The idea of bishōnen (beautiful boy) as object of erotic desire has been present since at least the beginnings of the Japanese language. The poetic anthology Kokinshū (c. 905), which some consider the first authentically Japanese-language literary work, the war tale Heike monogatari (c. 13 century), chigo (acolyte) scrolls, and many other works from early and medieval history had become by the Edo period (1603-1868) objects of fascination and emulation among commoners as well as samurai.
By the second half of the seventeenth century, Japanese popular culture was beginning to assert owners, creators, and genres centered around the idea of ukiyo (floating world). Its first peak came in the Genroku era (1688-1704) with the production of works, today considered cultural treasures, by masters such as Ihara Saikaku (1643-93), Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725), Matsuo Bashō (1644-94), and Hishikawa Moronobu (c.1618-94).
All four dealt with bishōnen themes, as did much of the ukiyo. Two works, one a haikai, the other a painting, counterpoised bishōnen and women in a remarkably compact way. The haikai is by Bashō; the painting by Moronobu. (Fig. 1)
Fig. 1 Hishikawa Moronobu, “Scenes in a Theatre Tea-house”
Bashō’s verse reads: Ume yanagi sazo wakashu kana onna kana, or, “plum willow indeed wakashu is it? woman is it?”. (Basho Haiku U: HS-152) Moronobu showed the inside of a kabuki theater teahouse, whose furnishings include a pair of paintings of what look to be a plum and a willow.
Before and during the Edo period, plum and willow referents abounded in art and literature. They could refer to seasons and to other things but they very often referred to males and women. Timon Screech wrote that a traveler by water to the Yoshiwara courtesan district “boarded his boat…at the Willow Bridge near the center of Edo and ended it at the Looking-back (Mikaeri) Willow at the Yoshiwara entrance.” So too at Shimabara in Kyoto, where “a large old willow graced the entrance and linked the site to the feminine” (Screech 1999:134) Of an Edo-period screen of the Uji Bridge (first erected in 646), “[w]eeping willows were metaphors for the tangle of tragic loves”. (Screech 2000:247)
Plums could be a symbol of male sexuality, sometimes but not always of young males, as they were in shunga (erotic art). (Screech 1999:148-9) Yushima hill’s Shintō shrine in Edo was known then and today for its plum trees. It was once the site of boy brothels, some of whose prostitutes had hung offertory flags at the shrine advertising themselves. (Screech 2002:233) The star onnagata (a male acting a female role in kabuki) Muzuki Tatsunosuke I (1673-1745) was compared to “a plum blossom in the snow” (Mezur 2005:87) for his male sensual appeal. Donald Jenkins glosses the kyōka (“mad” poem) at the top of an early nineteenth-century hanging scroll showing a wakashu walking with a young boy carrying flowering plum branches: “The flowers of the Yoshiwara / Are not the only ones worth loving; / The blossoms of the young plum [i.e., the young man] / Are attractive too.” (1988:255) A Moronobu parody of the style of an official government painter, Kanō Tan’yū (1602-74), depicts Ki no Tsurayuki (who supervised compilation of the Kokinshū) comparing the beauty of a young man to the plum blossoms in front of which the two are sitting. (Mostow 1996:111)
According to Paul Schalow, a wakashu in Saikaku’s day could range from eleven or twelve to eighteen or nineteen years of age, distinguishable by his forelocks. (1990:28-9) The city of Edo had ample opportunity for males to cruise one another. Notable were the theater districts of Sakai-chō and Kobiki-chō. Fukiya-chō gained a reputation for its brothels, which Saikaku noted: “In the morning, at the theatre / We’ll go crazy over boys. / Even the Winds of sex go / Exactly as you want them — / The Fukiya district.” (Screech 1999:172)
There were four major kabuki theaters in Edo at the time of Moronobu’s painting. “Crowding in against them from either side were rows of lantern-festooned teahouses” (Jenkins 1993:19) at which wealthier fans (male or female) could pick up tickets, change from street clothes to more elaborate dress, and, in between acts and after the performance, hold parties for actors (male-only by shogunate diktat) in relative privacy, away from the main hall.
A plum-and-willow teahouse?
Moronobu’s teahouse was furnished with scroll paintings, lacquered furniture, and a door decorated with a country scene. It offered music, food, drink, massages and a screened-off area with an ample bed. His handscroll tells a story, too, though one that’s not known to us given that it was cut from a longer scroll. Officials gifted expensive pieces of art as assertions of status and would sometimes cut out parts from a handscroll or painted screen, practices imitated by commoners.
E-maki (pictorial handscrolls) could be objects of great value, especially from a master. Moronobu may be better known today for woodblock prints, which could be printed in large number and were cheap enough to be disposed of after an owner had tired of them. Not so paintings, even for artists who worked in the zoku (vulgar) demimonde of kabuki, depending on their reputation and talent. In about 1810, Santō Kyōden (1716-1816) wrote to a friend that his Moronobu scroll was “worth a lot”. (Screech 2007:38)
Moronobu’s teahouse painting shows groupings of people. Most are wakashu or their clients; some are onnagata. In the center right, a blind masseur massages the shoulders of a client who is attended by an actor serving a drink; another plays the shamisen. The masseur is leaning forward and listening, the server may be looking to his right, the shamisen player is looking over them while the client ignores the focus of their interest. In the foreground, an actor on the left is pointing back to bed area, whispering in a customer’s ear. The man is looking that way; the other actor in this group is observing the first two. In the upper left an actor entertains a man on a bed furnished with quilts and a net. The youth appears annoyed at the goings-on.
