Five Women Who Loved Love: Amorous Tales from 17th-Century Japan

(Paperback)

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First published in 1686, Five Women Who Loved Love was an immediate bestseller in the bawdy, life-loving world that was Genroku Japan. And the novel's popularity has, if anything, increased with the years, making it today a classic like Boccaccio's Decameron or the writings of Rabelais.

The book follows five determined women in their always amorous and usually illicit adventures. The five heroines are Onatsu, already wise in the ways of love by the age of sixteen; Osen, a faithful wife until unjustly accused of adultery; Osan, a Kyoto beauty who falls asleep in the wrong bed; Oshichi, willing to burn down a city to meet her samurai lover; and Oman, who has to compete with handsome boys to win her lover's affections.

But the book is more than a collection of skillfully told erotic tales, for, as the translator points out in the introduction, "Saikaku ... could not delve into the inmost secrets of human life only to expose them to ridicule or snickering prurience. Obviously fascinated by the variety and complexity of human love, but retaining always a sense of its intrinsic dignity ... he is both a discriminating and compassionate judge of his fellow men." Saikaku's style, as allusive as it is witty, as abbreviated as it is penetrating, is a challenge that few translators have dared face, and certainly never before with the success here achieved in a translation that recaptures the heady flavor of the original.

Reviews

"Five charming novellas which have astonishing freshness, color, and warmth." --The New Yorker

Author Bio

Ihara Saikaku (1641-1693) has been called "the greatest popular Japanese novelist of the 17th century." Also a poet, Saikaku founded the ukiyo-zoshi (books of the floating world) genre, which flourished between the 1680s and the 1770s.

Wm. Theodore de Bary (born August 9, 1919), is an American sinologist and East Asian literature scholar who has edited numerous books relating to primarily Japanese and Chinese literature, history and culture. He is recognized as essentially creating the field of Neo-Confucian studies.