A Very Illuminating Translation of a Classical Japanese Text on Samurai Love: The Great Mirror of Male Love

Although lacking the grand historical sweep of Watanabe's chaotic book The Love of the Samurai: A Thousand Years of Japanese Homosexuality, Paul Gordon Schalow's book The Great Mirror of Male Love makes a more substantial contribution to the cross-cultural study of homosexuality by making accessible the most-sustained Tokugawa representation of diverse aspects of male pederasty. "Making accessible" means much more than translating. The high quality of the fidelity and readability of the translation has been validated by bestowal on it of the Donald Keene Award. The extensive notes (44 pages of them) provide information on the historical existence of many of the individuals (especially kabuki female impersonators) in the stories. Although below I shall question a few points in Schalow's introduction to the book, it, too, is an important piece of scholarship that considerably enhances the usability of the book for non-Tokugawa specialists. My only cavil about accessibility is that the 58 woodblocks from the original 1687 edition reproduced in the translation lack captions. To those of us relatively unfamiliar with Japanese iconography, the relationship of illustrations to text is not always clear, and readers totally unfamiliar with the conventions may mistake boys for women.

The very successful writer who used the name Ihara Saikaku is a "key informant" for later attempts to gain access to the intracultural communication about samurai boy-love in late 17th century Japan and the structure of normative expectations in that time and place. Although Saikaku was not himself a samurai, and may not have been a boy-lover, he frequently reworked stories about historically verifiable personages. And he wrote the Nanshoku Okagami (henceforth abbreviated by its English title GMML) for boy-lovers, whatever his own sexual preference(s). It includes an ideology of pederasty, whether or not he accepted it. Obviously, he was not writing for 20th century foreigners, and was quite uncontaminated with the expectations formed by our theories about "sexual orientation." Fiction can provide a "noetic expression of a social and cultural milieu... [that] provide[s] readers with a codification of the world that is cognitively and aesthetically credible" (Phillips 1987: 3-4) apart from its aesthetic accomplishments. Although literary works (even a book entitled "A mirror..."!) "are refractions and distillations, rather than reflections or replicas," and should not be taken as representative samples of behavior in any culture, they provide "an unimpeachable source of indigenous meanings, assumptions, and purposes,", according to one anthropologist who has used such texts to understand another culture (Phillips 1987:27,61).

The Way of Samurai Boy Love

GMML has two halves with 40 tales in each. The first half deals with samurai boy-love, the second with kabuki male impersonators. The usual name for the beloved/insertee was wakashu (young man) and the cult of the wakashu, shudo is a shortened form of wakashu-do, i.e., "the way" (do, the Japanese word for the Chinese tao) "of young men," analogous to "the way of the gods" (shin-to), or "the way of Buddha" (Butsu-do), etc. The -do construction demonstrates that pederasty with the adolescent wakashu remained a spiritual endeavor, just as the Buddhist cults of the chigo (divine child) in Tendai and Shingon monasteries was earlier conceived to be. In the ethos portrayed and legitimated by the GMML , there was

a mutual emotional exchange between man and youth which embodies ikiji, or "shared masculine pride." ... A youth was deemed worthy of male love if he possessed nasake, a form of empathy or love involving emotional sensitivity to the suffering of a potential lover and a desire to alleviate that suffering (Schalow 1989 :122).

As among the ancient Greeks, the warrior had a pedagogical role, and (in addition to his Buddhist duty/merit to alleviate the suffering of others' longings) the youth was supposed to feel honored to submit to tutelage and sexual service:

As in marriage, sex was only one element of the man-boy relationship. The adult male lover (called a nenja) was supposed to provide social backing, emotional support, and a model of manliness for the boy. In exchange, the boy was expected to be worthy of his lover by being a good student of samurai manhood. Together, they vowed to uphold the manly virtues of the samurai class: to be loyal, steadfast, and honorable in their actions. Not infrequently, the sincerity of the vow was proved by self-mutilation such as cutting the flesh on the arms or legs or severing parts of fingers (GMML, 26).

In addition to the spiritually-tinged term shudo, relationships were also referred to in a brotherly term: kyodai-keiyaku (fraternal troth). Schalow (p. 28) notes its use of in two stories,

to designate a form of male love unknown in townsman society in which an adult male samurai and his wakashu lover were separated in age by only a few years. The term suggests the fictive kinship roles played by each in the relationship, one taking the role of elder brother (ani-bun) and the other taking the role of younger brother (ototo-bun).

