . · "today" In this fashion Saikaku explores many of the positions that repea edl y ]iv1ng . , . o: t a woman could have at the tiine-as a palace attendant, a dancer, a mistress of a domain lord, a high-ranking woman of the licensed quarter (tayil), a priest's teacher of calligraphy and manners, a nun \vho performs Buddhist chants (utabikunz), a hairdresser, a seasonal house cleaner, a go-between for marital engagements, a s:a.1nstress a \vaitress at a teahouse, a streetwalker, and many other professions-prov1d1ng oortraval of a cross section of contemporary commoner society. Life of 83 a Sensuous Woman has in fact been described by many modern scholars as a novel of manners. Sometimes with the names of actual people barely disguised, Saikaku satirically reveals the underside of the lives of domain lords, powerful samurai, wealthy priests, and upper-level merchants. Throughout the work, Saikaku's main interest remains the woman's resourcefulness and imagination in these concrete social circumstances and how these contexts evoke or frustrate her irrepressible desire. An Old Woman's Hermitage (n) A beautiful woman, many ages have agreed, is an ax that cuts down a man's life. No one, of course, escapes death. The invisible blossoms of the mind64 finally fall and scatter; the soul leaves; and the body is fed like kindling into a crematorium fire in the night. But for the blossoms to fall all too soon in a morning storm-ah, how foolish are the men who die young of overindulgence in the way of sensuous love. Yet there is no end of them. On the seventh of the First Month, the day people go out to have their fortunes told, I had to visit Saga65 in northwest Kyoto. As if to show that spring had truly come, the plums at Umezu were just breaking into blossom. On the eastbound ferry to Saga I saw an attractive young man dressed in the latest style but unmistakably disheveled. His face was pale, and he was thin and worn, obviously from too much lovemaking.