Our eyes follow these groupings to the fusuma (sliding screen), where a plainly-dressed man, possibly a doctor but clearly an interloper among these expensively-dressed people, is speaking to a youth while clutching his wrist. They are the center of attention. Is he importuning the actor? Trying to get him to go somewhere else? Giving him bad news about someone he knows? The actor looks like he’s resisting; he has his other hand to his mouth and his body half-hidden behind the screen. To their right is the owner or manager, possibly concerned at his guests’ displeasure at their costly fun being interrupted. Some e-maki have text but there is none in this surviving part of the scroll. We don’t know whether this tea house is fictional, in what city it may have been, who the people shown were, what the performances that day were, and how the tête-à-tête at the fusuma ends.
A pair of paintings at the back of the e-maki (in the alcove near the top, right of center) caught my eye: they appear to be a willow branch and a plum. (Fig. 2) Had Moronobu heard or read Bashō’s haikai? As far as I can tell, no one in the West has yet speculated as to a connection between ume-yanagi in these two works.
Fig. 2 Detail of “Scenes in a Theatre Tea-house”
Their adult lives were nearly contemporaneous. Moronobu moved to Edo in about 1657. By the time of the painting in 1685 Bashō was recognized as a haikai master, having judged contests. His work may have been more accessible than the painting given the large number of book stores and book lenders in Edo then. Richard Rubinger cites a claim of more than 200 publishers in seventeenth century Edo. (2007:83) A book could be borrowed for five days for no more then, by the end of the Edo period, half the cost of a bowl of noodle soup. (Hirano 2007:120) Beginning by the mid-eighteenth century, the Edo bookseller-publisher Suwaraya Ichibei “provided his store…as a space for the most innovative cultural articulators to commingle, chat, play, and work together.” (Hirano 2007: 118) Individuals organized salons for poetry and other artistic pursuits in hired rooms as well as in private homes, “egalitarian spaces where class, by convention, did not matter.” (Gerstle 2011:142)
Moronobu would have had opportunity to have known about Bashō’s work and possibly to have met him. But given the popularity of ume and yanagi in culture, Moronobu could have come up with the pairing on his own. And plum referents were often to its flowers, not the fruit itself.
Everywhere invoked, nowhere present
According to Katherine Mezur, from kabuki’s beginnings (about eighty-two years before the teahouse painting) throughout the Edo period, onnagata were not performing imitations of real-life women. Of a Saikaku story about Matsushima Han’ya, who was a real onnagata, Earl Jackson observed that “[w]omen are everywhere invoked, yet nowhere present.” (1989:466) Mezur argues that onnagata constructed a female-likeness based, in part, on an adolescent boy’s body: “bishōnen no bi (beauty of male youth)—the aesthetics of the beautiful boy—shaped onnagata gender acts and role types.” (2005:2)
The eroticism of male adolescence underlay their performance. Onnagata style was formed from wakashu kabuki (c. 1600-1652), in which boys on stage would entice audience members to hire them. Kabuki had changed by the time of Moronobu to where the onnagata he shows in his tea-house painting would have acted in plotted works, creating their own kata (stylized forms) or following those of onnagata stars. Mezur reasons that this process of evolution and onnagata performativity disrupted “the hegemony of binary and oppositional gender roles…. [O]nnagata performance cannot be identified with any one gender. Instead, onnagata perform multiple, ambiguous, and transformative genders.” (2005:15)
Bashō’s haikai could be read today as reductive, affirming to the reader or listener a nominally binary choice. Yet even here, as he moves from referents to the real, from the classical to the profane, from the rich cultural image of ume to an individual wakashu, Bashō introduces a grain of doubt. He privileges ume, starting his poem with it, but immediately after “wakashu”, as well as after “onna”, he has “kana”, for which I used “is it?” but could also be “I wonder; should I?; I hope that”. So the nominal choice and action toward it could be uncertain or deferred. Possibly it could be no choice at all.
By juxtaposing ume yanagi, Bashō sets them as coterminous, that is, as sharing a border. Borders are dangerous, not just to the people who try to cross them, but to meaning. To paraphrase Gloria Anzaldúa, they are where one thing “grates against [another] and bleeds.” (1987:25) Among and within nation-states they can be chaotic and violent as people contest them, as they did the shogunate’s barriers along its highways, sometimes trying to sneak past them without authorization (Nenzi 2006:107), for which the penalty could be death. (Screech 2000:257)
From a metaphysical standpoint, borders are self-destabilizing. Max Statkiewicz writes that borders threaten “to spill over and confuse” genres and categories: “A margin is by definition, paradoxically, indefinite. It marks and blurs the difference between the main corpus…and its outside by dissolving the border (margo) of separation.” As the foundation of a system of strict oppositions, borders occupy an “uncanny, unheimlich position, at once central and marginal (errant).” (2009:133) Onnagata destabilize the fiction of a binary gender system. “Like border figures, or outlaws…their bodies enact their own culture, which is male embodied but not identified.” (Mezur 2005:251)
Much of gesaku (the playful parodic writing of the ukiyo) counterpoises bishōnen and women as objects of desire. But this comparison is not necessarily of one or the other. It could be both, none, or something else. Ideas of what constituted “woman” and “boy” were not altogether fixed, something in keeping with the idea of life as floating, without set boundaries, where categories could shift. Ukiyo works are remarkable in that not only was this concept of ambiguity widespread, but that it could be expressed so compactly for readers or viewers to recognize as describing their world.
Works cited
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Gerstle, Andrew. “Creating Celebrity: Poetry in Osaka Actor Surimono and Prints” in Keller Kimbrough and Satoko Shimazaki, eds., 137-61. Publishing the Stage: Print and Performance in Early Modern Japan. Boulder, CO: Center for Asian Studies, U of Colorado Boulder, 2011.
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