Fertility and pleasure relied on the ritual structure of yometori marriage to celebrate female entrance into the roles of wife and courtesan. They also relied on notions of motive and metaphor to speak to the necessity of entrance and about the women entering. Before discussing modes of motivation and metaphor, it is important first to consider the notion of motivation in general and in reference to Japanese religion. Wendy Holloway proposes the notion of “investment” to understand what motivates people to take up one identity over another in a society of competing discourses.20 A sense or hope of economic security and social status, and whatever emotional contentment these things may bring, largely defines a person’s decision to invest her identity in a specific discourse. The household and pleasure quarter offered hierarchy and social position to women for use in establishing security and status. As such, they were centers for investing one’s identity. With investment in institutional hierarchy, there was also a hope, as Holloway’s term suggests, of gaining something in return, such as the relative prestige and limited authority that long-term commitment to the roles of wife and courtesan potentially offered. For a bride, an investment in marriage could lead to comanagement of the household and the potentially powerful position of mother-in-law; for a debuting courtesan, an investment in the higher ranks gave her status, prestige, and earning power. Still, “investment” as a motivation strongly assumes free choice and decision making.21 In a
Highly schematized and unitized society like the Tokugawa, investing one’s identity in an institution, role, and set of values was central to the very composition of society. At the same time, few people had the freedom to select their social identities in the ways that Holloway’s interesting term implies. Indeed, when wives and courtesans did freely choose, it sometimes was, as we will see in chapter 5, the choice to divest themselves of their marriages and contracts by seeking divorce or escape from the quarters.
The question of motivation in Tokugawa society centered as much around meaningful interpretation in the absence of choice as around investment in the presence of choice. Much of the meaningful interpretation of motivation derived from the religious and moral universe. Winston Davis introduces two types of motivation that people bring with them in varying degrees to the maze of institutions, sacred services, and practical actions and assumptions Japanese religion makes available. He calls these “in order to” and “because” motives. The former cover a range of actions people may initiate in order to gain or secure something; these motivations are oriented toward “a desirable future state.” The “because” motives emphasize responsive actions people may perform because feelings and convictions such as gratitude, guilt, and fear encourage them to do so; they are “determined by past lived experiences.”22
The intersection of women’s lives and Tokugawa religious thought and practice provides many illustrations of such motivations. An example of mixed motivations is the rite of koshin machi (also called kanoesaru machi in an alternative reading of the characters). This was a defining practice among people belonging to the religious confraternity (ko) dedicated to the deity Koshin. Since the second character of Koshin’s name may also be pronounced saru, meaning monkey, and designates a monkey day according to the sexagenary calendar, the presence of three monkeys frequently marks the deity’s iconography. One covers its eyes, another its mouth, and one its ears. Together they represent the avoidance of evil and vice, which was a central goal in Koshin devotionalism. Popular faith in the deity grew throughout the Tokugawa, and devotees erected large numbers of stone markers engraved with images of Koshin and the three monkeys. Originally a Daoist divinity, the deity and its cal-endrical observances on saru days likely entered Japan from China during the early Heian period through the influence of diviners who were popular with the court due to their extensive knowledge of Chinese divinatory practices and texts. The rite, as it had developed throughout the centuries in interaction with Buddhism, required members of the
Confraternity to stay awake for the entire night on days of the monkey, which occur once in a sixty-day cycle. Devotees believed on this night that three worms (sanshi) existing in the body and capable of causing great harm if one let down her moral and spiritual guard reported the person’s past conduct to the deity Taishakuten, who is charged with oversight of people’s behavior in living up to the Buddha’s teachings. If the worms freed themselves and reported misconduct to Taishakuten, then the person suffered the consequences of her behavior. Punishment often was in the form of physical illness. However, by staying awake to wait for dawn, purifying herself through listening to sutras, observing taboos, and making offerings to Koshin, a person could keep the worms from leaving her body.23
Divine punishment borne as physical malady was often manifested as a variety of diseases, including respiratory ailments. Further, period texts clearly state that illness of the lungs was a particular concern of women, and one method of prevention lay in practicing koshin machi to blunt the disabling effect of the three worms. A Manual for Female Longevity (Fujin kotobuki gusa), a guide to women’s health published at the time of Namu-ra’s text, explains that since “women may fall into a state of severe melancholy, they are vulnerable to lung disease. For ages it has been a tradition for women to observe the rites of Koshin so as to avoid such sickness. They stay awake until the cock crows so the three worms will not leave their bodies to report misbehavior to Taishakuten and appeal to the deity to take action against their female hosts.”24 Sexual abstinence was the most important act of purity and devotion on this night. Other taboos against various types of contamination, such as pregnancy, mourning, and the consumption of certain foods, were observed on this night to preserve the devotees’ purity. Violating taboos led to punishment. Not observing sexual abstinence, for example, was thought to lead to the conception of a child fated to become a notorious criminal.25
