I find empty rivers and mountains - in which I fail to comprehend the religious ideas in Ihara Saikaku and Wang Wei

Here are the endings - last sentences - of three of the stories in Ihara Saikaku's Five Women Who Loved Love:

1. "About this time the story of Onatsu was made into a play in the Kyoto-Osaka region, and from there it spread to even the most remote provinces, winding through each town and hamlet as an endless stream of love, on which men and women might embark with all their cares and float as light as bubbles through the Fleeting World."

2. "Their names, known in countless ballads and songs, spread to distant provinces with the warning: This is a stern world and sin never goes unpunished."

3. "And so this tale is told, with all its love and sadness, to show how unreal and uncertain life is, how much like a wild, fantastic dream."

All three tales end tragically, basically, and I suspect that any of these morals could be attached to any of the stories. Only the final story ends differently, with the gay husband examining his wife's teacups and salted mermaids and planning his sexual dissipation, which is much like a wild, fantastic dream, and not much like a stern world where sin never goes unpunished.

Saikaku's stories are built, in one way or another, on Buddhist religious ethics. This, to the reader new to Japanese literature, ignorant of Buddhist tenets (I mean me), is an obstacle to understanding. Saikaku's ironic use of these religious ideas is a futher complication. I have no idea when or if Saikaku is serious. How did a contemporary Japanese reader reconcile those endings? Or was that the, or a, point, a way that the five stories turn into one book?

Well, that's one reason we read fiction, right, to learn about the world. No reason I have to understand it all right away, or ever.

I'm making progress, though, with a lot of help. Here is a poem by the 8th century Chinese "hermit" poet Wang Wei, translated by David Hinton:

Mourning Meng Hao-Jan

My dear friend nowhere in sight,
this Han River keeps flowing east.

Now, if I look for old masters here,
I find empty rivers and mountains.

Let's see. The friend, "the first of the great T'ang Dynasty poets," is absent, yet the world (the river) continues on its way. The landscape is empty of the friend, thus the poet's sadness. But the last line has a second meaning, that the "empty rivers and mountains" are themselves old masters. There's the Buddhism, the transcendent idea, the landscape imbued with meaning.

Have I crushed the poem to powder yet? Well, simplicity first, complexity later. I'm at least beginning to get an idea of what I should be looking for, even if I don't know what to do with it once I've found it. Small steps.

Here's a link to David Hinton's book of Wang Wei poems, with a few additional examples.

Fine teacups, a rice pounder, some salted Mermaids - Ihara Saikaku's Five Women Who Loved Love

The Anthology of Japanese Literature inspired me to take up Ihara Saikaku's Five Women Who Loved Love (1686), a collection of five tales of young women caught up in all-consuming love affairs that end, mostly, in suicide, execution, or a nunnery. They are all based on more or less contemporary events, and several of them are also the subject of puppet plays by Chikamitsu.

Five Women Who Loved Love is interesting enough for its own sake, but I inevitably found myself comparing it to more familiar Western literary traditions. Sometimes it felt quite modern, especially in the odd, indirect structuring of some of the stories. The frankness about sexual and digestive matters sometimes seemed modern and sometimes harked back to Petronius or Boccaccio or some of Saikaku's Western contemporaries like Swift. In Victorian terms, this is a dirty book, but it's hardly smuttier than William Wycherley's The Country Wife.

Actually, the open treatment of homosexuality was genuinely surprising to me. The final tale is about a girl who falls in love with, seduces (disguised as a boy), and marries a hedonistic homosexual monk. It's as much his story than hers. It ends with the ex-monk inspecting his new wife's wealth, "so happy that he wept," thinking of all the sexual pleasure (actors and prostitutes) he can buy with it. The first four stories end tragically in one way or another, but this is where Saikaku actually leaves us, ironically complicating any lessons a reader might have wanted to draw.

I don't quite trust the translator, Wm. Theodore de Bary. First, what's with that abbreviation? Second, he brags in the introduction that he owns an original edition of the book, which is admittedly pretty cool, since it was first published as five separate little books, with woodcuts, but still, kinda rude. Third, look at the display of wealth that the monk is admiring:

"There were one thousand two hundred and thirty-five flawless coral beads, weighing from one and a half to one hundred and thirty momme each; sharkskin for sword handles; celadon procelain in unlimited quantities; fine teacups from the Asuka River region, piled about carelessly because it made no difference how many got broken; some salted Mermaids; a small bucket made of agate; a rice pounder from the Taoist paradise of Han-tan in China", etc., etc., wait a minute!

The translator's footnote informed me that a salted Mermaid is "A kind of salamander," which I was willing to accept until I turned the page and found this, one of the original illustrations:

A kind of salamander? I don't think so, pal.

Maybe this is a good place to point the curious to the Bookphile's recent post on this book, which takes a rather different point of view.

The meaning of a volume / Reputed most difficult - Donald Keene's Anthology of Japanese Literature

It is a pleasure
When, without receiving help,
I can understand
The meaning of a volume
Reputed most difficult.

from “Solitary Pleasures,” Tachibana Akemi (1812-1868), tr. by Donald Keene in his Anthology of Japanese Literature.

Donald Keene's Anthology of Japanese Literature was published in 1955 and is still in print. No one seems to have been able to replace it. The book covers the beginnings to 1868. There's another anthology for the modern stuff.

One reads an anthology to learn the lay of the land, and to guide future reading, and the Keene anthology worked for me in that sense. What did I learn?

First, most importantly, I could spend a lot of time enjoying the riches of the Heian Period (roughly 8th-12th centuries). Any reader of The Book of Genji has little choice but to spend a lot of time, since it's so enormously long. But it's not just Genji. The poetry, The Pillow Book, the range of the women’s diaries. What a time. And the clear fact that nearly all of the major writers were women still amazes me.

Some version of The Tale of Heike (13th century), the chronicle of the civil war between two noble families that led to the creation of the Shogunate, is essential. It's a foundational work for later playwrights, poets and story-tellers, a bit like The Iliad and The Odyssey were to the ancient Greeks, or for that matter to 19th century English poets. It is not so obvious that I need to read the original – my impression is that most Japanese readers stick with one of the many modern retellings.

The monk Kenko's Essays on Idleness (14th century) will have to wait, although I love the title.

Similarly, my appetite for No plays is pretty much sated by the four included by Keene.

The 17th century is a high point. There are at least three major writers: the novels of Ihara Saikaku, the haiku and travel journals of Basho, and the puppet plays (!) of Chikamatsu seem like they must be highlights of the language. I really was not expecting those puppet plays. Nor that one of Saikaku’s books is a collection of tales of homosexual love affairs between samurai.

This is what I mean: with a good anthology, I learn a lot, quickly. It's as close as I get to speed-reading or skimming. Oh, there’s such a thing as that? I had no idea.

The 18th and 19th century, at least to 1868, are thin. There's not nothing – there’s rarely nothing – but the prose is imitative, the poetry formalized into sterility. The Japanese poetry, to be specific, which seems to have become so mannered and rule-bound that if a poet wanted to write about anything remotely modern – attacks on the Dutch traders for example – he had to do it in Chinese.

I wonder if there's an anthology of Chinese literature that gets as much done in 450 pages?