Parody, Irony and Ideology in the Fiction of Ihara Saikaku by David J. Gundry

Abstract

Reviewed by: Parody, Irony and Ideology in the Fiction of Ihara Saikaku by David J. Gundry J. Scott Miller Parody, Irony and Ideology in the Fiction of Ihara Saikaku. By David J. Gundry. Leiden: Brill, 2017. 300 pages. Hardcover, €99.00/ $114.00. For many of us, the fiction of Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693) shares one characteristic with other lengthy, difficult works of classic literature: although recognition is mandatory, actual familiarity is rare. We relish delivering the amazing statistics of Saikaku's haikai prolificity, including his twelve-hour impromptu composition of a thousand memorial verses after the death of his wife and 16,000-verse marathon written in one twenty-four-hour period, yet find his allusive and complex fiction difficult and even baffling. Still, as David J. Gundry clearly demonstrates in his groundbreaking new book, Parody, Irony and Ideology in the Fiction of Ihara Saikaku, familiarity with Saikaku can breed something much more useful than contempt. The first book-length study of Saikaku in English, this volume makes a welcome appearance, especially to those of us who teach Saikaku, and leaves us wondering why we have had to wait until now for such a monograph. We discover, through Gundry's masterful analysis of Saikaku's allusive and at times nearly impossible prose, that the dense and rich style of the author of the renowned The Life of an Amorous Man does not yield its treasures easily. Yet we also learn that, in terms of helping to illuminate both Genroku culture and Edo-period social transformations, those treasures are well worth the effort required to bring them to light. [End Page 90] Years ago a colleague of mine in German literature delivered a campus-wide lecture whose thesis revolved around the innovative, even revolutionary, literary focus on money in the works of Bertolt Brecht. I talked to him after the lecture about Ihara Saikaku's Seken mune san'yō (Worldly Mental Calculations) to open him up to new horizons. Gundry does something similar in this book, puncturing both the myth promoted by Mikhail Bakhtin and Milan Kundera that the novel is a solely European product and the myth present in vestigial nihonjinron: "I aim to counter discourses of European and Japanese exceptionalism" (p. 3, n. 7). The author strives to update and upgrade the standard view of Saikaku as an iconoclastic bad boy, replacing it with a more nuanced reading that articulates his personal familiarity with the complexities of chōnin (townspeople's) upward mobility as characterized by the tension in his world between money and inherited social status (p. 17). Gundry writes nearly as much against received Saikaku translations and interpretations as he does about Saikaku, maintaining a running comparison between variant renderings in copious footnotes that become one's faithful companions across most of the chapters—replaced, where published English or French translations do not exist, with citations of current Japanese scholarly interpretations. The cumulative effect underscores the impoverished state of Saikaku interpretations in Western languages, reflected in the many and disparate partial translations, that this work seeks to rectify. The book follows a predictable structure: a long introduction setting forth the scholarship and approach, then several main chapters, each addressing one Saikaku work and providing summaries, translations of select passages, and brief contextualizing analyses. It contains a healthy footnote-to-text proportion that signals the degree of attention its author has given to other studies and translations. Gundry opens his introduction, covering nearly forty pages, by establishing an interpretive framework and allows that section to do much of the theoretical heavy lifting, leaving the chapters that follow to unpack each of the four selected texts with a plot summary and analysis (or, in the case of anthologized texts, summaries of stories grouped around key themes). The four works he takes up are Kōshoku ichidai otoko (The Life of an Amorous Man; 1682), Kōshoku gonin onna (Five Women Who Loved Love; 1686), Honchō nijū fukō (Twenty Cases of Filial Impiety in Japan; 1686), and Budō denraiki (Exemplary Tales of the Way of the Warrior; 1687). Because the latter two have heretofore received very little attention in the West, Gundry makes an especially valuable contribution by giving...