The Life of an Amorous Man (Koshoku Ichidai Otoko)
Overview
Eight books, fifty-four chapters. It follows the fifty-four years of love affairs of Yonosuke, son of a wealthy townsman, one year per chapter, from his awakening to love at seven to the age of sixty. The first half shows his youth, disowned and wandering the provinces; the second half shows him, heir to a vast fortune, amusing himself with famous courtesans in the pleasure quarters of Kyoto, Edo, Osaka and Nagasaki. At the end he sets off in a ship called the Koshokumaru for the Isle of Women, where only women are said to live. The fifty-four chapters echo the fifty-four chapters of The Tale of Genji.
Background
In the late seventeenth century, townspeople in the three cities of Osaka, Kyoto and Edo gained economic power, and the pleasure quarters became sources of fashion and culture. Ihara Saikaku, an Osaka haikai poet known for "arrow-count" contests in which he composed huge numbers of verses in a day and a night, brought his speed and his keen eye to prose. The success of this book gave birth to the genre of ukiyo-zoshi, "books of the floating world," and Saikaku went on to write Five Women Who Loved Love, The Eternal Storehouse of Japan, Worldly Mental Calculations and more.
Highlights
- A parody of The Tale of GenjiA bold structure that turns Genji's fifty-four chapters into a townsman's fifty-four years. A game of pulling an elegant classic down into the everyday world.
- The famous courtesansWomen recalling real famous courtesans, such as Yoshino Tayu of Kyoto, appear, conveying the etiquette and the iki, the stylish refinement, of the pleasure quarters of the day.Read “Kyoto, Shimabara” →
- The sailing of the KoshokumaruAn ending in which, though old, he sets sail for the Isle of Women. A bright nothingness that seems to laugh off this world.Read “Instruments of the Bedchamber” →