Japanese Literature on Roxana-Mălina Chirilă

Three nights of sex, one morning of rice cakes: Marriage in old Japan

Sun, 04 Aug 2013 11:56:54 +0000

Marriage in the Christian world is a pretty clear thing: you go to a priest and there’s a ceremony. Ritual things are said and done – and at the end, you’re married. The secular marriage us Westerners have is pretty much the same: you go to someone, declare your intent and then, through the power invested in the ritual by tradition and common convention, you’re married.

In old Japan, things were… different?… Very different. Hugely different. So different that if old Japan rules were applied today, you’d probably be polygamous by now.

Okay, to clear things up, when I say ‘old Japan’, I mean, oh, 9th century to 12th century – Heian Japan, when Japanese literature became interesting and prose started flowing forward like a river of inky goodness; when women were admitted to court and became poets and writers, when society was elegant and beauty in art was of the utmost concern.

And from this period of beauty and elegance comes a novel, The Tale of Genji, where the handsome, astonishing prince has affairs with beautiful, refined women who adore him (more or less). The story eventually grows into strangeness, but one thing that got me confused from the moment I first started reading it was marriage.

Although Genji is declared married at one point, he never lives with his wife. There’s no ceremony that you can notice. He kidnaps a girl and grows her into the perfect wife, but does he ever marry her?… Who knows. At one point he builds a huge palace for his ladies – but are they wives? Concubines? Tolerated illicit affairs? Friends with benefits?…

Turns out that, erm. Well, erm… „Erm” is the best way to describe it.

The wedding ‘ritual’

Heian Japan didn’t have a public wedding ceremony. It didn’t have a particular ritual with a priest or monk (Buddhist or otherwise). It didn’t have much at all. There was a courtship consisting of exchanging poetry and messages, or maybe the parents arranged for the marriage – the couple didn’t see each other in either case (the woman had to remain hidden; accidents did happen, but that was the principle).

After months or years, or however long, the ‘marriage’ would happen. The man visited the woman at night and left at dawn. He returned the following night and again left at dawn. On the third night, he’d stay until daylight, when he’d be ‘discovered’ by the bride’s parents. Then the couple would be offered breakfast – third day rice cakes. (source)

That’s pretty much it. Three nights of sex (at least theoretically), one morning of rice cakes. The only reason I myself am not married by Heian standards is that there’s never any rice cakes to be found for breakfast.

So, did they announce it to the world?… Well, if this happened with the aristocracy in the capital, they didn’t need to. The nobleman had a retinue, he traveled in ox-driven carts, it was a small city and gossip traveled with the speed gossip usually travels. People would know. (same source)

Living arrangements

The couple wouldn’t live together – initially there would be a long time when they’d both be living with their families and the man would visit at night. If the time came for them to live together, the man would move in with the woman. Sometimes the parents of the girl would leave to live in a new home, or they would provide the couple with a new house – in either case, it was the woman who owned the property and it was she, with the help of her parents, who raised the children.

Her parents also helped her husband in his career – so a man would usually want to marry a woman of high rank, for the political help her family could provide him. The children would belong to the wife’s family, but they were part of their father’s clan, interestingly enough. Towards the end of the Heian period (the end of the 12th century), women started to move in with men instead and things became more patriarchal. (source)

Polygamy (polygyny, really) and divorce

Theoretically, a woman was only allowed one husband, but a man was allowed multiple wives. One would end up as the ‘first wife’ – traditionally, the first he married, although some exceptions existed. Other wives had a lower rank in the household and their children received less support at court.

Divorce was a piece of cake – this time not literal. The couple just stopped seeing each other, if they lived in different locations. If they lived together, the man would leave – in very rare cases, it was the woman who left. No rituals, no forms, no signing anywhere. Pretty easy.

Divorce (or death) also made it possible for lower-ranking wives to replace the ‘first wife’ from the point of view of position and importance (same source).

All in all…

Kind of a thorny issue for women (especially if you add to the above that they were supposed to never manifest clear erotic interest in men). They could be married against their will – technically, so could boys, but only when they were young enough. They could have property, but not hold jobs, so the death of their parents and/or husband could lead to inability to cover the expenses – and therefore poverty.

A thorny issue for men, too – they needed to marry into good families, to make sure that they remained in good standing with their parents-in-law for political and economic support. And they needed to make certain that they treated their high ranking wives with the respect due to their and their parents’ positions.

Plus, everybody had to be elegant, to play an instrument, compose poetry and understand art to strike a good match. And even if I love the arts…

A list of classy WTF books

Thu, 01 Aug 2013 08:01:23 +0000

Do you know those books which you can supposedly brag about reading? You know, like „Pride and Prejudice”, „The Satanic Verses” or „The Iliad”? Of course you do. You run into them a lot – and there’s others which are less known, but just as impressive to mention.

Except some of them are weird. Or very weird. Or, well, fucked up – despite being classics, critically acclaimed and other such. And despite their authors not thinking they were that twisted. Here’s a few:

The Tale of Genji.

