Wrong About Japan by Peter Carey Read Free Book Online Page B

I’d foolishly hoped he might somehow become interested in an art form which once had been as disreputable as manga was today. After all, Kabuki was considered so deviant that it had been banished up the river to Yoshiwara, although the actual nature of the Yoshiwara Pleasure Gardens was not something I wished to discuss with my son in any detail.
“There’s a fighting scene,” I said. “With ladders.”
“Great.”
Bored and restless, the poor boy endured play after play, expecting each one to be the last. And while I could not possibly admit it to him, I was not always fully engaged either. Yet there was one play, Sono Kouta Yume mo Yoshiwara , we both liked, and even though Charley now insists all this is entirely my own invention, I remember how he stilled as his attention was seized.
Gonpachi is brought to the execution site on horseback, then pulled off the horse. A severe official dolefully recites the details of his crimes before asking him if there is any last statement he wishes to make. This being Kabuki, Gonpachi naturally wishes to speak, launching into a long and passionate confession. Born into a good samurai family he had committed a murder in a moment of passion and fled to Edo. Then, in Yoshiwara, he fell in love with a geisha. Now, everyone understands that such affairs are an expensive business, so he had fallen into debt and from there to robbery.
He now repents and asks everyone to pray for his soul.
The geisha arrives as the speech ends, having slipped away from Yoshiwara to say good-bye. Beautiful, pitiful, she begs the officials to let her share a drink of water with her lover, and one of them relents. Only then does the geisha reveal that she has a knife. My foreigner’s heart leaps with hope when she cuts the ropes binding Gonpachi, but then the guards rush in. Gonpachi struggles to defend himself, warding off the guards’ staves in such a way thatthey make a cross, an echo of the crucifix on which he is condemned to die.
In the second act we discover that all of this had been a terrifying dream. Gonpachi had fallen asleep in a palanquin, and now wakes to find himself in the Yoshiwara Pleasure Gardens. What an enormous relief! I had inhabited his remorse, felt the merciless weight of Tokugawa law, but now the gardens are so beautiful, so bright, so alive with flowers. It is the very opposite of the Western tradition where the hero dies in the last frame after merely dreaming of a happy life.
Now a letter from the geisha is delivered, in which she begs him to hurry to her side, and so off he goes—one more leaf drifting on the waters of the floating world. The program notes explain that his happiness is overlaid with a certain gloom, but I was left refreshed and delighted, wondering if the brothels of Yoshiwara could have really been so beautiful.
Charley denounced the experience as the worst four hours of his entire life, even worse than when he cut his heel on a broken bottle and received his stitches under inadequate anaesthetic. He, however, was the one who later brought up the subject of Yoshiwara. Was it still there? Could we see it?
I would have loved to visit the Yoshiwara of the Genroku era, which Howard Hibbett describes soeloquently in The Floating World in Japanese Fiction . Here, in a luxurious setting, merchants and sufficiently prosperous samurai enjoyed sparkling, vivacious company that could be found nowhere else in Japan. The chief pleasure quarters—the Shimabara in Kyoto, the Edo Yoshiwara, and the Osaka Shimmachi—were made up of large groups of buildings, some of them magnificent, which served as the fine restaurants, the exclusive clubs, the leading salons of the day. Not least were the great “teahouses,” as brothels were often called, where famous courtesans joined the candlelit banquets and parties given by men of fashion. One such house, the Sumiya, in the Shimabara, still stands and has been designated an Important Cultural Property. This establishment is not