In the quarters a courtesan’s procession concluded with her arrival at the house of assignation where her client awaited her. Ranking women made such processions to meet their clients many times throughout their careers. Certain occasions, however, held great import. A first meeting with a new client was one such occasion; another was a teen’s debut through the sponsorship of a senior sister courtesan. Because of the status it conveyed, sponsorship of a debutante was a responsibility a ranking courtesan attempted to take on at least once in her career.112 Sponsorship was time consuming and expensive; a courtesan had to plan the celebration and find a sponsoring patron, ideally from her own customer base, to pay for much of the event. Successfully carrying off a debut party, however, earned her significant prestige, praise, and promotion in rank. Ideally, the debutante was an attendant of the sponsoring courtesan. In her debut she was officially promoted from the ranks of attendant girls to that of the high tier, along with the social prestige and economic burden of maintaining her own entourage.
First meeting and debut rituals were a reflection of those performed for marriage ceremonies. The debut ceremony in particular, which was a young woman’s first public official meeting with a client in her new role as a first-class courtesan, was a rich prototype upon which all other future rites of first meeting were based. Although the time frame of a debut ceremony spanned a number of days, much of it was given over to the execution of a large dochu. The new courtesan paraded down the boulevards of the quarter with her senior sponsor, her entourage, and
Support staff.113 Procession days were often scheduled to coincide as much as possible with the festival calendar of the pleasure quarters. As misemono, parades of debuting courtesans contributed to the energy and celebration of fete days. Further, it was considered favorable for the debutante to be presented to the public by her bordello on auspicious days. Beyond the parading, the common stages in first meeting rites for both debuting and senior courtesans were i) the display of her trousseau, 2) the meeting with the client, and 3) the consummation of relations.
Reception and display of a trousseau was central to a young woman’s new rank. Just as the display of a bride’s dowry was meant as a “debut” of a woman as wife, exhibiting a courtesan’s trousseau was significant in her own debut to her community. The Yoshiwara Compendium lists the gifts that a debutante might receive (see appendix B).114 Some of these items, particularly furniture, articles of daily use, games, and objects of cultural refinement, are similar to those listed in Namura’s guide. Among the courtesan’s trousseau’s unique articles was bedding. For a debuting courtesan, the first gift of bedding from a client was essential for a successful coming-out celebration, and for a courtesan already working in the upper tiers, additional presents of futons and quilts from clients marked her for further promotion. Bedding functioned similarly to the ceremonial use of a bride’s shell box in articulating a particular valuation of female sexuality and in serving as an aesthetic symbol of status and ritual object of transfer. Just as the matching shells intensified the significance of a bride’s sexuality within the limits of fertility and obedience, bedding focused a courtesan’s sexuality within the limits of carnal pleasure. Futons and quilts were the public signs of an exclusive relationship between her and her client. Only the client presenting the bedding had the right to its use when he was with her. The accumulation of futons and quilts, typically expensive and sometimes even finely embroidered, signaled status, as it not only indicated the number of clients one woman held but also the wealth of these men. Like a bride’s shell box, bedding was also a ritual object of transfer. Upon receiving the bedding, the client’s preferred teahouse of assignation would then place it on public display either outside the building or in the latticed parlor. The day for its transfer to the courtesan’s room was often timed to fall on a major festival day, to take advantage of the energy and crowds such days provided.115
Kitagawa Utamaro portrays this rite in one of his illustrations depicting events in the Yoshiwara. In an open parlor a young female attendant
Blows on a horn to announce the viewing of the bedding (see fig. 5). The rite of displaying futons, pillows, and such is called tsumi yagu (piling up of bedding). To the girl’s right is the pile of new bedding. Behind her are stacked boxes of noodles and cups of sake to be distributed to patrons of the teahouse who will come to view the bedding and offer their congratulations to the courtesan. On the other side of the parlor, a lower-ranking courtesan prepares small gifts to be handed out to customers in appreciation of their patronage. Another young attendant lifts a roll of cloth on which is printed a pattern called hiyoku mon, symbolizing the happy coupling of a man and woman. In the quarters the hiyoku mon pattern designated the courtesan and client an exclusive pair.116
The word hiyoku connotes two things joined as one, just like the wings of a bird adjoining its body; it is also part of the term hiyoku zuka —a “happy couple grave.” In the pleasure quarters this referred to the double suicide of a woman and her “true” lover—the man who occupied her heart and existed outside the circle of her “play” lovers. Often, real lovers committed the desperate act of double suicide in the hopes that they could gain emotionally in the next world that which had been socially out of reach in this world—the status of husband and wife.117
Figure 5 A courtesan and her assistants prepare for the display of new bedding. From an original reproduction of Kitagawa Utamaro’s illustration by Mitani Kazuma. Courtesy of Rippu Shob5, Tokyo.
