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A Lousy Journey of Love: Two Sweethearts Won't Back Down
- University of Hawai'i Press
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60 PLAYBOYS, PROSTITUTES, AND LOVERS And so it happened that a certain man of letters wrote the story of Seki’s life in a single scroll. Her Articles, which follow his biography, penetrate and indeed transcend the heart of Lao-zi and Zhuang-zi in scope and detail alike. Looking over the whole minced-liver history of pushy soul-preachers , we can count down, from obstinate Bai-yi and Shu-qi, who starved to death on bracken, all the way to rash Prince Bi-gan and Wu Zi-xu, and to Wei Sheng’s sick integrity—each of these men died in vain. Life lasts less than a century: subtract the time lost in mourning the dead, nursing the living, all those lumbagos and little headaches—and what you’ve got is no more than four or five days a month to open your mouth and laugh. To run yourself into the ground for fame and fortune is the height of stupidity, as if you could live for eight hundred years. Seki talked them down with her steely tongue, preaching however grand one’s castle may be, it takes only two square yards to sleep through the night. Her godly figure is etched in prose so clear she seems to stand before us; her literary remains speak loud and far, each phrase ringing out in silvery tones. To add my bungling notes to such a litany is like pasting false coral on a deer-skin purse. I’m better off bragging alone, ignorant of the reader’s ridicule , as if that might soothe my nerves and help me live a little longer. If I blow my horn like some uncalled-for cohort, it’s not that I harbor strange habits like Wang Ji or Du Yu; a quirk of my brush is what’s caused me to scribble these words. Written aside the Stump Keeper’s window in Katsushika late in the Ninth Month, 1749 translated by Robert Campbell #$% Two Sweethearts Won’t Back Down HIRAGA GENNA Z This verse, written in a rhythmic alternation of hexameters and pentameters, forms part of the Blown Blossom and Fallen Leaves (Hika Rakuyō, 1783), a posthumous compilation of the works of Hiraga Gennai (1728–1779), put together by Ōta Nanpo(1749–1823)asatributetohisfriendandcolleague.Nanpobrought together several short and witty, but unpublished, pieces. Gennai had met his death in jail, accused of murder, although the matter was never made PLAYBOYS, PROSTITUTES, AND LOVERS 61 clear, and his death was as strange as his life. Beginning as a minor local samurai, Gennai renounced his hereditary status for the freer life of an Edo townsman, turning to the creation of literary works and to the new field of Western-derived scientific experimentation, then growing apace in an unusually relaxed political environment. In the text translated below, Gennai’s two interests of literature and science fuse to form a complex adventure, full of classical erudition, rich in humor, and at the same time informed by the close gaze made possible by imported microscopes. The verse tells of a lovers’ flight to escape the strictures of society, leading into an unknown place. It is a mock offering in the genre of michiyuki, or fictional poetic travels, which by convention conducts the reader through a landscape composed of famous sites (rather than actual geography) and ends in the death of the protagonists. Plays surrounding double love suicides invariably feature michiyuki, which were written in rhythmical seven-five-syllable lines and were presented in an emotionally intense performance of jōruri chanters. As an author of puppetplays,Gennaiwas particularly adept at theatrical narration, which he uses here. But Gennai parodically turns the lovers into lice and directs their peripatations over a boy’s body, from the nape of his neck, over the head, down the back, andfinallytohisprivates. The piece is deliberately prurient, and Gennai was implicated here as one of Edo’s flamboyant “woman avoiders” (onna-girai). It may be noted that Blown Leaves opens with a riotous rundown of boy prostitutes operating in the city, a subject on which Gennai was something of an expert. Frontispiece for Blown Blossom and Fallen Leaves. (Hika Rakuyō, Tokyo Metropolitan Chuo Library) [3.81.23.50] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:56 GMT) 62 PLAYBOYS, PROSTITUTES, AND LOVERS As with real michiyuki, the cartography is subordinate to poetic linkages , and the places visited form a web of word play and allusion rather than topographical logic. Any toponym, or other term, that has...