—Mengxin Li
I think the ‘life of a sensuous woman’ by Ihara Saikaku is definitely great works and I enjoy reading it.
It shows me the complexity of humans. The protagonist was a beautiful lady when she was young and with her beautiful face, she slept with over 10 thousand men throughout her whole life. At the very beginning of the book, it reads,’ A beautiful woman, many ages have agreed, is an ax that cuts down a man’s life.’ (Saikaku 593) I am totally dragged into this book when I read the first sentence. It seems like it will tell a story about how a woman exhausts a man. But indeed, it shows me the living situation of all the women in that era. Women were sex slaves for men during the Edo period. They sold themselves to men and satisfied their everlasting pleasure. Men, sought for women to play with, treated them like animals and never restricted their desires. Guess what was the result? Women became too weak to fight back and men were exhausted and swallowed up by their own lust.
At first, I did not understand if the protagonist herself refused to be treated inhuman, why didn’t she manage to escape from the destiny of a sex slave at the very beginning. Instead, she even seemed to enjoy the feeling of having constant sex with different people. But later when she met the old crazy woman and heard her story at the back of the temple, she was panic and ran away, which made me realized that women in that era had no clue what unequal status they had. They did not realize there might be a choice for them to get away from this in the first place. Just like the protagonist in the book, after she realized what miserable life she would encounter had she stayed in that temple, she managed to flee as far as she could. So in another aspect, the book showed that women in the Edo period were miserable because they were not aware of their unequal treatment and did not trust themselves to make a difference.