Women brought to their practice of koshin machi a mixed bag of “because” and future-oriented “in order to” motivations. One participated in the rite to atone for and avoid punishment because of past moral lapses. Worship also protected a woman from contracting lung disease, to which she was congenitally vulnerable “because” she had been born female. Protecting oneself against the possibility of future illness—“in order to” remain healthy—was a major motivation. Abstaining from sexual relations acted as a motivator in order to avoid giving birth to a child destined for a life of crime. The link between sexuality and one’s future life that influenced the “in order to” motives of koshin machi is also
Expressed in literature. Chikamatsu used the eve of the observance as the setting for Love Suicides on the Eve of the Koshin Festival (Shinju yoi kdshin machi), which concerns the double suicide of a husband and wife, Han-bei and Ochiyo.26 By placing the drama within the ritual time of kdshin machi, the playwright could heighten the sexual tension, both overt and subtle, running between his characters, such as the lust a group of samurai has for Hanbei’s younger brother and the jealousy Hanbei’s mother harbors toward Ochiyo. It is doubtful that Chikamatsu’s audience missed his intentional juxtaposing of a holy night of abstinence and introspection with men’s sexual desire for another man and an older woman’s envy of her daughter-in-law. As Chikamatsu’s characters intimate in their own flawed ways, mixed motives in the vigil for Koshin were ultimately linked to one’s participation with and behavior toward others. The nocturnal practice stressed improving ethical behavior in one’s associations and atoning for past lapses. Atonement demanded the personal exercise of sexual regulation, which on the night of kdshin machi was an exercise in abstinence and purification. Failure to regulate sexual activity in accordance with the rite could prove dangerous to a woman’s bodily health and bring social misfortune to her and her future children.
Like entering into worship on the night of Koshin, entering into marriage brought both types of motivations into play, and both were inseparable from a woman’s inclusion and conduct in the new web of human relations created by her marriage. The single most important motivation for marriage was that of duty to obligation. Returning briefly to Davis, he stresses that while both “because” and “in order to” motives are very active in the Japanese religious experience, “because” types incorporate a range of virtues central to Japanese society such as duty, loyalty, gratitude, and selflessness. These virtues are expressed through ideas of obligation and debt captured in the term on, meaning “benefit” and “favor.” Acting on this sense of obligation and debt is called the “return of benefits or favors” (hd on).27 Many religious activities that people perform in Japan are geared toward the idea of returning benefits. Throughout their lives people acknowledge a host of obligations and debts of gratitude to both humans and deities that they understand as having played a role in making them full persons: conceived beings having some relative degree of social identity and position, knowledge, skills, and health. Conversely, overcoming a paucity of these things or improving them also leads to actions that are stimulated by future-oriented, “in order to” motives. Although Tokugawa women entered very different models of sexual values when they became brides and
Courtesans, their motivations to enter such disparate roles often demanded adherence to the same moral base of realizing on and acting on it as a debt of gratitude.
Motives and metaphors in fertility
One outstanding debt of gratitude that has historically shaped family relations is that which children exhibit toward parents. Acknowledging this debt has been considered the basis of filial piety and the root of moral centeredness. The jokun genre intensely focused on a woman’s need to pay this debt through her behavior. The Women’s Imagawa includes the following in its list of twenty-two admonishments to women (see appendix A): “You forget the deep debt of gratitude you owe your father and mother, and you are negligent in the way of filial piety.”28 As construed through the fertility model, the best way for a daughter to repay this debt and express gratitude toward the life her parents gave her was to enter another household. Although it was a very complex exercise in gratitude, she was to show identity with and loyalty to her parents by affiliating herself with a new family. Further, she was to perform various actions within the hierarchy of this new family as a daughter-in-law as a means to express gratitude to her parents for rearing her in the proper way. The surest means to satisfy this complex duty of expressing gratitude to two families as both daughter and daughter-in-law was to provide the husband’s household with an heir. It was in this hope that Uesugi wrote to his granddaughter that only she could make her parents happy by making her parents-in-law happy with conscientiousness, maturity, and children.
