Wives, Courtesans, and Tokugawa Society

Utamaro wanted to convey that the courtesan’s dream of becoming a wife is illusory. Her waking world of professional sexual play is a realm of activity antithetical to the behavior and role of the wife she becomes in her fantasy. Yet he also conveyed the constant connection Tokugawa society made between the two women as idealized, inverse images. Each image, through the negation of its qualities, necessarily implied the other. As sleep and wakefulness ultimately form two different experiences in the same individual, the courtesan and wife developed divergent but linked images in Tokugawa society. These images of night and day constituted part of a discourse concerning female sexuality. The root question of this discourse that the wife-courtesan dichotomy epitomized was this: is the purpose of female sexuality to serve the virilocal household through reproductive fertility, or is it to serve the commercial sex industry and its paying clients through nonreproductive pleasure? The ideal wife was obedient to her husband and in-laws and used her energy and skills to work toward the economic advancement of the household and her sexuality to produce an heir. This valuation formed fertility values. The ideal courtesan was sophisticated and spirited, an expert at pretending to love many men while loving none, and offered her sexuality for the economic advancement of the bordello holding her contract. This valuation constituted pleasure values. Other values existed, such as celibacy, which the Buddhist nun exemplified, and the sexual activities of many young villagers that were regulated more by local youth groups than they were by individual households. However, fertility and pleasure constituted a dichotomy of difference that profoundly shaped Tokugawa society and culture. Much of that shape developed from society affirming both sets of values, but doing so while seeking to keep one affirmation separate from the other. Arts and literature, urban spatial configuration, and political policies expressed much of this orientation of bounded affirmation. Further, Tokugawa society did not simply affirm these values, but also produced them through its labor needs, the growth of a national book market, and the rise of economic class distinctions among commoners. In the following paragraphs I describe some aspects of the affirmation and production of these values.

For painters and printmakers like Utamaro and authors such as the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653—1724) and the novelist Ihara Saikaku (1642—1693), this orientation of bounded affirmation offered rich possibilities for animating their works with both tragic and humorous pathos. In his 1720 play The Love Suicides at Amijima (Shinju ten no amijima), Chikamatsu uses the pull of a wife’s love and loyalty and that of a courtesan for the same man to push the protagonist and his lover into the climax of double suicide. Saikaku, in his 1686 novel The Life of an Amorous Woman (Kdshoku ichidai onna), allows his anti-heroine to romp on both sides of the wife-courtesan divide, revealing the humor and pathos of her life choices.2 Even musical instruments were not free of this orientation, at least in the early part of the period. The samisen was considered primarily an instrument appropriate only for entertainers of the pleasure quarters and for kabuki musicians. The koto was much preferred for training young women in the musical arts.3

Affirmation of female sexuality as constituting both fertility and pleasure values also contributed to the creation of a distinct social space in urban areas. The pleasure quarters—settings in several of Chikamatsu’s and Saikaku’s works—were districts segregated from the rest of urban space. Edo’s famed quarter, the Yoshiwara, was walled off on all four sides with a single front gate marking its entrance. The Shinmachi of Osaka and the Shimabara of Kyoto, which with the Yoshiwara formed the country’s three great quarters, were similarly segregated. Spatially configuring the urban landscape was not uniquely connected to prostitution. Demarcating space for pleasure in Edo was part of a broader spatial categorization that included the creation of holy sites and class-based residential areas housed in a hierarchy defined in terms of geographic locality and size.4 Warriors (bushi) possessed more than two-thirds of residential space in the city, while temples and shrines—some with spacious grounds—and commoner housing split the remaining area.5 The walls of the Yoshiwara formed a subdivision of sexualized space within the area where commoners resided. Although Edo’s physical geography denied this spatial hierarchy the clean lines of perfect borders, there was an underlying order that measured each allotment of space using the same grid pattern as that of the imperial city of Kyoto.6 This creation of social space, attentive to hierarchy, divisions of sacred, secular, and sexual activities, as well as to ancient political pedigree, reflects the insight that in Tokugawa Japan, “spatial and geographic discourses inhered in political practices and cultural forms.”7