Trapped between love and contractual labor, double suicide was sometimes the only way a woman and her lover could fulfill their love, especially if paying off her contract were a financial impossibility. In his double-suicide plays Chikamatsu uses the literary device of the lovers’ journey (michiyuki) to portray the flight of lovers preceding their deaths. With the inevitability of self-annihilation upon them, the couple creates a new and ideal world from the one they are fleeing by sharing moving expressions of love and envisioning on their path the paradise of another world awaiting them upon death.118
Returning to the world of play and profit, a courtesan’s “play” lovers gave not their hearts, but bedding instead. Like the shell box marking the transfer of a bride’s sexuality to a single household, bedding indicated a client giving his sexuality, loyalty, and money to a single courtesan and her bordello. Still, the celebratory exhibition of a debuting courtesan’s personal and professional accessories suggested a critique of pleasure’s own values of polygamous play. This criticism is analogous to the way the public display of a bride’s dowry questioned fertility’s promotion of obedience to a single household. The juxtaposition of bedding, which was for the exclusive use of a single client, with other accouterments central to a courtesan’s career, which would be used with all the men in her future, raised the question of a courtesan’s relational identity. This question arose not in spite of pleasure’s idealization of female sexuality but because of it. By whittling away a woman’s identity to that of a wife, for example, fertility did not settle the issue of claims to a bride’s identity. Instead, fertility’s own rites, as expressed through the public display of the dowry, forced into the open the unsettled nature of a woman’s identity as still that of a daughter whose material possessions belonged to her and her family. Similarly, pleasure’s parody of marriage rites necessitated its own question of identity in its exhibition of debuting gifts. Was a woman the “bride” of one man or of all? The question became even more pointed in the career of a courtesan as she collected even more “exclusive” bedding.
As the fertility model awkwardly insisted that a woman be the wife of one and the daughter of none, the pleasure model’s uneasy answer to the question of identity was that a courtesan be both the bride of one and the bride of all. The pleasure model depended on the language and imagery of marriage relations in order to express its vision of human association and sexual values that stood in stark and deliberate contrast to the ideals embraced by marriage and fertility. The Greater Learning for
Courtesans lists eighteen principles and precepts for women to follow in the quarters (see appendix B). The fourth principle effectively uses marriage language to reject fertility values while articulating a courtesan’s one-and-all bridal identity. “A courtesan is different from a faithful wife (teijo), for she has many husbands and is praised by the number of pillows she piles up.”119
Marriage, however necessary its use and however playful its application, was an odd ritual format for use in casting human relations among courtesans and clients. Marriage ideally represented that which the pleasure model feared most: sincere feelings between two people and an identity that they form as an exclusive pair. Such feelings tugged on the mask of iki, risked turning erotic play into true love, and threatened the flow of cash into a bordello as a woman focused her thoughts and energies wholly on one man rather than playfully on many. Love for one man was as hazardous to the pleasure model as a bride’s unapologetic emotions for her natal family were to the fertility model. Bordellos played up the “game” of love and marriage in employing debut and first meeting rites, but they sometimes had to deal with the problem of real love. Love broke the rules of play and threatened its order with the possibility of profitable women fleeing with their men or committing double suicide, or of a client falling in love with a woman from another bordello and taking his heart—and his money—down the street.