The wakashu's eager subordination was more important than his actual age. Moreover, the boy following wakashu-do was supposed to submit without thought of how attractive his nenja was. In "Within the Fence," a fifteen-year-old setting off to take up a position as a page worried about how terrible it would be to be viewed as a "heartless youth" (p. 64) and at least in fiction, boys were eager to be loved. In another Saikaku (1972:8) story, "Love Vowed to the Dead," a boy gave himself to an old man whom he found totally unattractive because he swore at his lover's deathbed "to love the creature in his friend's place and he was bound by the honour of a samurai to fulfill his promise." The attractiveness of the nenja was normatively irrelevant to the wakashu, although his own attractiveness was extremely important (see GMML, 118).

In the stories of Saikaku, and in many collected in the 1930s by Jun'ichi Iwata (see Watanabe 1989:52-73, 111), the wakashu's obligation to be faithful to his master conflicted with his obligation to submit to the passion of other adult males when they were seen to be pining for the wakashu (GMML, 34). Discovery often led to death, but suicide was (and remains) a very popular ending for Japanese love stories. In other stories, the boy was not found out, or the nenja realized that the wakashu was motivated by compassion (jihi) for the suffering of some other man hopelessly in love with the wakashu, whatever their rank (see pp. 71, 153; Watanabe 1989:52-65). Schalow (p. 34) remarks that karma providing "a Buddhist excuse for Confucian failings is common in Saikaku's tales," but in addition to this convenient exculpation, there is compassion, a worthier Buddhist motivation. Although Saikaku deflated the pretensions of others, especially Buddhist priests, he never attributed the "infidelity" of a wakashu to the wakashu's lust. In the idealized picture of wakashu-do he presented, the wakashu was motivated by duty to alleviate suffering, sacrificing his own interests, even breaking his vows, in order to share his body with those burning with desire for it. Shume, the wakashu in Saikaku's story "He Fell in Love When the Mountain Rose was in Bloom" exemplifies noble candor in telling his daimyo (a high-ranked lord, baron is the usual equivalent suggested)

A certain man has fallen in love with me. If I refuse him, I betray my honor as a follower of the way of boy love. If I act freely, it means breaking my lord's laws and is tantamount to rejecting your longstanding benevolence toward me. Please kill me so that I may escape this quandary (GMML, 156).

This request was not granted, and in other stories ("Love letter sent in a sea bass", "Within the Fence") forbearance and/or an understanding of the honorable motivations of the wakashu often preserved the "unfaithful" wakashu from death. In "Within the Fence" the wakashu was ordered to undergo an early coming-of-age ceremony. A relationship after the coming-of-age ceremony seems to be implicated for the illicit but rewarded pair in "A Sword Is His Only Memento." Schalow (personal communication) interprets the sexual relationship between the two who are now "true brothers" as put in the past by the coming-of-age ceremony. In "Within the Fence," and also in "He Fell in Love When the Mountain Rose was in Bloom," the illicit pair were separated after the lovemaking foreborne by their lord.

The other pressing contradiction of the way of boy-love was between the pledges of eternal love and the finiteness of youth. At least in Saikaku's fiction, there were wakashu older than twenty. Katsuya apparently continued to play the wakashu role after his coming-of-age ceremony in "A Sword Is His Only Memento" (p. 96). Mondo in "Two Old Cherry Trees Still in Bloom" is a 63-year-old wakashu, albeit one who retained the hairstyling of a boy (p. 182). Although one can hardly expect representative samples of behavior or relationships in works of fiction, it seems to me that representations of variations from the norms reflect reality, even in cases that are advanced as cautionary tales.

Kabuki

Kabuki performers were originally women entertainers who were also often prostitutes. Indeed, "prostitution was commonly practiced by entertainers of all kinds, both male and female" (Shively 1978:8). Kabuki actors gained a monopoly when women were banned from the kabuki stage (in decrees of 1629, 1630, 1640, 1645, and 1646), but "even before the ban against actresses, at least as early as 1612, there were troupes made up entirely of boys or young men who performed wakashu kabuki (youths' kabuki)" (Shively 1978:9). Plays about male-male love filled the repertoire during the time female impersonation was banned (1651-4), and continued after the ban was replaced by regulation of actors' hair in 1654 (Shively 1968:237). The long forelocks (mae-gami) were the glory of the boys' appearance, and the shearing of the wakashu was a shocking mortification to actors and a source of mourning for their patrons. Saikaku wrote that shaving the mae-gami was "like seeing unopened blossoms being torn from the branch" (GMML, 214). However, the legislation on actor's coiffure provides a splendid example of the unanticipated consequences of legal edicts. As Saikaku noted (in 1687)