The pleasure quarters, along with theaters, formed one part of these spatial discourses. The national government, or shogunate (bakufu), viewed prostitution and kabuki, which was a new and wildly popular form of theater, as “two wheels of the vehicle of pleasure” and thus necessary evils.8 It realized that outlawing bordellos and theaters would essentially commit its limited resources to making arrests and meting out punishment for such public nuisances as gambling, drunkenness, and lewd behavior—all linked to sex and show businesses.9 The bakufu was not unconcerned about such behavior, but of greater concern to authorities was how to limit and control, rather than eliminate, morally corrupt behavior. The bakufu decided on a policy that circumscribed the behavior of pleasure and sexual play through spatial restrictions and walls. Further, female providers of such play were restricted to residences within the enclosure, while their male customers could leave upon receipt of services. Requiring courtesans to live within the quarter was one of the conditions the government set in 1617 when it allowed the Yoshiwara to be built in the hustle and bustle of Edo.10

Men were the main players in the building and development of Edo in the first decades of the seventeenth century from a provincial castle town to the center of national government. Its swift growth into one of the largest cities in the world represents on an exaggerated scale the expansion of castle towns and markets throughout the country that had been taking place throughout the 1500s.11 However, with a rapidly expanding population consisting largely of warriors, laborers, artisans, and entrepreneurial merchants, Edo was in its early decades effectively a city of men.12 In fact, the demographics led the bakufu to occasionally employ Yoshiwara courtesans to serve as court attendants at formal functions during the first half of the seventeenth century. Women honored with these responsibilities abstained from sexual activity to purify themselves in preparation for their temporary duties.13 In a male metropolis, however, prostitution proved ubiquitous. Bordello Episodes (Ihon ddbdgoen) describes unlicensed bordellos quickly developing along the outskirts of Edo during these first decades to meet the demands of the city’s unusual demographics.14 This unregulated prostitution boom and its predictably attendant crimes and misdemeanors presented the kind of situation the government wanted to curb. By following the models of the earlier Shimabara and Shinmachi, the bakufu hoped the Yoshiwara and other authorized quarters would keep vice contained, allowing the government to regulate it and enjoy its benefits.

One such benefit was gaining a tax revenue. The ready attraction of additional tax revenue from prostitution, for example, lay behind a request from Edo magistrates in 1731 to have the government sanction areas of the city that had already developed heavy traffic in illegal prostitution. By spatially defining these as areas of public vice and bringing them under government regulation, the magistrates reasoned that taxes could be levied and collected and employment would consequently rise, since legal quarters required an abundant support staff of laborers, entertainers, waitresses, and cooks. Although the government eventually dismissed this proposal, it speaks to the readiness of municipal leaders to accept prostitution in order to share in its profitability.15 Still, the very profitability that national and local governments sought to regulate through sanctioned public prostitution (kosho) in turn encouraged economically competitive varieties of private prostitution (shisho), ranging from semi-organized public bath women (yuna) to “hidden prostitutes” (kakushi baita) such as streetwalkers and wives, in partnership with husbands, either willingly or through coercion opening their homes for business.16

Prostitution was widespread in both public and private forms. Indeed, the bakufu sanctioned at least twenty-four profitable and revenue-producing quarters across the country.17 I focus, however, on the three great quarters in Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto, which were the institutional centers of pleasure values. Along with urban theater, they defined style and panache. A strict hierarchy among women in these quarters also defined the class, duties, and expectations placed upon them. Like any society, the quarters had haves, have-nots, and those in the middle. Women working at the lowest rung lived at the physical margins of the quarters and sold their bodies to many for minutes at a time. At the highest rungs, however, existed originally three ranks through which a woman might be promoted (from lowest to highest): kakoi, tenjin, and tayu.18 Rankings and names changed throughout the period and the terminology varied somewhat in the different quarters, but the notion of a hierarchy of idealized skills and beauty remained critical to the world of courtesans. I use “courtesan” rather than “prostitute” to refer to those women possessing status unavailable to private prostitutes and beyond the reach of poor women scraping by on the margins of public prostitution. Additionally, Charles Bernheimer, in his work on literary and artistic depictions of prostitution in nineteenth-century France, stresses that “courtesan,” unlike “prostitute,” denotes a woman whose sexual services were reserved for men of some means and who was a public figure herself.19 The Parisian courtesan’s relation to moneyed men and her own public and institutional stature parallels that of the ranking women of the Toku-gawa pleasure quarters, though with one important caveat. Parisian courtesans, unlike their Japanese sisters, offered their clients pleasure free of a political policy of physical segregation.