Still, like bourgeois commoner society, the quarters looked to marriage ritual as a means not only for performing a particular action to produce a particular result, but also for sharing in the status the ceremony offered. Being self-conscious places of style and glamour, the quarters borrowed from yometori rites to bedeck themselves in the aesthetics and prestige of the ritual that was offered as culturally normative. Debuting, which was effectively the first and grandest of many future first-meeting ceremonies, was the most elaborate and emulative of yometori marriage ritual. Saikaku describes in detail a debut ceremony in the Shima-bara.120 His novel’s protagonist, Yonosuke, heads with friends to the quarter to see the debut of the newest tayu, a young woman named Yoshizaki. Their visit follows their participation in the popular annual memorial service for the Buddhist saint Kukai at his signature temple and noted sight, Toji.121 People, Yonosuke’s group among them, throng the Shimabara’s streets, splitting their time between sacred and sensual pursuits during one of Kyoto’s major fete days. Saikaku’s portrayal of the ceremony begins with the bordello owner and his wife taking their seats in the parlor of the teahouse as household representatives. The parlor is filled with food and gifts, the latter from Yoshizaki’s male sponsor. Saikaku lists lacquered shelves, an incense box, paper and writing box, smoking kit, kimono, and, most important, “sleepwear and bedding piled up in small mountains.”122 These small mountains of futons, quilts, pillows, and nightwear constituted the bedding that would later be put on public display. In a debut it was common to exhibit the debutante’s first mound of bedding in the ceremony itself. Amidst these piles of finery and food, the client takes his seat and waits for Yoshizaki’s entrance following her procession. In debut and first-meeting rites the client sat in a subordinate seat as he waited for his “bride” to enter and take her place in the seat of honor, which would typically be in front of the parlor’s ornamental alcove (tokonoma). In Saikaku’s description, two teenage assistants, each carrying a candle, lead the young tayu into the parlor. An entourage of girl attendants and teenage apprentices, from whose ranks the new tayu has risen, sits on either side of her as she takes her seat in the teahouse’s place of honor.123 Debut and first-meeting rites made a high-paying client a small presence in the ritual, often seating him close to the edge of the parlor, while the young woman sat near the parlor’s alcove.124 Utagawa Kuninao (1793—1854) illustrates this ceremonial placement in an 1831 work. In his portrayal, the woman, gilded with a thick, richly brocaded kimono and long hairpins typical of prostitutes in the latter half of the Tokugawa period, has entered the parlor to take her position near the alcove (fig. 6). Encased in her elaborate and imposing costume, she looms over all the attendees. Her client is a distant observer and is nearly irrelevant to the ritual, which centers less on the creation of a couple and more on the presence of the courtesan. To paraphrase The Greater Learning for Courtesans, a courtesan has many husbands, and thus in a ceremony of first meeting a client becomes merely another face in the crowd, another pillow on the mound.
Saikaku also captures the rite’s complete focus on the courtesan. His passage concentrates exclusively on the pageantry of the tayu and her train of attendants; the male protagonists are diminished by the extravagance of the ceremony. Saikaku’s description not only reveals the courtesan’s high status, but also suggests hyperbolic imagery, like his more explicit identification of the tayu with a bodhisattva discussed earlier, of the first-class courtesan’s sacred aura. Sitting in the middle of a line of attendants, in front of whom has been placed rich, offertory foods and splendid fabrics and gifts, the allusion Saikaku puts forward is that of a goddess icon set among lesser statuettes on a temple’s altar filled with offerings of flowers and candles. Set apart and distinguished from her client, the courtesan alone, like a bodhisattva icon amidst its worshipers, is at the center of the ceremony.125
What becomes immediately apparent in Utagawa’s and Saikaku’s depictions is the contention that the ritual body, acting on the simple phrase “Stand up straight!” can embrace an entire universe of meaning.126 The courtesan’s dominant and honored position, in contrast to her client’s diminished presence in the proceedings, signifies her relation with her own sexuality and her high status vis-a-vis her clients. In opposition to the sexuality of the bride—fertility transferred into the possession of her husband’s family—the courtesan’s sexuality of pleasure is her own possession. As an erotic laborer, she “rents” her sexuality out for the financial boon it brings her bordello, but she never transfers it to any man for sole ownership. A client’s temporary access to her sexuality requires his monogamous commitment to her, which is also a commitment to share her with her other “husbands.”
This ritual commitment of a man to a “polygamous” woman is sealed
Figure 6 A courtesan and client have their first meeting. From an original reproduction of Utagawa Kuninao’s illustration by Mitani Kazuma. Courtesy of Rippu Shobo, Tokyo.