It used to be that no matter how splendid the boy, it was impossible for him to keep his forelocks and take on patrons beyond the age of twenty. Now, since everyone wore the hairstyle of adult men, it was still possible at age 34 or 35 for youthful-looking actors to get under a man's robes. . . These actors hid their years from others . . . [but] the more observant theatergoers realized to their great shock that actors whose stage debuts had come at the same time were now playing villains and old hags opposite them. If skill is what the audience is looking for, there should be no problem in having a 70-year-old perform as a youth in long-sleeved robes

Thus, "when being entertained by a kabuki boy actor, one must be careful never to ask his age" (p. 267).

Effeminization of beloved boys in demilitarized Tokugawa Japan

At least while the warrior caste predominated (i.e., prior to the unification of Japan in 1590 and the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603), boys who were sexual favorites of adults were not thereby rendered effeminate. Aristocratic boys were educated, and at least officially, the masculine honor of their souls was the paramount consideration. In one of many invidious contrasts of the Genroku era and "the good old days" of a more sincere, more masculine, and less mercenary homosexuality, Saikaku recalled, "In the old days, boy love was something rough and brawny. Men swaggered when they spoke. They preferred big, husky boys, and bore cuts on their bodies as a sign of male love. This spirit reached even to boy actors, all of whom brandished swords" (p. 307).

As among the ancient Greeks, 19th century Azande, or 20th century Sambia, once they graduated from the role, they married and they became the leading warriors of the next generation. Even while still wakashu, prowess with a sword was expected. However, as in ancient Greece, over time and with the decline of a warrior ethic (viz., the peace following the 1600 battle of Sekigahara), the ideal for the boy became increasingly effeminate.

It is in the 17th century, especially after the assault on the mae-gami of the wakashu in 1654, that actors also become permanently effeminate.The extension of wakashu careers by replacing mae-gami with costuming and acting has already been mentioned above. Another unanticipated consequence of the prohibition of mae-gami was the development of the specialist in women's roles, oyama. Gorosaemon, the patron of Yoshizawe Ayame (1673-1729), told him he must live as a women to be effective: "One cannot become an excellent oyama without living as a woman in everyday life. In fact, his masculinity betrays itself easily in him who makes an effort of will to become a woman [only] on the stage" (quoted by Watanabe 1989:86). This principle of constantly performing as a woman, offstage as well as on, became oyama dogma, even into the 20th century (see Scott 1955:157-98). They always dressed as girls or women, used the distinctive features of women's speech, emulated women's coiffure, posture, and intonation, squatted to urinate, and even entered the women's side of public bathhouses without anyone objecting (Shively 1978:41). Youths had previously graduated to playing male roles as their beauty faded (or, earlier, when their forelocks were cut off as part of coming of age at 19 or 20), but Ayame condemned this, and, thereafter, most oyama remained oyama for life, representing the ideal models of "traditional Japanese femininity."

The increasingly rich and dominant class of merchants (townsmen - chonin) became patrons of theater and of impecunious youth, and the ideal in boys on and off-stage became decidedly more effeminate. By the late 17th century, kagema-jaya, teahouses providing effeminate boy prostitutes existed alongside female houses, especially in the larger cities, particularly Edo (now Tokyo).

In 1687 in GMML, Saikaku portrayed two types of patron-insertors, as well as the two types of patronized insertees (younger samurai warriors and kabuki actors):

connoisseurs of boys (shojin-zuki) and woman-haters (onna-girai). Shojin-zuki had a nonexclusive interest in boys, which means that they generally were married, maintained households, and continued to have sexual relations with women. Onna-girai, on the other hand, did not marry and they completely rejected women as sexual partners (p. 4).

From this distinction of behavior (which already strains evidence within the GMML for shojin-zuki heterosexual behavior and interest), Schalow leaps to making inferences about identities as bisexuals and homosexuals:

Since both groups could engage in man-boy sexual relations without stigma, their appreciation for boys did not serve as a distinguishing feature. As a result, sexual identity for men with an exclusive preference for boys was constructed from their sexual antipathy for women, and they thus got the name "woman-haters" (Ibid.; also see Schalow 1987:43, 1989 :120).

