Paper short abstract:

The portrayal of rōnin characters in Saikaku’s most money-focused collection of stories provides striking examples of the disintegration of the ostensibly honor-driven samurai ethos once individual samurai must fend for themselves. These will be examined in the context of the rest Saikaku’s oeuvre.

Paper long abstract:

“The samurai are a model for the people, an example shining mirror-like above them.” Thus begins the first story in Ihara Saikaku’s (1642–1693) Budō denraiki (Exemplary Tales of the Way of the Warrior, 1687). However, the collection of samurai vendetta tales that follows contrapuntally confirms and contradicts this assertion. Indeed, Saikaku’s fiction taken as whole alternately supports and undermines the postulate that whereas commoners are motivated by vanity, lust and greed, samurai are driven by considerations of honor and loyalty. Saikaku’s most money-focused collection of stories, Seken mune san’yō (Worldly Mental Calculations, 1692), which tells of desperate measures taken to collect, pay off or dodge debts falling due at New Year’s, features portrayals of cash-hungry rōnin characters that provide striking examples of samurai dishonor in scenes of conflict with chōnin (urban commoners). This presentation will both place these depictions of rōnin misbehavior in the historical context of a new, de facto chōnin cultural hegemony and compare them to other clashes between samurai and commoners in Saikaku’s fiction.