The Great Mirror of Male Love

The first complete translation of Nanshoku okagami by Ihara Saikaku (1642-93), this is a collection of 40 stories describing homosexual love affairs between samurai men and boys and between young kabuki actors and their middle-class patrons. Seventeenth-century Kyoto was the center of a flourishing publishing industry, and for the first time in Japan's history it became possible for writers to live exclusively on their earnings. Saikaku was the first to actually do so. As a popular writer, Saikaku wanted to entertain his readership. When he undertook the writing of Nanshoku okagami in 1687, it was with the express purpose of extending his readership and satisfying his ambition to be published in the three major cities of his day, Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo. He chose the topic of male homosexual love because it had the broadest appeal both to the samurai men of Edo and to the townsmen of Kyoto and Osaka, his regular audience. Homosexual relations between a man and a boy were a regular feature of premodern Japanese culture and carried no stigma. When a boy reached the age of nineteen, he underwent a coming-of-age ceremony, after which he took the adult role in relations with boys. The first twenty stories in Nansoku okagami feature boys from the samurai class whose lives exemplified the ideals of boy love; the second group of twenty stories shifts its focus to young kabuki actors who exemplified boy love in their own way, serving as prostitutes in the theater districts of the three major cities. The stories, which eschew the explicitly erotic, touch on many interesting aspects of life in premodern Japan, notably samurai connoisseurship of boy love, with its emphasis on loyalty between lover and beloved, the Buddhist tradition of love between priests and acolytes as a means of spiritual enlightenment, the life and pleasures of the urban classes, and the world of the kabuki theater.<

Table of Contents:
Introduction Preface Part I: 1. Love: the contest between two forces 2. The ABCs of boy love 3. Within the fence: pine, maple, and a willow waist 4. Love letter sent in a sea bass 5. Implicated by his diamond crest Part II: 6. A sword his only memento 7. Though bearing an umbrella, he was rained upon 8. His head shaved on the path of dreams 9. Aloeswood boy of the east 10. Nightingale in the snow Part III: 11. Grudge provoked by a sedge hat 12. Tortured to death with snow on his sleeve 13. The sword that survived love's flames 14. The sickbed no medicine could cure 15. He fell in love when the mountain rose was in bloom Part IV: 16. Drowned by love in winecups of pearly nautilus shells 17. The boy who sacrificed his life in the robes of his lover 18. They waited three years to die 19. Two old cherry trees still in bloom 20. Handsome youths having fun cause trouble for a temple Part V. 21. Tears in a paper shop 22. He pleaded for his life at Mitsudara Hachiman 23. Love's flame kindled by a flint seller 24. Visiting from Edo, suddenly a monk 25. Votive picture of Kichiya riding a horse Part VI: 26. A huge winecup overflowing with love 27. Kozakura's figure: grafted branches of a cherry tree 28. The man who resented another's shouts 29. A secret visit leads to the wrong bed 30. A terrible shame he never performed in the capital Part VII: 31. Fireflies also work their asses at night 32. An onnagata's tosa diary 33. An unworn robe to remember him by 34. Bamboo clappers strike the hateful number 35. Nails hammered into an amateur painting Part VIII: 36. A verse sung by a goblin with a beautiful voice 37. Siamese roosters and the reluctant farewell 38. Loved by a man in a box 39. The Koyama barrier keeper 40. Who wears the incense graph dyed in her heart? Notes English translations of Ihara Saikaku Index.

Review :
"A welcome opportunity for wider comparison of the literary traditions and sexual conventions of Japanese and Euro-American cultures." - Journal of Japanese Studies