Tokyo: A Biography. Stephen Mansfield
the literati and woodblock artists.
A slew of gifted writers and satirists with a good eye for social follies, excesses, and injustice aided social change. Edo offered freedoms not vouchsafed for in other major cities like Osaka and Kyoto. It was possible for people not listed on the Census Register, for example, to pass unnoticed in Edo’s rich social mix, making a living as day laborers. It was relatively easy to blend in with the social outcasts and criminal class.
Inhabiting the lower rungs of the social ladder did not exclude the townspeople from developing an urbane, codified style of manners and tastes. A bravura aesthetic involving a loud flair, ostentation, and straightforwardness flourished in Edo. A more subdued and understated style was closely associated with the wealthy Low City merchant, who had connections with the Yoshiwara. The acquisition of such tastes represented a greater degree of cultural discernment. The more rebellious, lower-class practitioners of a brasher, more vivid form of style and taste, on the other hand, preferred districts like Fukagawa, a working-class pleasure quarter that flourished in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The former were likely to engage in amorous dalliances in the cultural setting of literature, witty conversation, art, and music; the latter to pursue simpler, more easily attainable forms of desire. In this period of ripe, ultimately subversive culture, the Buddhist term ukiyo, denoting the impermanence of life, was appropriated and repurposed to express the “floating” decadence and social flux of the era.
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