How different is her fortune in Japan! There she wears scarlet, garish and bright as the five years’ revelry to which, as they might sell a platter or a cup, her parents have sold her; but she is not doomed to the black degradation which robs her Western sister of self-respect. Though the loss of freedom be irksome and submission to buyers disagreeable, yet she is a member of “the oldest profession in the world,” in a country where it is not without honour. She is surrounded by companions, well fed and well housed, protected from robbery or murder by the Government and the goddess Inari; above all, she does not live ashamed and boycotted, but plays her part in an active round of duties and ceremonies. If remembered precepts of religious teaching ever visit her, they come, not to threaten, but to console. So far from slipping hell-wards, she is earning the approbation which Heaven accords to filial self-sacrifice. Happy she is not, though she may one day become so, for, when her contract shall have expired, marriage will be no impossibility. But she is much less unhappy than if she wore black.
It might be thought that the operation of natural laws, regulating supply and demand, would sufficiently account for her existence. But those who prefer fancy to fact are given the choice between two legends. According to one, the Emperor Komatsu Tenno sent forth his eight daughters to be women of pleasure and set the fashion in seven provinces; from them the courtesans of Settsu, Hiogo, and Eguchi were said to be descended. Though one may doubt the authenticity of this imperial origin, the incongruity between rank and the exercise of the scarlet profession did not affect the Eastern mind, as it does our minds, with a sense of repulsion. On the contrary, it is no uncommon thing in the old romances to find a heroine of noble birth resorting, reluctantly indeed, but without any feeling of irremediable guilt, to the sale of her charms, until she should find a chance of regaining liberty and her lover. In fact, one of the classes into which courtesans were divided, that of tsubone-jōro, was so called from the word tsubone, signifying the ladies’ apartments in a Daimyō’s house, because the daughter of Ichinomiya, a Daimyō, being driven by stress of weather to Hiroshima and by want of money to sell her favours, became prototype and founder of aristocratic demireps. The country-folk, respecting her station, would not reckon her among common jōro, but prefixed the substantive tsubone rather than blur their nice appreciation of class distinction. The second legend sounds less apocryphal. After the great sea-fight of Dan-no-ura in 1185, the widows and daughters of the defeated Taira clan “were forced for daily bread to sell their bodies in the streets of Shimonoseki.” But at least four centuries before that date the Hetaira had begun to set her mark on history and literature.
The poetry of the Nara period, which reflects the elegant court-culture of the eighth century and is represented by Manyōshiu (“The Collection of One Thousand Leaves”), was largely written by women, and contains at least one song by a “jūgyōjōfu,” or “woman who goes about for pleasure.” The kugutsu, who were summoned by innkeepers for the convenience of guests and were of much lower status, composed many famous little songs, whose memory has survived that of their authors. But the first light-o’-love whose orb burns brightly on the stormy darkness of the twelfth century, when Taira and Minamoto deluged the rice-fields with blood, was Tora Gozen. The most beautiful courtesan in Oiso, she became the mistress of the elder Soga, who slew his father’s murderer in the hunting camp of the Shōgun Yoritomo at the foot of Fuji. Their tale is told in an historical novel, “Soga Monogatari,” and the tourist who descends from the sulphur-springs of Ashinoyu to Lake Hakone will still pass on his way three monuments of stone, the smallest being commemorative of Tora. More striking still is the tribute paid to Takao, another type of immortal frailty, who refused with scorn the Lord of Sendai’s offer to become his property. Endowed with every accomplishment, she enjoyed a higher social position than the geisha of those days, and regaining her freedom, was faithful (so far as professional exigencies would allow) to a lover of humble rank. Not only has her native hamlet of Shiogama erected a memorial-stone to honour her dishonour, but the priests of the little Myō-onji temple jealously guard a faded fragment of her wardrobe. There was never great hostility in Japan between the goddess of love and more ascetic deities. In more than one locality you will find a row of temples fronted by a row of pleasure-houses, that the pilgrims may impartially indulge body and soul.
