24 - 30 January 2002
Issue No.570
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 24 - 30 January 2002 Issue No.570 |
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The dawn of the floating world
"A Secret Visit Leads to the Wrong Bed": the title of one of the short tales in Ihara Saikuku's Nanshoku okagami, most often translated as The Great Mirror of Male Love, is immediately followed -- as convention demands -- by a three line verse precis of the story. It reads: "An actor opens a face powder shop./Modern ladies imitate the actor Kichiya./Her elder brother's unexpected pleasure."
It is sufficiently enigmatic to entice the reader further -- as, indeed, are the precis to all 40 of Saikuku's tales -- though it is likely to be only a short time before the same reader is able to see through the studied ambivalence of these introductions and predict the story lines. Such is the nature of archetypes. A wrong bed is always a wrong bed, and visible a mile away as long as it has been established just what constitutes the right bed.
First published in the 1680s, Nanshoku okagami is one of the key texts in the cult of sexual connoisseurship that flourished in late 17th century Japan. It is, of course, rooted in much earlier traditions -- among the more celebrated precursors must count the mid-tenth century Ise monogatari ("Tales of Ise") and, almost a hundred years later, Genji monogatari ("The Tale of Genji") -- though these earlier texts are exclusively heterosexual.
By the 17th century, though, with the emergence of a wealthy merchant class, alongside the formalising of Samurai codes of conduct and the apparent reification of class structures, or at least of the patterns of behaviour associated with the ruling Samurai, the stage was set for a change, a change that, while inevitably harking back to non-prostitutional classical archetypes, would at least allow for a change of gender in the object of attention. Fragrant concubines were to be replaced by young Samurai, or kabuki actors: their lovers older Samurai, or else -- a nice turn in the convention here -- by the Buddhist clergy.
It was quite by accident that Nanshoku okagami formed a part of my reading last summer: I had spotted it on the shelves of a friend and borrowed it. At the time it seemed little more than a curiosity, though last week, at the exhibition The Dawn of the Floating World, a ravishing showing of 17th century Japanese prints at the Royal Academy in London, and one of the most popular exhibitions of the past twelve months, it began to accrue rather more significance than is normal in the merely curious.
Ukiyo-e, or "pictures of the floating world", focus on the daily life of the pleasure quarters and entertainment districts of Edo (now Tokyo): "Ukiyo-e artists", the publicity accompanying the exhibition says, "captured the floating, transient world of pleasurable amusements: the refined world of the courtesan and the popular theatre of the kabuki actor."
Indeed, the development of the woodcut, that most Japanese of all the pictorial arts, is intricately bound up with the emergence of the theatre, and the popular actors it spawned. Their images formed the artists' most lucrative subjects, and were sold in large numbers to theatre-goers. They provided the models, both in manners and in clothing, that the audience would ape. That the actors were themselves available for hire was common knowledge, and in no way detracted from either their prestige, or their popularity, though sporadically the authorities would express concern and occasionally sought to legislate against the theatre. Such actions tended to be largely cosmetic, however: typically, in the early 1650s, it was decreed that the term kabuki should be replaced by a phrase that is most accurately rendered as "Mime Theatrical Show."
The images themselves are breathtaking. Tilting the pictorial plane towards the viewer, the subject figures become a schema of exquisitely realised lines, occasionally hand-coloured into perfectly flat blocks of colour. As demand grew, and reprints were made from the original blocks, the inevitable would happen: one block of a two-block print would be lost, though the new run would still continue, with the dramatic cropping that would later be aped in new print runs.
Even when the artists began to deal with the presumably pornographic, as in one of the scrolls included in The Dawn of the Floating World, such is the emphasis on the decorative potential of the couplings that it takes several moments for the viewer to realise quite what is going on. And it is a peculiar distancing that occurs during those few seconds, an aestheticising of the presumption that neutralises the porno in pornographic, leaving only the graphic, and only pictorially speaking.
The distancing contrived by the printmakers replicates the responses, and to some degree the conventions -- of Ihara Saikuku's Nanshoku okagami. Beyond the initial opacity of the introductions it will eventually come as no surprise that the kabuki boy actor ends his days as a monk: if there is a moral inconsistency in such a plot line -- and it can exist only for those outside the tradition within which the conventions arose -- it is, aesthetically, absolutely consistent. Where else should the rent boy end his days, but as a hermit, in solitude, or as a monk, in silence?
The 17th century marked the first time in Japan that economic and social conditions allowed a flourishing publishing industry. It was the first time that artists, as well as writers, could survive on the proceeds of their trades. And if it has been observed that the concern with sexual love in 17th century Japanese popular literature, and art, represented a shift of focus from a negative and pessimistic Buddhist view of humanity to a pragmatic, hedonistic view emerging from the positivism of neo- Confucianism, it is equally true that in the same period, for the townsman, sex (and romance) became a vehicle for the expression of personal, private experience within what remained a highly regimented world, one in which chances for individual expression were consistently minimised by the authorities.
The Dawn of the Floating World comes as a wonderfully refreshing experience, and one that, unsuspectingly, gains a great deal of poignance four centuries later, and viewed by an inhabitant of Cairo.
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