A term used by others increases the possibility of an identity crystallizing, but evidence that persons identify themselves by such a name or criterion is necessary. The existence of a label does not prove salience, let alone self-application. Although there are characters with pronounced aversion to contact with women in three of the nineteen samurai boy-love stories, and in three of twenty kabuki stories, there is only one self-reference as "woman hater" in each half of GMML (pp. 139, 310).

As for bisexuality, it bears noting that in the 19 samurai stories, there is only one mention of intercourse with women by someone who has sexual relations with boys as well. Nagayoshi in "Drowned by Love" quite clearly loved women, even if he eventually was bored with them and found a boy "a perfectly satisfactory replacement" for women (p.165). There may have been a cultural "assumption that the interests of men depicted were directed at both women and boys," as Schalow 1987:44) wrote, but the text (as he translated it) is not a convincing basis for showing such an assumption, and still less a "more-or-less balanced interest in both women and boys" (p. 45). In the kabuki stories, only one male (a boy actor yet) has sex with a woman, and that case the dying girl was misrepresented as a dying boy when Shizuma agreed to the encounter. Although he was "sincerely devoted to the way of male love" (GMML, 200), Shizuma continues from this deed of charity for a suffering creature to the monkhood. That is, even this rare instance of heterosexual behavior within GMML, is not part of a recurrent pattern of bisexual behavior. Rather than heartily having a boy on one arm and a woman on the other, as late medieval libertines were represented in the West, the lovers of boy in GMML, are not shown maintaining relationships with women. For instance, in "Tears in a Paper Shop," Juroemon "stopped seeking other forms of sexual pleasure" (p. 194). Those who shared the bed of Heihachi "lost interest in their wives and children" (p. 242) and after a night with the actor Han'ya -- even without sexual relations -- the man from Tosa "was utterly bored with even the shapeliest of courtesans" (p. 260) and died of love for Han'ya on the voyage home. The norm -- at least the statistical norm in GMML -- is for the man who loved a boy to become a monk once the boy ceases to exist (either dying or coming of age), not to return to women or to a bisexual savoring of women and boys. Nor do the boy actors "grow up" to love women, or even to engage in heterosexual behavior (pp. 203, 236, 266, 282). The nenja-wakashu vows of eternal love stand in marked contrast to the closest Chinese analog of GMML, Bian er chai (Hairpins Beneath His Cap), a late Ming (hence, more or less contemporaneous) "collection of four stories of five chapters each, all based on the theme that love finds complete fulfillment in the sexual relationship between two men. . . [but] such a relationship confines itself to a brief period after which the lovers must self-consciously resume the affairs of normal life, that is, marriage and procreation" (McMahon 1988:74, also see p. 96n46 on Yipian qing) Homosexual relationships (and not just age-graded ones) are sometimes intense in Ming literature, but the (neo-Confucian) demands of filial piety to produce descendants are explicit even in works celebrating intense male homosexual passion. No such concern is evidenced anywhere in GMML.

At least in the world of GMML -- which is, it bears remembering, a fictional world produced for a particular urban boy-loving market -- outgrowing boy-love to become a lover of women, or a connoisseur of both boys and women, was not represented. Those who left pederasty behind renounced the world altogether, by becoming monks. If this pattern differs from that in other representations of Tokugawa devotees of wakashu-do those of us who cannot read Japanese must await more translations and/or secondary analyses.

In Saikaku's other work, boys are one savory dish, rather than a do. Yonosuke, the libertine in Saikaku's first great popular success Koshoku Ichidai Otoko (1964 [1682]), recorded 725 boys and 3742 female conquests in his diary; and Gengobei in Koshoku Gonin Onna (Saikaku 1956 [1686]) moves from boys to girls, but such a transition is not visible in GMML. If, the audience for GMML assumed that the samurai youths or the actors who provided sex to patrons settled down to marrying women and raising families, the evidence is extrinsic to the text. The text, especially the first and last story, present an ideology of the superiority of boy-love. The superiority of this way of life is assumed by most of the characters in the book. A boy was no more than "a perfectly satisfactory replacement" for one man who was so "utterly bored with women" that he made a beautiful young lady "a widow with a living husband" (GMML, 165), and in "Loved by a Man in a Box," the narrator, who could remember the names of 1,000 boys from his "27 years as a devotee of male love" is a discordant voice in the general celebration of loving boys, in that he recalled "shar[ing] a sense of honor and masculine pride" with only a few.