Although wedding ceremonies formally bound men and women in their mutual obligation to maintain family harmony and continue family lines, the fertility model focused sharply on women and their special obligations. They were not only the fertile carriers of a new generation, but also were new members entering homes dependent on their obedience to household authority and traditions. In his letter to his granddaughter Uesugi stressed that keeping peace with her new husband and his parents and avoiding what he refers to as fundo sosho (resentful legal action), by which he probably meant divorce, was part of her debt of gratitude. “Intimacy between a husband and wife comes through devotion to harmony and through taking pleasure in one’s debt of gratitude. Resentful legal action is no way of fulfilling that debt. When spousal devotion to their debts of gratitude (ongi) collapses, then the moral order
Of husband and wife is also rent.”29 Note that Uesugi acknowledged that damage to the moral order came about through mutual abandonment of a couple’s duty to on. The implication of this is that moral order was still salvageable by at least the wife holding fast to her fulfillment of debt to both families, even in the midst of her husband failing in his duties as son and husband. The “because” motive for marriage put forth in duty to one’s parents and parents-in-law through the obligations of on was satisfied most fully through successfully living by fertility values, namely committing oneself to her husband’s household, caring for its members, and giving birth.
Marrying also carried “in order to” motives such as avoiding sickness. As with one of the motivations of koshin machi, marriage was also one means of warding off the danger of lung disease by regulating a woman’s sexual behavior through its monogamous structure. As a physician, Namura argues that one reason for the early marriage age ofJapa-nese (sixteen and seventeen for boys and thirteen and fourteen for girls, according to him) is that parents worried about their children’s, especially their daughters’, moral and bodily well-being. They fretted about sexual misbehavior, which could make young girls vulnerable to depression and respiratory disease. To ward off these anxieties, parents tended to marry off their children early so as to put them in a structured environment that acted to curb improper sexual activity. Namura is critical of this practice. He felt that people so young would give birth to physically weak children.30 Still, the logic of this parental prerogative is grounded in future-oriented motives. Like the sleepless rite of koshin machi, marriage fixed one’s identity and behavior in relation to others to a larger ethical universe. Failure to participate in the ritual structure of either—in other words, to act outside the ethical universe to which each is connected—could culminate in attacks on the body as a type of extracted justice. Further, just as Koshin worship articulates ethical behavior in women’s sexual relationships—in other words, the exercising of abstinence and purification—marriage rites articulate the values of fertility: obedient behavior and purposefully productive sexual activity over willfulness and concupiscence. Namura considered parents largely responsible for instilling these values in girls well before marriage. It was their task to make sure their daughters secured the status of position, as well as gained some security against sickness and ill luck, both of which marriage could provide. This is one set of future-oriented motivations that led daughters and their parents toward marriage. Failing in this responsibility could have grave consequences. In his text, Namura crit-
Icizes parents for not preparing their daughters well for marriage and putting the young women at risk of undermining their health. He cautions that parents can spoil their daughter throughout her girlhood by giving her more affection than they give their son. But when she matures and reaches marrying age, such doting parents, now realizing that they have wasted valuable time, attempt “suddenly to have her taught the arts of proper womanhood, straighten her nature and dampen her high spir-its.”31 It is often too little too late, and the young woman thus enters her husband’s household bewildered about how to respond to her new responsibilities as a daughter-in-law and wife. She may feel constrained by the expectations of her parents-in-law and, in reacting to this frustration, may act too eagerly to please her husband. In the end she succeeds only in straining relations among everyone in her new household. This failure in role and relations may sap her of bodily strength and encourage tuberculosis (rogai).32 Late or poor training of a daughter for the duties of a wife could actually bring about the very problems—the failure of health and the lack of social status—that marriage was intended to avoid. The flip side of Namura’s criticism, however, is that attentive training started early should successfully satisfy the “in order to” motivations of parents and their daughters. Further, the “in order to” motives play back on the “because” motives, producing a cycle of motivation acting ideally to propel women into marriage and dictating successful conduct in the household.
