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Book
Ihara Saikaku · 1972
Ihara Saikaku's seventeenth-century tales of male love among the samurai render a world in which devotion between men overrides duty, rank, and even the fear of death — a tradition of the erotic that the corpus holds as evidence of how differently a culture can organize desire and honor.
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What this book knows
Saikaku's samurai tales show male same-sex love as a force that overrides duty, rank, and even the fear of death.
desire
Even a brave and valiant samurai grows weak when he loves; for love is the greatest power of all and governs this world.
CLI-RC-045His manly beauty has made me lose my head. He has fascinated me — only this elegant male has troubled me.
CLI-RC-023erotic-as-power
They loved each other madly and passionately, expecting every minute to be condemned to death by command of their master.
CLI-RC-036Through all these years their hearts had not changed. They had never taken any interest in a woman.
CLI-RC-030intimacy
He found in the box a dagger and a fervent prayer for his recovery — he owed his recovery to Senzayemon's love.
CLI-RC-052Love each other again for this one night — each is a man of honour, said the mother, watching from the next room.
CLI-RC-028Editor’s framing
Saikaku was the great popular chronicler of Tokugawa-era pleasure and commerce, and these stories belong to the nanshoku tradition — male same-sex love as an honored bond, not a transgression, often between an older samurai and a youth, bound up with codes of loyalty and sacrifice. The tales are by turns tender, violent, and matter-of-fact about a love that the European tradition of the same period was busy criminalizing. Reading them well means setting aside the assumption that shame is the inevitable shadow of same-sex desire; here the shadow is duty, and the conflict is between two honored claims.
What to attend to: the way devotion is figured as a force that can override the samurai's first loyalty, and the lethal stakes that attach to it — these are often stories of love unto death. The cultural distance, which is the point: a record of desire organized by a different code entirely. The translation is dated and the frame is a window onto a vanished social order more than a transparent account of it.
In Vela's reading Comrade Loves of the Samurai is one of the cross-context witnesses the erotic canon prizes — the test of what stays constant in the human shape of desire when the language, the century, and the social order change completely. We read it on the desire axis, beside the European and contemporary traditions, as the evidence that shame is a cultural fact and not a law of the body.
Featured passage
Senpatji sighed: 'Alas, it is indeed a Strange world! I never suspected that you were his son. Yes, I killed your father. But I am happy, OShynosuke, to die at your hands. Come, kill me, and avenge your father.'And he threw away his swords and offered his neck to Shynosuke. Shynosuke cried: 'No, take your sword and fight with me. I cannot kill you in cold blood, who have been so good to us.'His mother was watching this scene from the next room, and called her son to her, saying: 'I admire both you and Senpatji. Each is a man of honour. Love each other again for this one night. I wish to grant you such an interval. Celebrate your separation, but to-morrow without fail, O Shynosuke, avenge your father.' Then Shynosuke brought dishes and cups of wine, and the two rejoiced. The mother slept in the next room, and Senpatji and Shynosuke lay down together. When the woman woke in the morning, they were both silent, lying in the same bed. She called her son: 'Rise up, lazy boy! 'But there was no answer. She went into the room and turned back the blanket which covered them, and saw that Shynosuke had pierced Senpatji's heart with his sword passed through his own breast and out at his back. His mother Stood there for a long time overwhelmed at the sight of these two lovers' bodies, and then, in her sorrow and distress, killed herself in the same room. Surely a sad and a tragic tale. [image file=image_rsrc1KK.jpg] 7 They Loved Each Other even to Extreme Old AgeTHERE WAS A LITTLE SHOP IN A STREET OF the Yanaka district of Yedo, with a narrow bill hung in the doorway which read: 'We have a remedy for superfluous hairs. It is equally good for many other ailments.'Copybooks for Students were also sold there; but since these were written by the hand of an old man, no one bought them. A bamboo blind hung between the worn and dirty screens. The trade of that shop was negligible, and the proprietor did not make enough out of it to live by. A graceful pine tree rose above the sloping roof; summer chrysanthemums flourished in the garden, and there was a well of pure water and a pail on the end of a pole. Sometimes birds came and perched on the pail.
Senpatji sighed: 'Alas, it is indeed a Strange world! I never suspected that you were his son. Yes, I killed your father. But I am happy, OShynosuke, to die at your hands.
6 published passages · book excerpt · research analysis
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