Woodcuts, Woodcutters, and the Art of Savoring the World

Abstract

Abstract: This essay explores what difference it makes that late seventeenth-century Japanese prose fiction, including the work of Ihara Saikaku, was far more frequently and extensively illustrated than its European counterparts. Part of the explanation for this may simply be economic and technological, but a more interesting answer lies in Japanese books' commitment to a far more visual (and often far less moralized) aesthetic, one that encourages a surprised and delighted savoring of the world (a stance intriguingly modeled for us, both visually and textually, by a passing woodcutter in Saikaku's Kōshoku gonin onna [ Five Women Who Loved Love ]). This intensely visual aesthetic, in turn, solicits a rather different kind of narrative engagement than that invited by most European fiction of the period: one far less interested in individuals qua individuals, far less obsessed with interiority, and far more willing to acknowledge the place that pleasure can and ought to have in our lives. All of which is to say that Saikaku's work and other ukiyo-zōshi [books of the floating world] can usefully contribute to the ongoing project of provincializing Europe (and the equally urgent project in literary studies of provincializing Defoe and perhaps the Anglophone novel more generally).