The future-oriented motives of gaining status and avoiding sickness through marriage and proper comportment in the house of one’s inlaws begin, as Namura stresses in his text, with the training a girl receives in her natal home. Her upbringing and her obedience to her parents to marry motivate a daughter to express her debt of gratitude to her parents through leaving her home and becoming a bride. The writer of The Greater Learning for Women was acutely aware of this cycle and recognized a daughter’s parents as key to her success in the fertility model. He concludes his moral primer by admonishing parents to stop overspending on their daughters’ weddings. Parents, he insists, do not raise girls by money and material valuables but by moral lessons and moral example.33 Excessive expenditure on a wedding is proof that a daughter has not received from her parents the proper moral motivation for becoming a bride. These parents substitute money for morals, wealth for wisdom. Without morals, without wisdom, there is no base upon which a young woman may act in terms of the “because” motivation to repay the debt of gratitude to her parents for raising her with values. She has no debt
Because she was given no values. She enters into marriage ethically handicapped to act on the “in order to” motivation to comport herself properly to secure social and physical well-being as a wife.
The sacrality of human relations also finds expression in metaphor. Metaphor serves the task of sacrality well because it establishes correspondence between things of different classification and kind and intimates their similitude in terms of identity, certain qualities, or function. It is from this correspondence that ideas may be meaningfully and immediately comprehended. As Suzanne Langer states in her classic study of symbolism, metaphors are “our readiest instruments for abstracting concepts from the tumbling stream of actual impressions.”34 Amidst a tumbling stream of actual impressions concerning women and their sociosexual relations in the period—ranging from the earthy relationships less bound by household authority that many lower-class commoners took part in and the play of women in the quarters to the celibacy of Buddhist nuns and the purposeful fertility of samurai and bourgeois com-moners—jokun authors relied on certain metaphors to signify their vision of proper relations and advocate for purposeful fertility. “Heaven and earth,” as we saw in the previous chapter, was a key metaphor in the fertility model for explaining proper gender relations. The metaphor responded well to the model’s need to articulate the sacrality of structure that framed the marriage relation by creating a correspondence between principles of human association in this world and the cosmic principles of yin and yang that structure and maintain the universe.
In Namura’s guide other metaphors appear that focus squarely on the promise and threat of woman as bride. Namura’s introductory passage to his text, titled “Woman is the Beginning of Humankind” (Onna wa hito no hajimari no koto), commences with a selective retelling of Japan’s mythical origins. The passage serves as a mythic history of womankind, tying contemporary women to the primordial woman, Izanami, and the most important of her children, Amaterasu. Like the dramatic structures of many sacred histories, Namura’s own production marks its mythic vision with a pristine beginning, inevitable stumbles and challenges, and the promise of redemption. As a producer of myth, Namura chooses specific metaphors—Izanami and Amaterasu—to amplify his concern that a bride must aim to provide a harmonious life and generational continuity for her marriage household. Producers of myths have at hand, in the form of any available metaphor, an “empty signifier” in its pure potential. Creative control over mythological storyline demands that a producer fill the emptiness of each potential metaphor with meaning by
Choosing well the metaphorical form and content to create a persuasive image that speaks (so the producer hopes) an instinctive truth to the consumers of the myth.35 In choosing Izanami and Amaterasu, Namura chooses as the form the life-giving goddess and as the content the cultivation of the right values and behaviors.
His production of these metaphors and the narrative in which he employs them leave little doubt as to what he hoped his audience would take away from their reading of the myth: that women should enter into marriage in the spirit of the original, divine women from whom all blessings flow. Namura’s story of womankind shares many narrative similarities stressed in the myths of Ise Shinto. These myths, redacted largely from the Nihongi, were incorporated into the historical writings of Kita-batake Chikafusa (1293—1354), particularly his 1343 work titled Records of the Legitimate Succession of the Divine Sovereigns (Jinnd shdtdki).36 Given Namura’s breadth of cultural knowledge and education in Ito Jinsai’s academy, he was likely familiar with the narrative assumptions of these influential writings, which, like his own, were forms of myths attempting to amplify the particular concerns of their producers.37 In his own myth, however, Namura introduces Izanami and her male consort, Iza-nagi, as the first kami in a line of seven heavenly generations to possess gender distinctions.38 The two kami enter into sexual union, from which Izanami produces a daughter and three sons. Namura ignores the identity of the sons altogether, but he identifies the daughter as Amaterasu and the “ancestress of all earthly deities (chiji no mioya).”39 Along with the brothers’ identities, Namura also omits from his narrative the death of Izanami upon giving birth to the fire god, the decomposition of her body in the underworld, the spontaneous and asexual birth of Amaterasu from Izanagi’s act of ritual purification upon his escape from Izanami’s putrefied grasp, and his charge to Amaterasu and her brothers, Tsuki-yumi and Susanoo, to rule their respective realms. The signification of these metaphors (establishment of the imperial cult) and the particular narrative into which they are embedded in the Nihongi (removing Ama-terasu’s birth from sexual activity and linking such activity to death and pollution) complicate Namura’s task as master of his own metaphors. As master, his solution is to ignore the form and content of these other metaphors and move forward in his particular task of favoring a vision of female life crafted on the idealized values and behaviors of fertility.
