The Pleasure Quarters of Edo and Nanjing as Metaphor: The Records of Yu Huai and Narushima Ryuhoku

Abstract

IN 1859 Narushima RyuThoku )At5A-1L (1837-1884) began an account of Edo's Yanagibashi Oni~ pleasure quarters. He was inspired in part by a work devoted to the Qinhuai *Ot pleasure quarters of Nanjing composed by the Chinese writer Yu Huai izft (1616-1696) two hundred years earlier. Yu Huai's Banqiao zaji ftARM3 (Miscellaneous Records of the Wooden Bridge) describes the lives of the brilliant scholars and dazzling courtesans who gathered in literary groups in Qinhuai during the last years of the Ming dynasty and suffered fates noble and otherwise after the dynasty's fall in 1644.1 Haunted by the losses he must have experienced but does not narrate, Yu Huai used the powerful language and tropes of literary Chinese to transform his memories of those uncertain days into something that approached history in solidity. Writing at the end of the Tokugawa era, Ryuihoku drew on the richness of diction and allusion offered by the Chinese literary tradition in his portrayal of the lives of the prostitutes of the Yanagibashi district. Yet his account, Ryuikyo shinshi fJ4E (New Record of the Willow Bridge District), does not stand as a tribute to a glittering world embodying the vitality of a vanished age, nor is it a means of transforming personal experience into history. Literary Chinese becomes rather a tool for prying beneath the surface of things through ironic comment or careful observation and a mechanism for defamiliarization. Ryuihoku uses it to