Saikaku's Evanescence

Abstract

Abstract: This essay explores how Ihara Saikaku's new form of fiction— ukiyo-zoshi —both adapts and adopts traditional Japanese aesthetics. Saikaku's Five Women Who Loved Love (1686) is a paradigmatic example of the modern conception of ukiyo , which inverts the traditional Buddhist sense of ukiyo , written with a different character, to express the ephemeral, often erotic pleasures of the floating world, rather than sadness in the face of its transience. I argue that, though the modern pleasures of ukiyo are the drivers of the plot, the imagery and the traditional aesthetic pleasures associated with the Buddhist sense of the transience of a floating world run throughout the stories. Saikaku's characters are often presented as avatars of classical characters and in turn they often end up generating additional stories. Characters and stories alike are nodes in a cycle of infectious stories, versions of earlier stories that seed further stories and so transmit the evanescent pleasures of love in a self-conscious circulation of stories. The older resonance of the floating world sounds through its modern meaning. Saikaku ironically invokes the Buddhist significance of the floating world, but he may also ironically suggest the limitations of its modern pleasures. Saikaku's modernity inheres in this double irony.