Toward this task of signifying fertility values and behaviors, Namura calls the creative sexual activity of Izanami and Izanagi mitonomaguwai. This ancient word appears in the Nihongi (also called the Nihon shoki)
And the collection of myths compiled in 712 titled A Chronicle of Ancient Matters (Kojiki) as a description of the sexual union that was the climax of a circumambulation rite that Izanami and her consort performed around a pillar. In the Nihongi account, mitonomaguwai is made up of two ideograms meaning “to meet” and “join together.”40 Namura, while keeping the same reading, in his text replaces the first character (meaning “to meet”) with one denoting “marriage,” giving the meaning “to marry and join together.” This word play and use of divine metaphors is the first intimation given that a woman’s sexual activity, when practiced within the strictures of marriage, becomes purposeful action, like that of the kami and their creation of the earth and its multitude of gods. In Namura’s narrative, however, time has eroded the moral resolve of women to act with purpose with regards to their sexuality and behavior toward others. The farther one lives chronologically from the mythic wellspring of the original mother and daughter, Izanami and Amaterasu, the more difficult it is for her to identify with the goddesses’ divine standards. Mortal women of the ancient age (jodai no onna), Namura puts forward, while not quite measuring up to the kami in the earlier time of the gods (kamiyo), were still close enough in terms of time to the original idea that their minds were obedient by nature and their hearts free of vice.41 For contemporary women morally weakened through the degradation of time, though, Namura was convinced that they had to swim far upstream against the strong current of this sacred heritage.
As master of his own metaphors, Namura strategically chooses to change them in mid-passage. Buddhist images of demons and last days now begin to appear in his story. Through time women’s hearts have become evil. Unlike when the world was new and women divine, the present world has grown old and is reaching its last age (yo no sue ima no yo ni oyobi).42 In such a morally exhausted age women’s hearts become wicked day by day (onna no kokoro hibi ni ashiku nari).43 Namura portrays contemporary women, far removed from the pure spring of their divine origin, as floundering in the stagnant waters of moral bankruptcy. To create particular effect on this point of the long fall of woman, Namura borrows a well-used quote from the Hosso text Joyuishiki-ron: “Women are messengers from hell, cut off from the seed of the Buddha. They have the countenance of a bodhisattva and the heart of a fierce demon (yasha).”44 Buddhist demonology offers a plethora of otherworldly miscreants, and Namura’s choice of yasha, a character originally from Indian mythology, is apt given the fertility values he is promoting in his text. Yasha that have been converted to the wisdom of the Buddha’s message
Are fierce protectors of the dharma, but other yasha, the unconverted, roam in the forest and possess a wild and fierce nature that is violently threatening to social order; they have a particular craving for human flesh. Few metaphors are as appropriately demonic in advancing an apocalyptic vision in terms of the fertility model. It is in stark contrast to the model’s emphasis on the ideal of passivity and obedience.
A perfect description of fertility’s ideal, counter-figure to the yasha (and a reminder that fertility’s concern is hardly a historical curiosity of a far-flung culture) is found in Virginia Woolf’s own American metaphor of the “perfect” wife.