The mercenary focus of sexual transactions in the Genroku era is a leitmotif in GMML, with frequent invidious contrasts to an earlier, nobler, less materialistic age (and a future in which the cult will have more adherents). Devotion to one's patron and charity to one's admirers regardless of their station are consistently celebrated; the commercial world consistently decried. This is especially so in "Loved by a Man in a Box" and "The Koyama Barrier Keeper," in which renting out one's body is especially de-romanticized. Attempting to distinguish Saikaku's own "real" views from what was necessary to be published is a hopeless endeavor, but insofar as he spoke in the voice of public morality it was against the ruinous cost of renting boys -- not against same-sex love, and not against sex without love, but against homosexual behavior without love or some other noble motivations such as compassion. Similarly in ancient Greek pederasty, the first two components of ideal eromenosscomportment listed by Dover (1979:107) were refusal of payment and obdurate postponement of any bodily contact until the potential partner had proved his worth.

Woodblocks of threesomes consisting of a man, a boy, and a woman evidence bisexual behavior in Tokugawa Japan, as do literary accounts of acolytes who developed passionate relationships with girls or women, but do not establish the universality or even generality of bisexuality. Even if the purported normativeness of bisexual behavior in Tokugawa society were established, this would not prove that those involved in wakashu-do -- as wakashu or as nenja -- were bisexual in behavior or identity. Schalow (1989:507n7) asserts that "the evidence for the bisexual norm is convincing," but does not bother to marshall any evidence other than the example of Saikaku's first popular hero, Yonosuke. It may well be that the general view was that "those who pursued sexual relations exclusively with women or exclusively with youths were in a minority and were considered mildly eccentric for limiting their pleasurable options" (Schalow 1989:120), but the claim that either the ideal or statistical norms of those following wakashu-do (in contrast to those renting bodies) was bisexual needs a review -- not just an assertion -- of evidence. I can only hope that Schalow and others will provide us with more translations and interpretations of Tokugawa (or earlier) texts, particularly any in which avowed followers of wakashu-do -- and not just libertines cultivating prostitutes -- exhibit the sustained bisexual behavior Schalow (and Gary Leupp in Male Colors(1995)) assert was normative. The superb scholarly edition of GMML must whet the appetite for scholarly editions of other representations of wakashu-do, e.g., Ijiri Chusuke's 1482 Essence of the Jakudo.

REFERENCES CITED

Dover, Kenneth J. (1978) Greek Homosexuality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Leupp, Gary P. (1995) Male Colors. Berkeley: University of California Press.

McMahon, Keith (1988) Causality and Containment in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Fiction. Leiden: Brill .

Murray, Stephen O. (1988) "Homosexual acts and selves in early modern Europe." Journal of Homosexuality 16:457-477.

Phillips, Herbert P. (1987) Modern Thai Literature with an Ethnographic Interpretation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Saikaku, Ihara (1956 [1686)]) Five Women Who Loved Love. Tokyo: Tuttle.

--- (1964 [1682]) The Life of an Amorous Man. Tokyo: Tuttle.

--- (1972[1687-1696]) Comrade Love of the Samurai. Tokyo: Tuttle.

Schalow, Paul (1987) "'Woman-hater' as homosexual: literary evidence from 17th-century Japan." Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality? Proceedings, Literature and Arts (Amsterdam: Free University) 1:41-53

----(1989 ) "Male love in early modern Japan: a literary depiction of 'youth.'" 118-128 in M. Duberman, et al., Hidden From History. New York: New American Library.

Scott, A. C. (1955) The Kabuki Theatre of Japan. London: Allen & Unwin

Shively, Donald H. (1968) "Bakufu vs. kabuki." 231-261 in J. Hall & M. Jansen, Studies in the Institutional History of Early Modern Japan. Princeton University Press.

--- (1978) "The social environment of Tokugawa kabuki." 1-61 in J. Brandon et al., Studies in Kabuki. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Watanabe, Tsuneo (1989) The Love of the Samurai. London: Gay Men's Press.

Zolbrod, Leon (1977) Tales of Moonlight and Rain. Tokyo: Tuttle.

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With some lengthy footnotes that I have expunged here, this appeared in The Society of Gay and Lesbian Anthropologists Newsletter 12 (1990). Though entirely about pre-gay organizations of homosexuality, I think this still fits within my June AC reviewing blitz.