The policy of restricting prostitution within approved pleasure quarters contributed to the bounded affirmation of the fertility-pleasure discourse in at least two ways. First, by quartering nonreproductive sex, this policy gave a degree of institutional definition to sexual purpose, as seen from the male perspective, as an “either/or” proposition between play within the walls and activity more bound up with emotional and household duty beyond the walls. The regulation of public prostitution throughout the country was a product of early modern political organization, which Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536—1598) commenced when he quartered Kyoto’s sexual workers in 1589 as part of his attempt to bring order to his new rule.20 This politically backed institutional segregation of nonreproductive sex altered an earlier social construction of women’s sexuality and partnership with men, which some identify as the medieval ideal of a wife. According to this ideal a woman was both wife and sexual friend, both household partner and play partner. Segregated institutions of play separated her roles of mother and household manager from her role as her husband’s sexual satisfier, leaving the latter function to be shared with the courtesan.21 How much this medieval model of the wife was a cultural ideal or how much a simple matter of the vague structural nature of sexual relationships in medieval culture is not clear.22 Still, in contrast, the early modern demarcation of female sexuality placed women in either the household or the bordello, idealized their roles as either wife or courtesan, and produced a discourse of sexuality as primarily serving either fertility or pleasure.

Second, institutional quartering recognized the courtesan’s profession as a female occupation equal to other jobs in that it entailed a woman contractually working outside the home. Contracts of the period typically apply the term hoko to public prostitution, which denotes paid, contractual labor covering a wide range of mainly urban jobs that commoner men and women filled.23 Understanding Tokugawa prostitution as a form of contractual work connects with recent feminist approaches that analyze prostitution less as a type of oppression than as a type of work. In this analysis labor is the performance of self-interested economic activity that is rationally, if rarely freely, chosen. Wendy Chapkis terms this work “erotic labour.” Like other forms of labor, erotic labor’s value is contested in the fields of politics and culture, and within its own structure it provides, as with all types of labor, a hierarchy of social distinctions, statuses, and inequalities among its workers.24 From Chapkis’s description we may see the contours of Tokugawa prostitution—the coexistence of government-sanctioned and unlawful forms of prostitution, the attempts to redefine illegal districts as legal, and the use of hierarchical status to distinguish ranks—as a culturally specific example of erotic labor and its fields of contestation and hierarchy.

From the standpoint of erotic labor (with equal emphasis on both words), the fact that many late seventeenth - and early eighteenth-century texts cataloging occupations registered “courtesan” (keisei, yujo) alongside other types of female labor is not surprising.25 A Record of Treasures for Women (Onna chdhdki), which is a 1692 lifestyle guide for women and a central source of examination in this study, opens with an illustration depicting women of various classes, statuses, and occupations.26 Along with courtesans, the text pictures a woman who is a courtesan manager or a bordello owner’s wife,27 a peasant woman, townswomen, widows,28 a samurai wife, and an aristocratic woman.29 This pictorial jumble of women, independent figures drawn without any background of appropriate social environment to delineate them, is indicative of a cultural anxiety toward the rise of contractual female labor. This anxiety reflected the understanding that working outside the household positioned women in an unbounded public sphere where they were sexually vulnerable, especially if they lacked the moral education and internal discipline necessary to comport themselves with prudence and wisdom.30 In light of this anxiety the courtesan stood not simply as one occupation among others, but as the moral end result of labor performed outside the bounds of home and husband and without knowledge of correct social behavior and moral grounding. In this sense every unmarried daughter without such knowledge was in danger, especially if she worked, of, if not literally becoming a courtesan, then behaving in ways both sexual and social that would lead others to think of her as no better than a prostitute.

This anxiety was rooted in the economic environment that put many women in the workforce. Trends in the early modern political economy such as the growth of castle towns and large cities, urban migration, development and expansion of markets, rise of the merchant class, and the money economy hit their stride in the late seventeenth century, which the Genroku era (1688—1704) epitomizes with its prosperity and its celebration of the commoner classes. Young, unmarried women were an important element of this economy quite apart from prostitution per se. They found employment as maids in warrior and commoner households, as workers in cottage industries and textiles, and also in the service sectors of entertainment, food, and hospitality, which often overlapped with prostitution.31 Promotion of fertility values—idealization of marriage into a man’s household, of obedient and loyal behavior to that household, and of sexuality as purposeful fertility for that household— was born from the uneasy sense that young women, unattached to home or husband and untrained in right behaviors and moral grounding, needed protection against sexual exploitation while laboring outside the home.