You who come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her—you may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. . . . She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught, she sat in it—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all—I need not say it—she was pure.45
In contrast to the order such an angel’s prudence, modesty, and selfless attentiveness brings to the household, the unconverted yasha (i. e., unconverted to the behavioral ideals of fertility) represents an ever-present danger to the household. The bride as yasha enters the given order of her groom’s household as an outsider with as much potential, through her lack of proper behavior and fertility, to bring disorder and extinction to the household as she might bring order and generational continuity as an angel, a converted yasha—or, to return to Namura’s metaphor, a goddess, a life-creating kami.46
What can parry the threat of the demon bride and pursue the promise of the goddess bride? For Namura it is the adjustment of a woman’s mind to a state of pure integrity like that of the kami of the mythic past. He identifies the cultivation of the qualities of tashinami as central to this task. Pursuing these qualities—prudence, modesty, refinement, and attentiveness—establishes a mind of integrity (kokoro shojiki) by which to live in the world with others. In a mind attentive to the qualities of tashinami, “the jealous spirit is no more, desires are few, and sympathy and sensitivity to others run deep.”47 According to Namura, internalizing the behavioral patterns of tashinami is no easy task in an age so removed from Izanami and Amaterasu, but nevertheless parents must not delay in cultivating such qualities in their daughter. Once such an untutored girl
Becomes a woman, indifferent to the moral restraints of humility and shame, she will think she has the world at her feet and will act only according to her own desires; unimpeded moral decline throughout her years of marriage will make a woman vulnerable to taunts and gossip behind her back. People may call her kasha, which is short for kasha baba (burning cart hag).48 This term alludes to a Buddhist hell, ubiquitously depicted in many a mandala, in which sufferers must travel in a vehicle constantly in flames. This term was also used to designate older, powerful women in the pleasure quarter, typically managers and wives of bordello owners with reputations for abusing their charges, as it was hoped, due to their cruel behavior, that hellfire awaited them upon their deaths.49
Perhaps on this point of older, established women mistreating those who were younger and more vulnerable, Namura’s use of kasha is not coincidental. A young woman who entered into the roles of wife and daughter-in-law, yet who was morally illiterate in the behavioral ideals tashinami, entered marriage not by way of the goddess but by the path of the kasha baba. With age and good fortune such a woman may very well, according to Namura, rise to the important position of mother-in-law and even de facto household manager, but years of self-centered behavior will surely bring, he metaphorically suggests, unhappiness to all with whom she is associated—and especially, at some point in time, her own daughter-in-law. With a mind of integrity forged in a firm sense of tashinami, however, then even in a degenerate world a daughter becomes more like a goddess of yore than a demon of the present age. This sacred story of womanhood, with which Namura opens A Record of Treasures for Women, ends appropriately on this note of redemptive hope in an honest mind and proper deportment.
Motives and metaphors in pleasure
Like brides, daughters who became courtesans entered a place and role both strange to and demanding of them. The motivation for many entering the pleasure quarters as girls and young women was tied to the same moral bedrock as that of brides: loyalty and concern for parents and family. Here, repaying one’s debt of gratitude was quite literal: the obligations of on were met through entering public prostitution. Similar to a daughter entering into marriage as a means of expressing her gratitude to her parents and discharging her filial duty, the obligation of financially benefiting one’s parents and household was also a motivating fac-
Tor behind many daughters who entered entertainment districts throughout Japan. As discussed in chapter i, household poverty and urban demands for erotic labor combined to draw women into the quarters. For a woman with limited options to help her parents and family, a quarter’s promise of regular pay and a set term of service may have made what was a necessary decision also an ethically tolerable one of filial motivation. A comic haiku poem (senryu) put it like this: “Seeing your parents ill, it is one’s filial duty to enter a commoner’s palanquin (Yamu oya o misute yotsude e noru ko).”50 The suggestion here is that conditions such as the illness of parents and the economic insecurity of the household motivated daughters and their parents to enter into contracts with buyers from the quarters—who were already waiting with palanquin and porters on hand.
Acknowledging the debt to one’s parents was the moral standard. The fact that the “because” motive expressed through the moral principle of on could initiate participation in two competing value systems shows that it acted as a type of “passive enablement.”51 This is a type of intellectual passivity toward social change and the rise of ideologies that is common to many religious groups and ideas in Japan and elsewhere. This passivity allows religion a degree of malleability in order to change with political and economic developments without altering its fundamental doctrinal rhetoric. Meiji-period Buddhists used many ideas of the faith, such as the universality of suffering and the concept of no-self, to throw their support behind efforts of industrialization and to explain away its punishing consequences for workers. This religious justification enabled priests to assert that their tradition was relevant to the modernization efforts of the country at a time when Buddhism had come under stiff criticism for being foreign and anti-modern. A similar exercise with regards to disparate sexual values was also at play in the models of fertility and pleasure. Such idealized principles as filial piety were used to legitimate vastly different values, institutions, and practices concerning female sexuality. Whether acted on freely or as a result of parental coercion, duty to parents and to the household were viewed as expressions of returning the benefits one had received as a daughter, which in part enabled opposing forms of sexual practices and relationships to coexist on the same moral ground.