When the Ashikaga Shōguns made Kyōto a centre of nobler art and more delicate refinement, the Scarlet Lady lost ground. The curse of Confucius, stigmatising her sex, had crossed the Yellow Sea. Painters preferred the beauty of snow and tree and bird to her fatal beauty; poets, imbued with Buddhism, wrote passion-plays on other passions than hers. Neither in the serious Nō nor comical Kiōgen does she cut any figure at all. It would almost seem that for two centuries men found ceremonial tea-drinking and the excitements of civil war more congenial than her society.
At last the queen came by her own. When the feudal nobles went down before Iyeyasu and took his iron yoke upon their necks, the military despot was seen to be a popular liberator. Art and literature ceased to be the precious playthings of an æsthetic aristocracy. Novelists, playwrights, painters rose from the masses and worked for the masses. Rejecting in scorn the moony fetters of Chinese convention, they painted in broad colours and aimed at broad effects. Yedo, the new capital, without culture and without traditions, became their home and their hunting-ground. Of these turbulent subjects Venus Pandemos was naturally queen, and since her accession in the seventeenth century to the present day many measures of restraint, more or less fruitless, have been adopted by scandalised authority to curb her sovereignty.
As for the novelists, three great names in Japanese fiction may be cited at once. Saikaku, who died at Osaka in 1693, wrote an enormous number of amusing stories and sketches of contemporary life. The rollicking life of the gay lupanars was his favourite theme. Mr. Aston assures us that “the very titles are too gross for quotation.” Even his contemporaries were shocked, and a virulent criticism, entitled “Saikaku in Hell,” brought about the suppression of his works by the Government. A new edition has lately been permitted to appear. In the next century his example was followed and bettered by Jishō, whose name signifies “Spontaneous Laughter.” He was a Kyōto publisher, and his place of business, the Hachimoniji-ya, or Figure Eight House, was as popular in its day with lovers of sex-novels as the Bodley Head itself. He had a collaborator, called Kesiki; and whether he supplied the humour and Kesiki the psychology I cannot say, but their joint productions aimed at something higher than Rabelaisian mirth. They aspired to the laurels of Theophrastus, delineating “Types of Elderly Men,” “Types of Merchants’ Assistants,” “Types of Girlhood,” and the like. But whatever the type selected, the reader was sure to pass most of his time with it in fast society. Well, Spontaneous Laughter died, but his firm continued to publish sharebon, or witty books, until the end of the eighteenth century, when once more the authorities swooped down and made an end. The fame of both these novelists is eclipsed by that of Kiōden (1761–1861), the father of the romantic novel. His predecessors had made men titter, but he bade them shudder or weep, at the harlot’s fate. He proved the sincerity of his sympathy with women of that class by marrying two of them in succession. They are said to have been excellent wives. At the age of thirty he was “condemned to fifty days’ handcuffs (in his own house),” for circulating what he called an “Edifying Story-book.” His subsequent stories were mostly founded on less dangerous themes.
If any should suppose that the writers of stories and plays on this subject had no other purpose than to supply unwholesome food for unclean appetites, he would be egregiously mistaken. The author of a witty book might indeed be liable to this imputation, though the naïf attitude of his fellow-countrymen to physical facts which it is our habit to ignore robs the pat epithet “pornographic” of much opprobrium. Still there were limits of propriety, which, in his zeal to amuse, he frequently left behind. But the dramatist had every justification for dramatising the Unfortunate Lady, who appealed most strongly to his imagination and his heart. To begin with, his audience loved a spectacle, and what spectacular setting could dazzle them more than the spacious Kuruwa with its balconied palaces, divided by cherry-trees and hung with showy lanterns? What other section of society could provide such a feast of colour for beauty-loving eyes as these priestesses of pleasure, when they moved in procession through thronging suitors in their gorgeous sweeping robes, or sat superbly immobile, like painted idols, their high coiffures haloed with radiating pins of pearl and silver and tortoise-shell? And beneath all that picturesque elegance throbbed a tragic, adventurous existence. Other women passed silently from father to husband, from mother to mother-in-law, their lives arranged for them on lines of tranquil duty. But the Unfortunate Lady, transferred in girlhood, a chattel or a heroine, from village poverty to urban splendour, becoming half a queen and half a slave, was both free and not free to follow the voice of passion, which her secluded sisters had often never heard. They slept peacefully, with nothing to greatly hope or fear from the hand of destiny, but to her at any moment might come a Perseus, cleaving the dragon’s mail with golden sword and delivering Andromeda from deadly servitude. Out of the hundreds of plays devoted to Andromeda, I will recall one, which has sunk most deeply into popular favour, and which I saw enacted before a weeping audience at the Kabuki-za theatre.