Lifestyle guides and moral texts, many of which were originally published around the Genroku era and reissued throughout the period, promoted these fertility values. The rise of the printed book during the Tokugawa was critical to this process of promotion and dissemination. The same economic changes that produced anxiety about female labor also produced a means to a solution: a competitive, nationwide book market that churned out a variety of tomes including lifestyle guides and moral primers.32 These texts, written in Japanese script (kana) as opposed to Chinese, formed a popular genre calledjokun, or “women’s training,” which contributed to the seventeenth-century publishing boom.33 These publications were intended for the edification of girls and young women and covered a range of topics such as moral values, proper deportment, home management, and general lifestyle matters. The quarters were also important in the growth of publishing. More than two hundred titles concerned with varying aspects of prostitution, from guides to the quarters and courtesan critiques to fiction, were published by the end of the seventeenth century.34 Further, as letter writing was central to a courtesan’s occupation, there was a need for books to satisfy her development as a literate professional.35 Female managers, themselves retired courtesans, were the main teachers of reading and writing to young girls serving as child attendants to their sister courtesans. Literacy among courtesans indicates that while not all women could read and write, especially those living far from cities and their surrounding villages, all categories of women could do so.36 Typically this literacy was functionally appropriate to their professional and personal aspirations.37 Among daughters from families of commercial traders, for example, the ability to read and write was important not only for their participation in family businesses, but also in making them attractive as potential daughters-in-law.38 Similarly, wealthy peasants invested significant time and resources to cultivate in their daughters both educational and cultural literacy gleaned from jokun books because they knew a family improved its own standing by grooming its daughters in the values, behavior, and cultural knowledge that jokun writings made available.39

By promoting these values, authors of jokun books hoped to prepare girls and young women for the moral and social responsibilities of marriage and the life of a wife and household manager. Lifestyle guides such as A Record of Treasures for Women are particularly interesting as a means for espousing these values. The guides filtered fertility values from their elite origins in the warrior household by making available to commoners and their daughters descriptions of daily and ritual life loosely based on samurai household codes. The Ogasawara and Ise, which were noted houses of ritual, developed these codes in the Muromachi period (1338— 1573) to codify military training styles and ceremonial deportment among warrior households.40 Lifestyle guides funneled fertility values less through moral didactics than through descriptions of rites, customs, and behaviors. Guides offered commoners a window through which they could view the world of elite ritual and etiquette, and then employ it in varying measures in their own lives. This borrowing acknowledged the period’s schematized hierarchy. Hierarchy serves to place individuals and groups in varying positions of social worth for purposes of organization and control, and yet it also produces in people aspirations and strategies to acquire as much status as the hierarchy makes possible.41 In this manner, guides like A Record of Treasures for Women were not published simply to show commoners an unattainable lifestyle reserved for those at the social top. Rather, they offered up the world of elite behaviors for commoners to seize as their own in acquiring forms of ritual and symbolic status that the given hierarchy defined as valuable. The commoners’ appropriation of warrior culture has been dubbed “pseudo-samurai pretensions,”42 but such so-called pretensions validated samurai culture as the primary operative field of status, and acted to recognize the hierarchy upon which that culture sat. In this context, A Record of Treasures for Women possesses a prescriptive quality in its idealization of warrior lifestyle vis-a-vis commoners and a descriptive quality in that it allowed commoner daughters and their families to appropriate elements of the samurai lifestyle as they saw fit. In this manner the guide and other representatives of its genre offered to commoners an important means to begin creating the “samuraization” of their own lives by narrowing through ritual and behaviors the social gap between them and the warrior class.43

A Record of Treasures for Women, which privileges Ogasawara ritual,44 consists of five illustrated chapters describing categories of life experience considered the epitome of feminine knowledge and practice. These chapters cover i) the historical and contemporary position of women, illness and behavior, a vocabulary list for proper speech, and appropriate makeup and hairstyles; 2) the wedding ritual; 3) pregnancy and birth rituals; 4) penmanship, poetry reading, the care of the sick, and the maintenance and cleaning of clothing; and 5) bridal and clothing items, character recognition for common words, chapter names from the Tale of Genji, seasonal celebrations, definitions of literary phrases and words, and styles of wrapping items in paper. Sections dealing with speech, characters, Genji, and literary words indicate both the text’s assumption of female literacy and its educational function in developing that literacy.45 A Record of Treasures for Women offered a “values education” to families wishing to instruct their daughters to some degree on a lifestyle grounded in moral knowledge of elite female values, practical knowledge of maintaining health and home, and ritual knowledge for guiding one toward the text’s vision of womanhood: married, serving the household of one’s husband and in-laws with skill and loyalty, and giving birth to an heir.

