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Paper short abstract

This paper examines portrayals in Saikaku’s fiction of the four great cities of Genroku Japan: aristocratically elegant Kyoto, Osaka, capital of chōnin culture, samurai-dominated Edo and exotic Nagasaki, analyzing the ways in which they reflect and construct a developing national consciousness.

Paper long abstract

Ihara Saikaku’s (1642–1693) fiction inherits the longstanding valuation of the city above small towns and the countryside evident already in the contrasting in Ise monogatari and Genji monogatari of the comfort and sophistication of the capital with the supposed misery and barbarism of nearly everywhere else in Japan. However, unlike the unipolar Japan depicted in Heian-period literature, Saikaku works such as Kōshoku ichidai otoko (1682), Kōshoku gonin onna (1686), Honchō nijū fukō (1686) and Seken mune san’yō (1692) posit a culturally multipolar realm in which four cities outshine everywhere else, each in its own distinctive way. Kyoto features as the origin of an aristocratic elegance that extends down the social scale to suffuse the upper levels of its chōnin class. Osaka is portrayed as the center of an exuberant and inventive high-chōnin culture. Samurai set the tone in Edo, a city whose inhabitants, for example, are characterized in the final story of Seken mune san’yō as exhibiting a generosity due to the influence on all social classes there of the warrior status-group. Nagasaki is depicted as an intriguingly exotic locale not only due to the presence of Chinese and Dutch traders there but also because of the distinctive customs of the locals.

This paper will analyze the ways in which the narratives in question both reflect and help construct a developing Japanese national consciousness that accounts for and celebrates the country’s cultural diversity as embodied by these four metropolises. Furthermore, it will examine the complex interplay of inherited status and newly acquired wealth, tradition and innovation in the cultural and social ferment in which these stories are set.

Audio-visual equipment needed: a projector for showing PowerPoint slides.