It’s a pleasure to have you aboard this semester as we explore the theme of “the floating world,” not only as it first appears in early modern Japanese literature, but also where similar themes and situations play out in other literatures around the world and through time.
For Thursday, please read Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” and Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Come to class ready to talk about some similarities and differences between the form, content, and style of each poem as a whole, its characters, and its descriptions.
Looking forward to a Great semester!
Sean Nolan
Ihara Saikaku
Life Of A Sensuous Woman
The story touches upon a preconceived notion in which men are able to sleep with as many women as they want, but when the roles are flipped women are looked upon with disgust. Why are women frowned upon for sleeping with multiple men?
The story starts of with the women speaking to two young men about how people nowadays make love at such a young age and how back then the people used to wait until they were around twenty-five to thirty years old. She tells them her story of how she slept with a samurai when she was young, about eleven years old, and how her family had to leave the town they were in because of the incident. She then becomes wealthy at one point because she marries a wealthy lord, but eventually the lords sexual drive cannot keep up with the young lady and so she is sent back from where they found her.
The women to make a living ends up selling her body to multiple men. She becomes so good at her profession she claims herself at one point to be the, “oven god” ( the god of fortune). She sells herself to many priests and higher up officials. Near the end of her life she reaches the hall of a temple devoted to five hundred disciples of Shakyamuni Buddha and she notices that she has slept with every single disciple.
Yes the women states that she has slept with possibly more than ten thousand men but that is what she viewed to be her only means of survival, while these “religious men” knew that what they were doing was against their faith and continued to do it anyways. Lords who were already married and priests/monks who were not supposed to have sexual relations with others yet fell to temptations anyway.
In reality who is really wrong the woman who was fending for herself or the men who took advantage?
Ihara Saikaku
Life Of A Sensuous Woman
The story touches upon a preconceived notion in which men are able to sleep with as many women as they want, but when the roles are flipped women are looked upon with disgust. Why are women frowned upon for sleeping with multiple men?
The story starts of with the women speaking to two young men about how people nowadays make love at such a young age and how back then the people used to wait until they were around twenty-five to thirty years old. She tells them her story of how she slept with a samurai when she was young, about eleven years old, and how her family had to leave the town they were in because of the incident. She then becomes wealthy at one point because she marries a wealthy lord, but eventually the lords sexual drive cannot keep up with the young lady and so she is sent back from where they found her.
The women to make a living ends up selling her body to multiple men. She becomes so good at her profession she claims herself at one point to be the, “oven god” ( the god of fortune). She sells herself to many priests and higher up officials. Near the end of her life she reaches the hall of a temple devoted to five hundred disciples of Shakyamuni Buddha and she notices that she has slept with every single disciple.
Yes the women states that she has slept with possibly more than ten thousand men but that is what she viewed to be her only means of survival, while these “religious men” knew that what they were doing was against their faith and continued to do it anyways. Lords who were already married and priests/monks who were not supposed to have sexual relations with others yet fell to temptations anyway.
In reality who is really wrong the woman who was fending for herself or the men who took advantage?
-Carlos Gratereaux