This vision assumed the household (ie) was the institutional hub of fertility values, just as the pleasure quarter was institutionally central to the vision of pleasure values. Fertility values had their origin in samurai family morality and reflected the institutional structure of that morality. The early modern ie that spread among the commoner population was a collection, large and small, of individuals—typically related by blood but not always—committed to a corporate identity. The individuals were more than simply a family under a roof; they were an ongoing enterprise that was as much gesellschaft as gemeinschaft, and they recognized their official headship, if not always actual leadership, as an inherited male position ideally passed on from father to eldest son, but which in practice would often position a younger sibling, an uncle, or an adoptee for headship.46 A bride marrying into a middle-class or upper-class ie was expected to be loyal and industrious and possess organizational and educational skills to further the household economically; in addition, there was the hope she would provide an heir to succeed as head and continue the household for another generation.47 This description of the ie is generic and requires historical and social qualifications. It was not a family system buttressing an ideology of nationalism, as it would later become in the Meiji period;48 rather, it was a cultural ideal and economic unit that for the most part was not within the reach of the poor and propertyless. The Tokugawa ie was actually one pattern, albeit universal, among a patchwork of local family and inheritance patterns, some of which were matrilocal versions of the ie; it could be easily manipulated, especially on its points of virilocal marriage and agnatic inheritance, to fit the immediate, pressing needs of a household; and thus inheritance in the patrilineal ie, as was true of all Tokugawa inheritance patterns, was always more improvisational than mechanical. Still, as an economic and family unit, it constituted a growing norm—an ie-consciousness—among comfortable and confident rural and urban commoners whose relative economic stability encouraged institutional commitment to and identity with the household.49 Consequently, for many such commoners the question of household and marriage—to which household they should send their daughter and from which household they should accept a daughter-in-law—became a major concern. Lifestyle guides and moral primers read by them and their daughters bolstered the significance of this concern by presenting the ie as institutionally central to the moral and social development of girls who would one day become wives in the ie of future husbands.

In measurable ways the daughters of these commoners were direct opposites of those whose families sold them to the quarters. Quartered prostitution depended on the hardships of poverty and family misfor-tune.50 Buyers for the quarters often searched for girls and young women in economically vulnerable rural areas. One response to failed crops, market jolts, natural disasters, perennial poverty, and the sudden illness or death of a breadwinner was to release family members to become contractual wage laborers elsewhere, including discharging daughters to the erotic labor force. For example (albeit a later one), in 1900 half of the Yoshiwara’s women were from areas that had recently experienced damaging floods, which suggests a historical precedent of families releasing daughters during grim times.51 On the other side of the divide— one of real economic class interspersed within a social system that distinguished between peasant, artisan, and merchant—was an increasing number of rural and urban commoner families, with a growing ie-con-sciousness, that managed their economic destinies well, tied a household identity to that destiny, and wished to partake of the forms of social status available to them culturally and financially. Financial success bred a desire for social success—those pseudo-samurai pretensions—and the economic ability of wealthy and middle-class commoners enabled them to access education for their sons and daughters, employ tutors, and purchase cultured literature such as jokun.52 Wealthy farmers, village headman families, and middle - and upper-class urbanites and those living in proximity to large and provincial cities constituted the primary readership of moral and ritual guides.53

