Tokyo: A Biography. Stephen Mansfield
death—the great levelers—there was not a great deal to distinguish the low-ranking sancha or jijoro prostitutes in quarters like Shinjuku from the courtesans of the Yoshiwara, known for cultivating a theatrical indolence and arrogance. Women from both the highest ranks of the Yoshiwara and the less-exalted pleasure quarters were bedeviled by sexually transmitted diseases; most of the lower-ranking women died in their early twenties, and were mourned by few. At Jokan-ji temple in Minowa, a working-class district of northeast Tokyo, the remains of more than eleven thousand young women who perished while working in the pleasure quarters of the city during the Edo era are buried in a common, unmarked grave. Brothel staff would dump the bodies over the temple wall, giving rise to the establishment’s better-known name, Nagekomi-dera (the Waste-disposal Temple). A belief that prostitutes would return to haunt a person who treated their body with disrespect ensured that the corpses were wrapped in straw before being dropped over the wall, although this was the identical custom observed for dead animals.
Aside from their purely carnal functions, the pleasure quarters and their easily disposed and replenished women provided more than the playhouses themselves. Playwrights, artists, and poets found boundless subjects in the pleasure quarters. Far from being a public seraglio with sex as the dominant theme, the Yoshiwara in particular became the center of an alternative culture marked by a decadent aestheticism and connoisseurship of taste that were depicted by some of the greatest artists of the city. The quarter gave birth to fashions in dress, and its speech mannerisms and styles of deportment were widely emulated.
As subjects, the pleasure quarters were assiduously avoided by the older schools of painters, despite the fact that they existed not only for the sake of sexual gratification, but also as cultural seedbeds that would overwhelm the arts patronized by the aristocracy. Representations of urban styles in the pleasure quarters and elsewhere were derisively compared to the refinements of the Tosa and Kano schools of painting. It was not until the appearance of Hishikawa Moronobu, one of the early practitioners of ukiyo-e, that more refined commercially available woodblock print images began to emerge. Moronobu established a reputation for executing Yoshiwara no tei (Scenes from the Yoshiwara) and work in other erotic print genres.
Moronobu’s early prints were monochrome, but it was not long before pigments were added, resulting in the vibrant nishiki-e or “brocade prints” of artists like Suzuki Harunobu. In Pictures of Japanese Occupations, Moronobu, drawn to the exuberant complexity of Edo street life, created a highly realistic visual document of the working habits of ordinary townspeople—its tradesmen and fishmongers; peddlers of clams, rice cakes, and bean curd; washerwomen; salt-gatherers and priests; apothecaries and harlots.
Kabuki actors, with their sumptuous costumes, wigs, and extravagant makeup, made wonderful print subjects. The word kabuki had connotations of sexual license, and by the early seventeenth century it was synonymous with being out of the mainstream. Much beloved of the pleasure-seeking townspeople, kabukimono were male popinjays who sallied around the city in flamboyant dress, offending none but the authorities. Because the early female Kabuki troupes were associated with prostitution, it was ordained that women’s roles would be played by young men. In Edo, a city fixated on the erotic, this merely created another problem, as quarrels over the favors of attractive young actors broke out among members of the Buddhist priesthood and samurai in the audiences. Henceforth, female parts were to be acted only by older adult males.
Edo’s first licensed Kabuki theater was founded at Nakabashi in 1624, but because of its proximity to the castle, it was relocated to Negicho (now known as Ningyocho), and then moved once again to Sakaicho. By 1714, there were three major theaters in the area: Ichimura-za, Morita-za and Nakamura-za. The auditoriums were dark, with stages lit by candles; black-hooded stagehands moved through the shadows, unnoticed by audiences. Where special effects were needed to heighten the drama or for performances of ghost stories, trap doors could be used for sudden visitations. Small boys illuminated the ghastly visages of actors by holding lit candles beneath their faces. The overpowering smells of wax, camellia hair oil, women’s face powder, and clouds of tobacco smoke, combined with the tight seating arrangements, must have made for a suffocating theater experience, especially in the summer months, when there was little or no ventilation in the theaters.
Ichikawa Danjuro was the leading actor of the Genroku era (1688–1703). An exponent of the bravura aragoto or “rough” heroic style of Kabuki, embodying the superhuman features and valor of the heroes he played, Danjuro’s highly charged, masculine performances were enriched with patterned kimonos, scarlet silk underwear, and dazzling red-and-white makeup. Such was the legacy of Danjuro that he remains a tutelary deity among actors even today.
Book-publishing flourished at this time, as paper costs had fallen and literacy levels were on the rise. With the appearance of booksellers around 1650, public demand grew for picture books, scholarly works on Confucianism and moral conduct, travel journals and diaries, and works of literature. There was also great demand for light narratives, music manuscripts, comic verse, woodblock prints of the pleasure quarters and guides to the same, and anatomical treatises on “Dutch learning.” The latter were of great interest to physicians eager to learn about advances in Western medicine and surgery. If you could not afford to buy a title in one of Edo’s well-stocked bookstores, there were itinerant peddlers who carried their wares on their backs, renting them out for five days at a time in exchange for a small fee. By the late 1830s, the number of book lenders in Edo exceeded 800. Little wonder that literacy levels in Edo ranked among the highest in the world at that time.
Writing could get you into serious trouble, though, especially if you had the temerity to lampoon the authorities. Reactionary policies and edicts like the Kansei reforms in the late eighteenth century typically involved the promulgation of new censorship laws and an effort to dissuade the warrior class from dabbling in writing fiction.
A surge in literary activity and the cultural refinement it represented was embodied in the person of the great haiku poet Matsuo Basho. In the winter of 1680, a disciple of the writer built a humble reed-thatched cottage for him on the eastern shores of the Sumida River. Erected on land owned by Sugiyama Sampu, a wealthy lumber merchant, it was exposed to sea winds from the bay, typhoons, and the constant threat of tsunami. Fukugawa was by then a semi-rural area built on reclaimed delta land. As there were no natural springs or aquifers, water was delivered by boat. The poet had taken his pen name from the gift of a basho (banana) tree given by a student. The leaves appealed to Basho’s aesthetic of rustic simplicity, recalling, as he said, the “injured tail of a phoenix. When they are torn, they remind me of a green fan ripped by the wind.” Furthermore, pointing out that the basho had no value as timber, he added, “I admire the tree for its very uselessness.” The master named his cottage the Basho-an.
It was an accepted fact for Edo citizens that everything could be lost in a moment. The huge firestorm that devoured Basho’s neighborhood on December 28, 1682, left him homeless; he saved his own life by jumping into the river and hiding under a reed mat.
The satisfaction he enjoyed from the recognition of his work was not always matched by material comfort. As the poet wrote one cold night:
An oar striking waves
The sound freezing my bowels
Evening tears
In an age of almost excessive refinement, of mannerism in dress, taste and language, the nuances and symbolism of verse were implicitly understood. In the summer of 1676, pressed for funds, Basho wrote:
Placed on a fan
Wind from Mount Fuji
A gift from Edo
The imagery would have been immediately apparent to the more urbane reader. It is considered a gesture of immense elegance to offer a present on a fan instead of sullying it with the bare hand; thus, the impecunious Basho is offering the coolness of the fan itself as a gift to his host.
In Basho’s day, Edo’s complex network of rivers, canals, and moats were the equal of roads. Water stood for more than just a commercial conduit, being the medium for a floating social life. In the highly structured class system of Edo, the banks, water, and hirokoji (“open spaces”) adjacent to the Sumida River and other public congregation points came to represent areas of greater permissible freedom.