Five women Who Loved Love is written in a period of value transition in Japan. There is regular reference to ukiyo which the introduction notes can be translated as either the world of sadness (drawing on Buddhism) or the floating world. The later gets at both the glamor and the precariousness involved in the stories. The stories often felt like an intensification of chivalrous romances involved with breaking of the rules and death. But the chivalry analogy this is not quite right as the characters in the stories are largely townsfolk rather than samurai. Moreover, the bustling and commercial seventeenth century Osaka is Ihara Saikaku’s home and townfolk are also thus a core audience.
I found the stories often frustrating, often with implicit social critiques that were quite funny but with an at times outright misogynist narrator adding unwelcome commentary on gender relations. As is my present habit I skipped the introductory essay, but in my case this had been a mistake. I’d been left wondering if there was a Tokugawa era version of the Hayes code: the characters can have their bawdy romances so long as they are punished. The end essay helpfully elaborated that the criminal code made affairs or running away with the daughter or sister, let alone wife, of someone of higher stature a capital crime. The five short stories in the book draw, to greatly varying degrees, on the names and sometimes highly dramatized stories of people who’d lived in the author’s era or a generation or two before. The transition to a new era was happening but strict social codes where very much a factor and the characters are often rebels who win some popular acclaim. Even without direct critique, Saikaku tells a story that criticizes these laws and may have skated the edge of what was safe to publish.
I found it most interesting as a cultural artifact, if an often troubling one. For all the death, there's not much graphic violence, though what the women feel forced to put up with is often deeply disturbing with two of the stories involving resigned "my reputation is ruined I may as well have an affair." As the introductory essay comments, the writing style is not novelistic and I found it difficult to get a strong sense of the characters of the leading women, especially at the moment of pivotal choices.
Some of the moralism from the narrator is fairly shocking to me, i.e. complaining about the disloyalty of widows who remarry rather than becoming nuns. That said, while this is a critique of women, he also notes it applies to the male lead in a story who accepts a new partner after tragically losing two pretty young men to sudden love interest death syndrome. The role of homosexuality in Japan in the book is not tied up with in moralism from Saikaku, and the stories show multiple instances including oaths of fidelity and a prominent role in the theater, which was often limited to males by regulation.
I think the audience that might most appreciate it would be those that are culturally curious about classical Japan and want to go deeper than the “oh, Japan” reaction and have a sense of cultural history in a light weight and fast paced set of alternatingly funny, tragic, and always somewhat problematic stories. I’ll close with a passage from the first passage of the first book that gets at the experience of reading these tales and their sometimes black humor. Content warning, blithe treatment of suicide:
Seijuro [just disowned] could only say, “It’s heart-rending,” and thought to himself that he would take his own life, if only Minakawa would not insist on joining him.
She guessed what he had in mind, and said: “You are thinking of taking your life. Alas, how foolish! For, however much I should like to say, ‘Take me with you,’ I still have attachments in this world and cannot. In my sort of work one’s heart belongs first to this man, then to that. Let us simply call our affair a thing of the past.” So saying, she rose and left him.
Crushed by theses unexpected words, Seijuro abandoned his plan of suicide, . “How fickle these whores are! Read any time to cast away old lovers.”
But as he rose in tears to leave, Minakawa came back clothed in garments of white, ready now to die, and clung desperately to him. “How can you live? Where will you go? Oh, now is the time to end it all!” she cried, pulling out a pair of knives.
Seijuro was almost speechless with delight to find his lover faithful after all…
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