Raising commoner status by improving a daughter’s values, education, and ritual knowledge was central to Namura Johaku (d. ca. 1748), who wrote A Record of Treasures for Women under the penname Soden Tadakishi.54 In 1693, a year after he wrote his seminal guide, Namura also wrote a companion manual for sons titled A Record of Treasures for Men (Nan chohoki).55 Although Namura’s biography is meager, key elements of his time help us understand the intellectual milieu of his text and of himself as a writer.56 We know he was a physician and was likely a student of Ito Jinsai (1627—1705).57 Ito’s vision of a good society specifically reflected the “assumptions, ethical concerns, and material interests most characteristic” of the commercially active townspeople.58 His rejection of neo-Confucianism in favor of classical forms of Confucian ideas linked to Confucius and Mencius was largely meant as a critique of the warrior class’s embrace and interpretation of neo-Confucian ideas to suit and favor its social position and political concerns over those of rising commoners.59 In similar spirit, Namura wrote A Record of Treasures for Women as a positive means to assert the value of commoner life, particularly that of daughters becoming wives and mothers in their husbands’ households. Namura was determined that these daughters have the same ritual skills, lifestyle knowledge, and social values historically deemed worthy only of warrior daughters. Because of its popularity, A Record of Treasures for Women was republished throughout the period, and its replication charts the changing concerns of the times. Such change is particularly evident in its final 1847 edition, which novelist and culture critic Takai Ranzan (1762—1838) edited before its publication and which includes extensive passages he inserted in the manuscript, though without any erasure of Namura’s original text.60 The historical significance of Takai’s redactions is most apparent in the chapter on pregnancy, where his passages express later issues of nationalism and anti-Buddhism and ideas concerning obstetrics that were not relevant to Namura’s time. At appropriate points in this study I refer to Takai’s edition to clarify such configurations of historical concern and change.

Desire among families to raise the status of their daughters points to the broader issue of female social standing in the Tokugawa. The period has traditionally been considered the “dark age for women” (anna ni totte ankoku jidai). In this view, the Tokugawa represents the historical nadir of female status and authority, a marked decline from preceding periods. This conclusion comes in part from a methodology focusing on laws and customs that locked women out of inheritance and on varieties ofjokun, which, typical of the genre, directed their laser-like focus on women’s moral development while idealizing virilocal marriage. Recent scholarship has reacted to this view by reevaluating the educational value of moral texts and by stressing narrower, often biographical, studies of women to show “the limited but real power and prerogatives of Tokugawa women.”61 Joyce Lebra, for example, has examined the life of a daughter whose skills and contributions to her sake-brewing family were so valuable that the family devised strategies, such as matrilocal marriage, to get around traditional customs barring women from participating in the brewing industry.62

In another vein, Jennifer Robertson recounts the missionary activities of female devotees of the bourgeois religious movement Shingaku, with particular focus on a former Buddhist nun, Jion-ni Kenka (1716—1778), who propagated the religion’s teachings in the city of Edo.63 Such research insists on adding the color and detail of real individuals’ lives to any canvas that portrays female life as simply one of social inferiority. Still, as Anne Walthall cautions in her biographical study of Matsuo Taseko (1811—1894), an accomplished peasant woman, methodologies “privileging the individual over the collective” must be careful not to raise the subject’s life above the fray of her time and place, to see her simply as an individual willing her life forward.64 An individual history is arguably interesting precisely because it captures a life embedded in time and place that produces ironies of disjuncture and contradictions between self and peers and between individual achievements and culturally shared ideals. Thus in Robertson’s study of Shingaku women, the drive and accomplishment of Jion-ni Kenka—a celibate, unmarried woman active outside the home—is in complete opposition to the ideal of the Shingaku woman as an obedient wife, whose faith tied her to husband and home. Likewise, the life of the business-savvy daughter in Lebra’s work is remarkable because her career in the sake industry represents the exception rather than the rule, since the production of rice wine had become largely a male enterprise in the Tokugawa period, whereas in previous centuries brewing was traditionally women’s work.65

In addition to earlier studies emphasizing broad structures of social marginalization and more recent research stressing portraits of choicemaking individuals and their families, an examination of ritual practices brings an additional layer of understanding to Tokugawa female life. Ritual is both an objective structure of culture that acts upon individuals and a subjective practice by which ritual actors shape their social environment.66 Ritual is both “structured and structuring.”67 This dual nature allows the investigator equal footing in the emphases of the above historical understandings: the stress on burdensome social inequalities and the stress on the strategies and choices individuals and their families employed within the limits allowed by Tokugawa society and their own stratagems. A focus on ritual allows for the consideration of the cultural ideals and social structures that defined the valuations and life patterns of a number of Tokugawa women, while it also reveals one way by which women gained the prerogative of communal status and, at times, even individual authority to alter that status. In short, the investigator of ritual can move between the discrete perspectives of Utamaro and his courtesan, or, in other words, between acknowledging discourses constructed on idealized sexual values and examining the employment of ritual by individuals as they affirmed, clouded, or resisted these values.