Back to the Classics #11

I read this book for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge

Classic Set in a Place Where You Lived. I lived in Japan in 1979-80 as an exchange student, learning the language in an intensive program. Later I lived there from 1986 to 1992 as an employee of the Ministry of Education. Six years felt about two years too long. But what was I supposed to do? Leave a good-paying job only to return to a country in the midst of a recession brought on by restrictive monetary policy enacted by a Fed overly concerned about inflation; the loss of consumer and business confidence as a result of the 1990 oil price shock on the heels of the invasion of Kuwait; the savings and loan crisis that nobody remembers nowadays but was one of the biggest thefts in history;  and a slump in construction resulting from overbuilding during the 1980s. See how big history affects little lives?

This Scheming World – Ihara Saikaku

The settings are the major economic power-houses of 17^th century Japan such as Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo (now Tokyo). The intended audience is the town dweller, or 町人 chōnin, the generic name for merchants and artisans who sold goods and services to samurai who exploited farmers. There were classes of town dwellers. The masters were high bourgeoisie who set up stores in good locations and homeowners who rented residences. They were affluent enough become money-lenders to samurai who needed money to run their local governments and other townsmen who had to spend to keep up appearances and maintain face. The lower-tier townsmen had shops on backstreets and catered to people like them. Like the poor and work classes today, ordinary disasters – illness, fire, accidents – made for financial crises that drove them to money-lenders too.

The different classes also had different entertainments such as going to kabuki and sumo matches, eating at banquets, and frequenting brothels for the well-off to smaller theaters from knockabout plays and shows for the plebs. The town dwellers also became literate and wanted to read about people like themselves - practical, realistic, vulgar.

They also had different money problems, as we can imagine since too much money and too little money present their own problems. But members of both classes worried a great deal about New Year’s Day when all outstanding loans were due.

And, as I finally get to the point, those social and economic worries are what this gentle lampoon is about. All twenty chapters are set on New Year's Eve, the deadline for paying off debts in the Edo period. So it was the day when buyers and sellers would go crazy with worry, wondering how they were going to pay, how they would escape paying, and whether they would get paid.

Ihara Saikaku was a businessman turned monk and writer after the death of his beloved wife. So he knew town dweller attitudes and troubles and gently condemned them from a moral perspective. He has icy compassion, spiced with melancholy and satire, for marchers in the endless parade – the spendthrift wives, the cheating husbands, the profligate sons, the cheating merchants, the hell-bound money lenders. Human beings - incorrigible, ready to believe anything, at their dumbest when they think they got a real good bead on things.