This wonderful, beautiful novel was written sometime in the 11th century and it’s the world’s first novel. Or the first modern novel. Or the first psychological novel. All of those have been said at one point – it’s considered a masterpiece and the only real reason you’ve probably never heard of it is that it’s Japanese. Our Western world grew up without it.

It’s a splendid book, full of poetry and romance. Genji is a Japanese prince, so beautiful women fall in love with him at first sight, so handsome he makes men wish he were a woman so he could be their wife. And he has these wonderful affairs, yes?…

Well. For a few chapters. Then he falls in love with one of his father’s concubines, a woman who looks exactly like his dead mother. He can’t have her for his own because he can’t exactly snatch her away from the emperor, but he has an affair with her anyway. And, later on, he pretty much kidnaps a ten year-old from her family because she looks precisely like his father’s concubine (and his mother) – and raises the little girl to be the perfect wife.

If that doesn’t set your teeth on edge, then you should also know that pretty much everybody a character is likely to sleep with in this novel will be a blood relation. Because interbreeding yay!

House of Sleeping Beauties

Yasunari Kawabata won a Nobel Prize for literature. If that doesn’t make him a classy author, I don’t know what will.

Most of his novels have a haunting beauty, a delightful meditative atmosphere, a contemplative mood that will stick with you for quite some time. House of Sleeping Beauties is no exception.

…but then there’s the fact that the sleeping beauties are drugged prostitutes. The protagonist finds out about this brothel where old, impotent men go to spend the night with girls who’ve been fed sleeping pills so they wouldn’t wake up no matter what happened. And he spends quite some time thinking he’s still potent – what if he were to actually sleep with one of the girls?

The Japanese. They have way too many examples of creepy as hell fiction.

The Last Temptation (of Christ)

If you’ve only heard of one modern Greek author, Nikos Kazantzakis is probably it. He’s one of those VIPs of world literature whose novels got translated in all sorts of languages and then transformed into movies.

The Last Temptation of Christ is about a Jesus who is struggling with the destiny God threw on his shoulders. He spent his life as a carpenter making crosses for would-be Messiahs to be crucified on and he really, really doesn’t want to be the Chosen anything. Eventually, though, he ends up in charge of a bunch of misfits (the apostles), with Judas, who wants a real revolution and a liberation from Romans at his side.

It’s actually all weird, as if Kazantzakis was dreaming this in a drug-induced stupor, but the oddest part is where Jesus has this strong vivid dream/temptation where his „guardian angel” tells him he did well and he’s released from the cross. He goes away free, marries Mary Magdalen, and she dies. So then he goes off and marries both Martha and Mary, sisters of Lazarus and has lots of children with them.

The entire novel reads like an odd fever dream. I’m certain that’s not exactly the impression Kazantzakis would have liked to leave behind.

Women in Love

D.H. Lawrence. You’ve probably heard of him because of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. This is more of the same scandalous sex stuff. Except less explicit.

Ursula and Gudrun are sisters. Ursula is a teacher, Gudrun is some sort of artist. They become involved with Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich and some very psychological stuff ensues, complete with philosophical discussions of politics and society. Which is probably what makes this book one of those ‘classics’ that you study in university (I know I did).

But aside from the crazy names which add their own special ‘huh?’ to the book, the title too is an oddity. It’s a misnomer, but I’m not sure it’s an intentional one. Considering D.H. Lawrence’s other books, I think the author doesn’t know what love is if it strips down to its underwear and paints the letters ‘L’,‘O’,‘V’ and ‘E’ on its naked body. If the book was called ‘Women in Relationships They’re Very Ambiguous About’, it would’ve been more to the point (but admittedly less catchy).

The book provides examples of what I’ve come to describe as ‘D.H. Lawrence sex’. It involves the couple being attracted, going to bed – and then suddenly one of them (usually the woman) has this revelation that she’s actually repulsed by the guy she’s sleeping with. It’s sort of the ‘oh my god, who and what did I do last night?!’, but experienced a lot faster than simply the morning after. Or the hour after. Or the minute after. Or just after – it’s during.

Between some instincts for violence and more dislike than love in the major couples, the only real relationship based on actual love and attraction in the book is between Gerald and Rupert. There’s a moment when the sexual attraction between them is palpable and much, much more real than what either of the two experience with the women. I’m not sure it’s what Lawrence intended, but the psychological ride you take in Women in Love is going to keep you going, ‘what the fuck?’ over and over.

Jude the Obscure

My literature professor called Thomas Hardy mid-evil (pun on medieval, of course), which was very witty and informative of her.

If you’ve read a single Thomas Hardy novel, it was probably Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which is pretty WTF itself. But Jude the Obscure beats it hands-down on the WTF scale. It’s sort of a small village boy-meets-girl novel, in which Jude is a young man aspiring to go to university and Sue is his beautiful, perfect cousin. It’s kind of a worrisome plot in the first place, but things go a lot worse when you get the hand of destiny practically making itself felt at every step of the book, and when you have a creepy as hell kid popping up in the novel for no other reason than to make you think Frankenstein was a perfectly decent and socially acceptable sort of fellow.

Combine the creepy magical-superstitious-fated part of the book with the supposed realism and by the end you’ll be wondering what the hell you’ve read.