Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

A Life of Pleasure

A Life of Pleasure

The ‘floating world’ considered in this book ‘floats’ on the double tide of sex and money. ‘Above all,’ writes Mr Hibbett, ‘ukiyo meant the life of pleasure, accepted without thinking of what might lie ahead. In Asai Ryoi’s Tales ofpage 404 the Floating World (c. 1661) it is defined as living for the moment, gazing at the moon, snow, blossoms, and autumn leaves, enjoying wine, women, and song, and, in general, drifting with the current of life ‘like a gourd floating downstream.’ Still, ukiyo retained the overtones of its earlier Buddhist use to suggest the sad impermanence of earthly things . . .’.

Mr Hibbett has made an intelligent resume of the low literature current in Japan during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the first half of his book he enumerates various writers and artists of the period – Ihara Saikaku, Ejima Kiseki, Hishikawa Moronubu – and discusses the social setting of their work. His book is a sociological document, exposing the sordid vigorous life of eighteenth-century urban Japan; and this effect is achieved mainly by the excerpts from Japanese picaresque writing which constitute its second half.

One can only regret that Mr Hibbett did not choose to make full translations, and let the novelists speak for themselves, instead of producing a pot-pourri of social analysis, imperfectly reproduced illustrations, and truncated excerpts. It is disturbing too that he seems to regard the genial fictions and idealisations which the (male) authors put into the mouths of their courtesan-heroines as an adequate representation of the view which prostitutes might take of their profession. The picaresque novelists do obliquely disclose an actual and horrifying abyss where money (for women) and sex (for men) are the determining factors, from which the only door of release is the grave or the seclusion of a Buddhist hermitage. It is sobering to reflect that for many people in the East this world may be entirely contemporary.

1960 (210)