Fertility and Pleasure: Ritual and Sexual Values in Tokugawa Japan (review)

In this enlightening and well-crafted work, William R. Lindsey argues that seemingly disparate social values may be linked by similar rituals and demonstrates that such values may not be so disparate after all. He has chosen for this study the values of “fertility” clustered around the person of the Tokugawa-period wife and those of “pleasure” clustered around the courtesan. To demonstrate the ways in which the positions of wife and courtesan sometimes paralleled and sometimes mirrored one another, Lindsey chooses rituals associated with entrance into and exit from institutions of family and bordello, as well as rituals connected with pregnancy, a common experience for women in both positions. Rather than polar opposites, with one occupying the high and the other the low moral ground, both positions are shown to fulfill the needs and expectations of early modern society.

In his introduction, Lindsey conceptualizes the role of the wife as a realization of fertility values and that of the courtesan as a realization of pleasure values. Fertility values demanded that a wife devote herself to one man and his family and emphasized the hope for the birth of an heir; pleasure values, on the other hand, demanded that a courtesan playfully “love” many men to enhance her employer’s economic prosperity. While the actions expected of women in these two settings were quite different, the fundamental goal—promotion of the welfare of the collective—was the same. Specific behavior was conditioned by context and expressed in rituals that were surprisingly similar in many instances. Lindsey approaches his material from the perspective of religious studies, characterizing religion as a focus on the “ultimate concern” regarding the welfare of both individual and collective. While Lindsey focuses on practical, worldly benefits, he is careful not to reduce all Japanese religious practice to such aims.

The next chapter sets out Lindsey’s theoretical framework, which rests on a “value model” composed of ritual, ideals, location, and valuation. The fertility model, although focused on the wife’s function to provide heirs for the patrilineal ie, embraced much more than that, as Lindsey shows. In fact, the prime ideal of the fertility model was not fecundity but obedience to husband, parents-in-law, and the ways of the ie. In apparent contrast was the courtesan’s behavioral ideal of iki, which demanded that the woman exercise wit, worldliness, and compassion but forgo devotion to any single man. A woman who manifested iki not only provided sexual favors for her clients, but also entertained them with sophisticated banter that massaged their egos. Just as a disobedient wife who produced an heir would have been unsatisfactory, a high-class courtesan who provided sexual pleasure without considering the whole man would have been neglecting her job. It was the context of ie or bordello—in Lindsey’s terms, “location”—that determined the valuation of such particular behaviors; and it was ritual that moved a woman’s body from one location to another and symbolized the ideals she was to follow in either case. Throughout the book, Lindsey carefully examines the meaning of ritual, which was sometimes fixed and sometimes ambivalent. For example, a later chapter shows that the ritual marking a daughter’s departure to a husband’s home was not a complete severing of ties between the woman and her natal family, but left open the possibility of return.

After establishing a theoretical framework, the book turns to three experiences in which ritual helped to define a woman’s role as wife or courtesan: entrance, placement, and exit. Rituals of entrance included wedding ceremonies and a courtesan’s debut, which was often characterized by wedding symbolism. These rituals marked a woman’s transformation from daughter to wife or courtesan and were characterized by the physical transfer of a woman’s body. Lindsey’s discussion of entrance rituals, and the parallels that can be drawn between those for wives and those for courtesans...