Incorporation into the model of pleasure required the further motive of a woman in order to secure future status within the hierarchy of her bordello. Successfully managing her dealings with clients to create exclu-
Sive relationships with them provided fame and position for herself and a steady income for her employer’s—and her own—coffers. She would need this money to pay off her contract and terminate her employment. If obedient behavior helped a bride create meaningful space in the fertility model, then the display of the behavior and attitudes of iki—sex appeal, sophistication, intellect, and charm—could pay off handsomely for a courtesan trying to gain standing and affirmation within the structure of the bordello. The pleasure quarters provided courtesans with a hierarchical structure in which to act on their motivation to move up the ranks and secure status, and they also encouraged the ceremonial behaviors of iki that were necessary to garner such standing.
Pleasure, like fertility, also produced contrasting metaphors that articulated the model’s attempt to express the complex identity that women took on when they took on the role of courtesan. In the world of pleasure, no metaphor was more powerful than that of the tayu, or the top-class courtesan.52 In the last chapter of his 1684 novel The Second Life of an Amorous Man (Kdshoku nidai otoko), Saikaku describes a heavenly vision of the tayu as a bodhisattva. He portrays many famed, late tayu of the great quarters as having become bodhisattvas upon death and who are now living in a Pure Land in which any man would hope to take refuge. They are figures right out of Buddhist iconography. Light pours forth from their bodies; an entourage of sister courtesans surrounds them like protective deities. Adorning this Pure Land are bejeweled koto, golden cups, silver bowls, and the finest incense and porcelain.53 Saikaku’s description of the tayu as a bodhisattva may have been influenced by the famous dream of Shinran (1173—1262) in the Rokkakudo, the six-sided hall of Choboji in Kyoto, where he retreated for one hundred days of contemplation in 1190 before cutting his ties to the Tendai school and its monastic center on Mount Hiei.54 On the ninety-fifth day of meditation, Shinran dreamed of Kannon; the bodhisattva promised that if he had to forsake celibacy, she would appear to him as a lovely woman, marry him, allow him to enjoy sexual relations with her, and secure him a place in the Pure Land upon his death.
The artist Suzuki Harunobu (1725—1770) also alludes to the bodhisattva mystique of ranking courtesans in a 1764 illustration from a series depicting scenes in the Yoshiwara. Two rustic pilgrims on their first journey to see the sights of Edo happen upon a courtesan and her young attendant bedecked in their splendor. Assuming the woman to be an incarnation of the bodhisattva Kannon accompanied by a heavenly assis-
Tant, they bow their heads and place their palms together in worship of the seemingly divine pair.55 Although the tayu as a class of individual courtesans disappeared from the Yoshiwara’s ranking system in the middle 1700s, the metaphor and ideal of the perfect prostitute continued, as Harunobu’s humorous and touching picture shows. The last tayU-ranked woman in the Yoshiwara appeared on the rolls in 1761; in the previous decade another term appeared, oiran, which would replace tayu and would come to denote the highest class of courtesan.56 Like the primordial women of the fertility model, the tayu as the courtesan’s courtesan best expressed the pleasure model’s conception of female sexual value and purpose.
Tokugawa novelists and playwrights, like Namura, were also myth-makers, particularly of urban Japan’s entertainment districts. Their fictionalized accounts of actual tayU-class courtesans commemorated these women long after their deaths and created paragons of perfection to which many could aspire but few could ever reach. They produced exemplars of these women through the dramatic technique of “double identity.”57 The concept of double identity is played out frequently on the stages of kabuki and bunraku. For example, the protagonist takes on a fictional identity and behavior, only to reveal his true self and purpose during the climax. Double identity produces imaginative narrative and surprising scenes by blurring the line between ideal characters and real people, between fictional worlds and the actual world, and by borrowing from or alluding to historical events and personages. Just as with the Osaka courtesan Yugiri appearing in Saikaku’s fiction, novelists and dramatists blended fiction and biography to give double identities to many courtesans such as Takao and Agemaki of the Yoshiwara and Yoshino of the Shimabara. Their reputations as great tayu live on so powerfully in plays and novels that some, such as Agemaki—the quickthinking and loyal heroine in the play Sukeroku—are “known” almost exclusively from fiction. It is through these fictionalized representations of famous courtesans that the tayu as metaphor, and not simply as social rank, came to express pleasure’s values both inside and outside the quarter. Agemaki was not simply beautiful, but also sagacious, sympathetic, spirited, and sophisticated in the ways and hearts of men. This spirit of iki that other women tried hard to cultivate came to her effortlessly. What was, in the end, skillfully learned behavior for most was her true self.