With the exchange of rice wine. In Saikaku’s description of the debut of a tayu, the exchange of wine is completed in the same style as marriage: she and her sponsor sip three cups of sake three times.127 Non-debut first-meeting rites were simpler, but they typically stressed, like the humblest wedding, the sharing of wine.128 By sharing a sip of wine a woman and her client signified not the activation of her sexuality as fertility, but rather the use of her sexuality as pleasure for him as her latest najimi (a courtesan’s monogamous partner). Marking his najimi status with the drinking rite, the man superficially became analogous to the bride of marriage ceremonies. Like the bride, the burden of faithfulness was his alone. In the pleasure model, a najimi who fell for another bordello’s courtesan was the definition of infidelity. Such a relationship spoke of the emotions of the heart and stopped the client’s flow of money into the bordello’s coffers and into the purse of his courtesan, to whom he vowed loyalty. The world of pleasure despised the show of nonplayful emotions because it invariably led to the loss of money. The master, the courtesan, and her young entourage were all tied financially to each client, and the man’s loyalty equaled financial gain as much as his adultery equaled loss. A client behaving in such a fashion could bring upon himself humiliating punishment and coerced repentance. A courtesan’s girl attendants might capture him on the street and haul him back to the bordello for an accounting of his adulterous actions by the bordello master.129 Play, especially when its rules were broken, was not all fun and games.
With the exchange of wine accomplished, marking the playful uniting of a courtesan and client, Saikaku remarks that the debut rite takes on an air of ironaoshi (ironaoshi o fuzei arite).130 As described earlier, ironao-shi signaled a crossover point for the bride where she changed her white kimono for one tinged with color. The mood of the wedding rite changed from formal action to less prescribed behavior as the focus of the day eventually narrowed to the confines of the couple alone together in their sleeping quarters. Although a courtesan did not change her kimono during the ceremony, the gathering in the parlor took on a festive air after the drinking of sake. During this reception party the new najimi would toss his money for the courtesan’s attendants and staff to catch and stuff in their pockets. The payment for the staff’s work in preparing for the ritual and bringing it to fruition is called niwasen.131 This term may have been taken directly from the vocabulary of weddings where, as explained earlier, the husband’s family paid bridal representatives for transporting her luggage and dowry. What Saikaku identifies with his remark concerning ironaoshi is not a change of clothes, but a change in style, setting, and relationship that a wedding’s ironaoshi stage similarly marked. It is a change of tone from formality to frivolity, a change, at some point in the night, of venue from parlor to courtesan’s room, and a change of relation from simply woman and man to ranking courtesan and najimi.
Consummation followed debut. A sponsor received what he had generously paid for and had been anticipating in the days leading up to the final rite. First meeting did not always end with consummation. Once a young woman firmly secured her position as a top courtesan, she took on a certain official charisma and could command more authority over her erotic labor, although it was always subordinate to the monetary decisions of the bordello owner holding her contract. Outside of an owner’s intervention, she might withhold sex from a new client until as late as the third meeting. A comic haiku of the period makes this point, while also leaving no doubt that play defined the relationship. “The third meeting is all about pretending to fall in love” (Sankaime yotsubodo horeta mane o suru).132 Making clients wait until the third visit before they could pretend to love as they finally made love possessed the economic logic of easy profiteering. Initial meetings between a courtesan and each of her najimi partners entailed for the client significant entertainment expenses that he paid directly to the teahouse and bordello incidental of any sexual activity. In this sense, even the absence of consummation could signal the quarters’ drive for good times and profits.
In the drive of the household and quarter to incorporate women into positions of wife and courtesan—positions where their skills and sexuality were institutionally critical—each reached for the same culturally normative and celebratory ritual structure that yometori provided because each had something big to celebrate with respect to its values. In the household a woman and man coming together signaled a new member joining the household and committing her loyalty, energy, and fertility to advance the household’s daily tasks of maintenance and the future hopes of generational succession. In a quarter a woman and man—one man among many—coming together signaled a new source of revenue for her and her bordello. Yet the celebratory structure of marriage and first meeting, as well as the metaphors of bride and courtesan, quietly murmured with ambivalence as to how fully these rites could incorporate women and their identities, let alone their hearts and minds, in the marriage household and bordello. Marriage signified being dyed in the ways of a new household and a productive fertility, but it also signified the continuing ties with natal family and the anxiety of household disharmony. First meeting signified securing institutional rank and the expert display of a profitable playfulness with the emotion of love, but it also signified, by the broad use of marriage ritual, that such play could go too far and become real and unprofitable. With the consummation of each relationship the celebration concluded. What remained in the long days ahead was to see how well a woman measured up to the celebration of her institution’s values.
Four
World History
