Double Voices and Bashō’s Haikai

Abstract

One of the most dramatic transformations in the social, political, and cultural history of Japan occurred in the seventeenth century, in the transition from the medieval period to the early modern era, a century that witnessed the emergence of urban culture, centered on the chōnin (urban commoners), the spread of mass education, and the advent of printing, which transformed literature into a commodity for huge markets. Until then, written literature was almost entirely the possession of a small elite group of aristocrats, priests, and high-ranking samurai. In the medieval period biwa hōshi or traveling minstrels had chanted such military epics as the Heike monogatari (Tale of Heike) and the Taiheiki (Chronicle of Medieval Japan) to a populace that could neither read nor write. The average samurai was illiterate, as were farmers and craftsmen. With the emergence of a new socioeconomic structure, the government encouragement of education, and the spread of print capitalism, however, this situation changed drastically. By the middle of the seventeenth century, almost all samurai, now the bureaucratic elite, were able to read, as were the middle to upper levels of the farmer and chōnin classes. This newly literate populace transformed haikai, heterodox linked verse, into the first truly popular literature of Japan in the sense of being widely practiced and read by commoners.