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| Short Story Titles from This Scheming World |
I recently read a
book. I should have been working but someone once said great writers are
proficient readers. If I don’t make rent this month I blame the scoundrel who said that.
Now finished with the
book, I’m still not finished with my work but I’m going to write about the
book.
Thank you for reading. You are justifying my not working.
I Had No Idea Who
Saikaku Ihara Was. I Just Liked the Title.
Three words – This
Scheming World – describe perfectly the stories Ihara has to tell. Savvy marketing too, for a guy from the 17th Century. The connotations certainly compelled me to pick up the book. (Let's ignore the possible psychological machinations involved.)
Ihara has been called “the first spokesman for the Japanese
masses.” Murasaki Shikibu wrote the Tale of Genji, the
world’s oldest novel, in the late 10th Century. It was, in the words of Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata,
“the highest pinnacle of Japanese literature.” From then on down through Japan’s Warring
States Period, when the lords and samurai ruled the land, the printed word was limited
to the realm of the country’s nobility.
This changed at the beginning of the 17th Century, with the
onset of the relative peace of the Edo Era. No longer were the nobility lords
over all; not in the sense they were before, because the economy was becoming heavily
reliant on the merchant class. You wanted something, you had to buy it, no one
cared who your father once was. How this translated into a sudden wave of
interest in literature among the commoners I don’t know, but it did.