His name was not Perseus, but Gompachi, and he is supposed to have lived no more than two hundred and fifty years ago—the hero of this typical romance. He had the misfortune at the age of sixteen to kill one of his relations in a quarrel about a dog, and was obliged to flee for refuge to the capital. On his way to Yedo he was roused at midnight from his bed at a wayside inn by a beautiful girl, who warned him that a band of robbers, having stolen her from her parents, intended to slay him and steal his sword before daybreak. This was not Andromeda, but Komurasaki. As in duty bound, the gallant samurai cut down the whole band and restored their captive to her father, a wealthy merchant, who, for his part, asked nothing better than to marry his daughter to so dashing a youth. But this would have been against all precedent. For Andromeda to rescue Perseus and bestow on him the hand of a prospective heiress would have been to reverse the rôles in a most unbecoming manner. Gompachi, therefore, setting ambition before love, pursued his way to Yedo. There he fell into dissolute habits, and, some years after, hearing much talk of a new beauty in Yoshiwara, discovered her to be no other than Komurasaki. Her family had fallen into dire poverty, and, to alleviate their sufferings, she had become an inmate of the huge metropolitan pleasure-house. This time Andromeda was in her proper place, the helpless victim of a ruthless monster, but to strike off her manacles a golden sword was needed, and this Perseus found it difficult to obtain. He took to robbery, which again involved murder, for his own fortune was far too meagre to allow of frequent meetings, far less of redeeming his sweetheart. At last he was caught and beheaded as a common malefactor, before he could compass his mission, and Komurasaki, accomplishing her own salvation, stabbed herself to death upon his tomb. If you should visit Meguro, about four miles west of Tōkyō, when the peonies are in bloom, you will have no trouble in ascertaining the position of their grave. It is called Hiyoku-zuka after the Hiyoku, “a fabulous double bird, which is an emblem of constancy in love.”
Tragedies of this romantic character were very frequent in the Yedo period, though they generally ended in shinju, the simultaneous suicide of girl and guest, who thus hoped to enter on new life together. In fact, so frequent were they in the Genroku and Shōtoku eras (1688–1715), that the authorities tried to rob this death of attraction by cruel indignities to the dead. The bodies were exposed to view for three days on Nihon-bashi, hands and feet being tied together. Then the Eta, social pariahs, wrapped them in straw matting and cast them into a pit. It was thought that after such a dog’s burial their ghosts would not return to haunt the living, but it was customary to make their story into a song, which would become a nine days’ pathos in Asakusa.
Not pathos but majesty is the dominating note of the Ukiyoye painters’ homage to their Madonna. Easy to recognise by her distinctive garb—the tall coiffure, transfixed with branching pins, the reversed sash with satchel-like bow in front, the high clogs of black lacquer—she is by far the most familiar figure to Western eyes through the medium of plebeian art. Cheap colour-prints, disseminated her image from Boston to Paris; enthusiasts gave eager eye to her hieratic grace. Utamaro, who openly lived in Yoshiwara, which he served with purse and brush, was the first to win French homage through De Goncourt’s advocacy for his stately mistresses of preternatural height. Daintier and more human, but not less divine, the monochromatic ladies of Moronobu, the green-and-rose ladies of Kiyonobu, the sirens beloved of Kiyonaga, of Toyokuni, of Kunisada, followed one another round the world, encircling it with a Circean spell. Banish their portraits from the collector’s gallery, and you leave it bare of three or four of the greatest names on the roll of Tōkyō artists. On the other hand, you will more easily defend the Japanolater’s thesis, that part of the superiority of Japanese over Occidental art lies in its contempt for the “eternal feminine.”