Introduction

In the i79oS Kitagawa Utamaro (1750—1806) drew a portrait of the courtesan Hanaogi, smiling as she dreams of her wedding procession and the start of a new life as a wife in a respectable household (fig. i). Employing a technique of visual allusion—a picture within a picture (koma-e)—to point to the unreality of the dream world, Utamaro makes clear that the woman’s hope for a fabulous wedding is really a pipe dream.1 While it was not unusual for courtesans to marry after their term of service had expired, their husbands were usually simple commoners, or, in some cases, habitues of the world of licensed pleasure such as artists and writers and those who dreamed of becoming so. The hope that a wealthy patron might pay off a woman’s contract and take her as his wife was often an unrealized dream. Given his courtesan’s dream of a formal processional wedding representing a ceremony of high social rank, we may agree with Utamaro that her dream will vanish upon waking.

Yet Utamaro produced something more. He sketched a minimalist metaphor of a ritual and symbolic reality in which many women—both wives and courtesans—participated as actors. His metaphor of a courtesan dreaming of her wedding hints at a congruity between the incongruous roles of wife and courtesan in the composition of Tokugawa society (1600—1867). Much of this composition was forged from the late seventeenth century when political, economic, and ideological processes produced distinct valuations of female sexuality that constructed the roles of wife and courtesan as disparate signifiers of sexuality. From Utamaro emerge two links central to this composition: values and rituals. Wives and courtesans lived under, if not always by, distinct and idealized values concerning the purpose of their sexuality. A courtesan’s sexuality was

Figure i The courtesan Hanaogi dreams of her wedding procession. From a Kitagawa Utamaro print. Courtesy of Les Musees royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, Brussels.

Valued as a type of play to serve the sensual pleasures of clients; a wife’s sexuality, while valued for the mutual pleasure it gave her and her husband, was also marked in the early years of a young woman’s marriage by hopes of a purposeful fertility to provide an heir for the household. In addition, Utamaro’s courtesan dreams not simply of being a wife, but of becoming a wife through a wedding ritual. In her hoped-for becoming, ritual accomplishes two things: one indicative of the young woman’s own dream and the other in line with the artist’s view of that dream. In her dream ritual serves as a bridge, a mediator, between the conflicting values of two intensely opposed female roles. Still, any bridge reveals the very gulf over which it spans; the presence of a mediator necessarily shows the unresolved differences between parties. In Utamaro’s view of the courtesan’s dream, ritual serves to make salient the gap marking divergent values and the constraint and behavioral expectations such values promoted.

This interplay between the artist and woman on what her dream wedding accomplishes—clarifying the disparity of values while also changing and reorienting the ritual player in the midst of such disparity—projects onto Tokugawa society the interplay between sexual values and rituals. Although the values that idealized the roles of wife and courtesan were highly disparate, the actual rituals, symbols, and popular practices in which women engaged exhibited a degree of similitude and parallelism that clouded the distilled clarity of values. This ritual activity is inseparable from the religious and social makeup of the time. Not only did this activity pull from the universe of symbols, but it also acted in and through society, and particularly within the context of a woman’s, usually a daughter’s, sexuality and her role in either the institution of the household or the pleasure quarter. Natal household, marriage household, and pleasure quarter sought to lay claim to a daughter’s identity and sexuality. Amidst these claims of communities upon individuals, ritual served to transform roles and social identities, orient women to new communities, and help them face crises of social and even mortal dimensions; but ritual could also be used to express a woman’s ambivalence toward her community and its values, create common worlds of immediate female experience underlying these values, or resist the values completely. The following discussion of rituals covers marriage, debut and first meeting of the courtesan with her clients, as well as pregnancy, betrothal, retirement from the quarters, and cutting ties. These rituals act as a type of narrative not because they tell the story of any one woman, but rather because they narrate the constant interplay between competing values, conflicting notions of female sexuality, the coexistence of institutions dependent on women’s loyalty and sexuality, and the ritual responsibility women undertook in their participation in this narrative, as well as the religious underpinning of this interplay. Before beginning this narrative it is important first to place it against the dual background suggested by the courtesan’s dream of her wedding: i) contextualizing wives and courtesans in Tokugawa society, and 2) conceptualizing ritual and religion.