'No barrier between high and low': Love, ethics, status and style in the fiction of Ihara Saikaku.

摘要

In 1682 Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693), a leading composer of haikai renga, a linked-verse genre that both appropriates the tropes and devices of Japanese court poetry and ostentatiously flouts its genteel rules of diction, shifted his efforts to fiction and wrote the bestselling Kôshoku ichidai otoko (The Life of an Amorous Man), which literary scholars later posited as the founding work of the ukiyozôshi or "floating world fiction" genre, which encompasses the bulk of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Japanese fiction.;The goal of this study is to examine the peculiar mixtures of subject matter, of narrative voices and of styles that make up the texture of Saikaku's fiction, as well as to explore its relation to a socio-historical context characterized by great de facto social mobility and cultural ferment at odds with the Tokugawa shogunate's legally imposed system of rigid status categories. To that end I analyze a selection of works that reflects the broad scope of Saikaku's oeuvre, highlighting commonalities among them while simultaneously striving to capture their diversity. Chief among the traits shared by the texts I analyze are a dialogic quality involving both the mixing of disparate elements mentioned above and the existence within individual texts of competing ethical stances. From this blend of voices emerges a prevailing prosperous- chônin ethos reflecting a bourgeois will to make hierarchy depend on potentially acquirable assets such as money and cultural sophistication, rather than depending on birth, thus replacing a rigid status system with a fluid hierarchy, a sort of meritocracy of the marketplace.;The first chapter examines Budô denraiki (Exemplary Tales of the Way of the Warrior, 1687), a collection of thirty-two samurai vendetta tales. I analyze the manner in which separate currents within Way of the Warrior reflect a blend of gratitude for the peace and prosperity brought by the Tokugawa regime, resentment at the limits placed on commoners by this same regime, longing after and envy of the style and status of the samurai, and, in this light, desire on the part of the chônin to transcend the purely economic identity allotted them.;Life of an Amorous Man is the subject of the second chapter, where I focus Saikaku's allusive, haikai-like prose style, demonstrating that if as Bakhtin said, parodic references to the texts of elite genres "bring low" these esteemed literary precedents, in the case of Saikaku's fiction they also often have the effect of elevating the subject matter at hand by linking it to that of elite texts. Such is the case with Amorous Man's depiction of the glamorous new chônin culture centered in the theater districts and licensed prostitution quarters of Kyoto, Osaka and Edo, which it posits as having an aesthetic value comparable to that of the cultures of high-ranking samurai, the imperial courts of Japan and China, and Chinese literati.;Chapter three examines Honchô nijû fukô (Twenty Cases of Filial Impiety in Japan, 1686), which consists of twenty stories regarding violations, of varying extremes, of the Confucian ethic of filial piety, thus turning the plot of the Confucian paragon tale on its head. I demonstrate that it is precisely a trait that Confucian morality tales lack that most significantly links Twenty Cases to the other works examined in this study: a dialogic interplay of competing voices making competing ethical and/or truth claims, which has the effect of problematizing the naïve genre it takes as its starting point, adding moral ambiguities and even occasionally including elements in the portrayals of its villains that court the sympathy or grudging admiration of readers, and using an irony that undermines the emotion of moral indignation that these stories might otherwise inspire.;The fourth and final chapter analyzes Kôshoku gonin onna (Five Women Who Loved Love, 1686), which contains five novellas depicting transgressive love affairs initiated by chônin girls and women. I examine the ways in which Five Women uses references to the literature and historical figures of the Heian-period court aristocracy to implicitly elevate chônin characters and their milieu toward the level of these classical models, and explore its dialogic shifts between stern Confucianistic condemnations of the protagonists' amorous strayings, sympathetic portrayals of the protagonists that undermine the text's voice of Confucian morality, a Buddhistic emphasis on fate, contingency and the irrationality of desire that tends to further mitigate the text's pro forma expressions of Confucian rigor, and stretches of pathos undermined by comedy and irony. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).