Saikaku, in his own use of double identity in The Second Life of an
Amorous Man, captures the first-class courtesan’s effortless deportment and understanding of others. When the marriage of the dandy protagonist, Yonosuke, to Yoshino (1606—1643) is questioned by his female relatives for the shame it will bring them all, Yonosuke refuses Yoshi-no’s initial pleas to end their relationship to save his ties to his family. Respecting his love for her, Yoshino decides to win over his relatives. Hosting a dinner party for them, she surprises the skeptical family members with her grace and intelligence. She astonishes them, in the end, with her real self. She performs everything expertly and with flair, from helping girls comb their hair to playing koto and reciting poetry, from performing the tea ceremony to talking with the womenfolk on topics as diverse as scandalous gossip and the vagaries of the world. So stunned are the relatives by the beauty of the courtesan’s true self that they promptly demand that Yonosuke make her his wife.58 Saikaku never met Yoshino. She died one year after his birth and forty-one years before the publication of the novel from which this episode is derived. So great was her fame, though, that even after four decades Saikaku could use this event to fictionalize her identity and establish her character as the embodiment of the perfect courtesan.
Idealization of the tayu also carried with it a negative assessment of courtesans. Her sophistication, intelligence, and charm were effortless. She was able to bridge the gap between displaying iki and displaying one’s true self, between being the spirited courtesan that play demanded of her role and being simply herself. Given the idealization of the tayu, virtually all women of the quarters did not compare well to the metaphor. Their attempts to display the charms of iki, even if skillful, suggested insincerity. The play of style and allure demanded by their role made it difficult to bridge the gap between the playful prostitute and the sincere woman. From this gap emerges another metaphor: the fox. The relationship between women of pleasure and the fox is rich, and I address it further in chapter 5. As the opposing metaphor to that of the tayu, the fox is characterized by clever deception through the context of Yoshi-wara courtesans and the deity Inari. In folklore the fox, whether for ill or good, was seen as a changeling or possessive agent, most often in female form, charged with powers of sexuality, seduction, and trickery. Here the fox, as opposed to Shinran’s Kannon, puts sexual desire and its changing appearance to ignoble use. Courtesans, with their professional demands to play to the imaginations and emotional desires of their clients, were attributed with popular vulpine qualities. A woman might
Be called a “fox without a tail” (o no nai kitsune). Another term, kitsune ochi, refers both to a fox leaving the body of the person it has possessed and to a courtesan taking leave of both her client and his money after rendering her services.59 As we will see in chapter 5, a woman not only tricked her client out of his money but sometimes tried to trick her owner out of his legal possession of her through prayers and schemes of escape.
The perception of a courtesan as a type of trickster or changeling— deceiving a man into believing that she is reaching out for his companionship and not his purse or fooling her owner into seeing a loyal laborer and not a woman plotting to escape or giving her heart to one man— was often contained in the verb bakasu, meaning “to trick, enchant, or confuse.” A senryu of the time compares both courtesan and kabuki actor as equal masters in the art of creating illusion. “Change happens on two streets; tricks happen on five streets (Bakeru no ga nichb bakasu ga gochb nari).”60 Edo’s theater district was confined to two streets. Further, all theaters featured only male actors, some of whom specialized in female roles (onnagata), many of which were courtesans. Such actors “changed” into women on stage and created the illusion of being female. The Yoshiwara was made up of five streets where courtesans lived and plied their trade in “tricking” men’s emotions and perceptions with their abilities in iki. Together these seven streets made up Edo’s pleasure districts, where play, both theatrical and sexual, provided fantasy worlds of escape from the moral rigors and daily toil of normal society. On these seven streets men acted like courtesans and courtesans acted like lovers by turning on their skills to alter, if only for the length of a play or a visit, their audiences’ perception of reality.
Motive and metaphor vivified the models of fertility and pleasure. Duty to parents and household and the need to secure one’s position in part motivated daughters to become wives and courtesans. Metaphors of fertility and pleasure such as Izanami and the tayu also cast the shadows of demons and changelings. These motives and metaphors also indicate that both models shared a degree of ambivalence toward the presence and status of women that each was attempting to incorporate. Daughters who were motivated to enter unfamiliar places were—as the linked metaphors of goddess-demon and tayu-fox suggest—both promises of and threats to the success of their new homes and relations. By attempting to act on the promise and evade the threat, the process of incorporating daughters was activated though entrance rites of marriage and first meeting.
World History
