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CITY AND COUNTRY FOLKS 377 women! . . . Here, now . . . more to the point, don’t rumple my hairpiece with all your rubbing—be careful! This morning I found it’d fallen off beside my pillow. rowdy: You’re kidding! It’s better to take it off when you sleep, ya know. It’s not a loincloth. (The old man laughs.) Well now, that hick that just left is the big shithead, huh? bingorō: Who? Oh, Con-phheww-shit, eh? retired man: A gasbag Confucian, huh? What does he know? But I see that, strange to say, he’s actually been lucky enough to hold onto that apartment he rents. rowdy: There I was, thinking any Confucian was quite knowledgeable, you know, and this guy turns out to be a complete ignoramus! What can you make of his mumbo jumbo. It’s just like that gibberish they mumble when they take out the holy statues at the temple, you know: “Draw close, and you will soon be granted the opportunity of worshipping the Holy Treasure.” Even while he’s blowing smoke with his haughty airs, he doesn’t even know what’s going on with Muraku or Karaku! He knows how to read the Analects, but he doesn’t know the puppet theater! What d’you think? bingorō: You’re right! Absolutely! retired man: My friends, even if guys like him do know the Way of Confucius, that’s about it. When they turn off onto a sidestreet, they end up in the mud! rowdy: Hey, forget the Way of Confucius! Even on the way to the whorehouse , that kinda guy has gotta watch his step! bingorō: Always searching around for stuff from China, he’s missing out on what’s right here at his feet. A real oddball! He’s no big shot scholar; he’s not even a match for an ordinary guy! translated by Charles Vilnis + :( ; TADANO MAKUZU Z Tadano Makuzu (1763–1825) proved her talent in many literary genres, but it is foremost through the discovery of the political treatise Solitary Thoughts (Hitori Kangae, 1818–1819) in 1980 that Makuzu has come to attract a wider audience of historians and gender specialists as a woman thinker who expressed her 378 CITY AND COUNTRY FOLKS thoughts boldly. In 1994 Suzuki Yoneko compiled a collection of most of Makuzu’s extant writings from which the following translation draws. Makuzu grew up in Edo as the oldest daughter of Kudō Heisuke, a physician to the Date family, lords of Sendai domain. Her father was not only respected for his medical expertise but was also popular as a host of parties for intellectuals, including daimyo, scholars, poets, and actors, for whom he occasionally cooked. He gained a reputation as an expert on Russia and foreign trade, and it was his colonization proposal that spurred the shogunate to explore the island of Hokkaido in order to prevent Russian incursions. In a cruel twist of fate, however, Heisuke’s prospects for acquiring a leadership position in the colonization of Hokkaido faded after his patron, shogunate senior councilor Tanuma Okitsugu (1719–1788), fell from power in 1786. Her father’s political setback adversely affected Makuzu’s future: her father futilely waited for promotion in order to secure his daughter an advantageous marriage. Makuzu served the daughter of their lord as a maid-in-waiting for ten years before she was married off at twenty-six to an older man. This marriage soon failed, and after her mother’s death Makuzu took over her father’s household affairs. At the age of thirty-five, she married another widower, Tadano Iga, a respected Sendai retainer. Leaving Edo behind for the first time in her life, Makuzu traveled to the far north to raise her stepchildren, while Iga served in Edo. This move to a remote place under such unfortunate circumstances must have distressed the thirty-five-year-old bride, but it seems to have strengthened her desire to express herself in writing. Makuzu was well trained in current trends of composition as well as in theories of poetry and prose, participating in a network of disciples of Kamo no Mabuchi (1697– 1769). All of her extant works were composed in the first twenty years she resided in Sendai. Iga proved to be supportive of her creative pursuits, but his duties left them little time together in the fifteen years before his death. Furthermore, her father died two years after she left for Sendai, and by the time...

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