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This chapter charts seventeenth-century Japan’s global relations and internal socioeconomic shifts, and analyzes in this context Ihara Saikaku’s “floating world” fiction as an expression of the Tokugawa merchant townsman class’s political subordination despite their economic advancement. This historical situation informs Saikaku’s ambiguous treatment of the force of materiality as a trigger of social chaos and an instrument of individual empowerment. Based on these themes, the chapter reads from Saikaku’s works, in particular his 1682 novel The Life of an Amorous Man (Kōshoku ichidai otoko), an ironic vision of national realities from the townsman perspective as well as fantasies about the outside world pitted against Tokugawa Japan’s domestic constraints. Saikaku is thus aligned with the literary horizontal continuities of the Age of Silver, and should be viewed as an Eastern pioneer of narrative modernity.

This chapter examines Ihara Saikaku's novel Five Women Who Loved Love, which was written for the amusement of the townspeople in the new commercial centers of seventeenth-century Japan. The few surviving records show that Saikaku was not only a popular novelist but also a poet of wide reputation in his own day, a playwright and commentator on theater life, and something of a vagabond who had closely observed life as it was lived in parts of the country other than his own. Being so cosmopolitan, he was all the more truly a citizen of Osaka. The things that fascinated him in his native city he also found in others—back alleys and slums as well as gay theaters and teahouses; beggars, peddlers, and the lowliest prostitutes, along with merchant princes and famous courtesans. But in writing about them as he did, with such a rare combination of sympathy and detachment, he gave expression to a feeling of which the inhabitants of Osaka were probably more conscious than other townspeople: that they were citizens with a new importance to society and a new outlook on the world, one that showed the way to a richer and happier life than medieval Japan had known. Five Women Who Loved Love is mostly about people enjoying the pleasures of already-earned wealth, but two of its heroes do have to figure out how to go about acquiring it, and we know from them something of what Saikaku thought was essential to the making of money: frugality, persistence, a ready mind for figures, mastery of the abacus, a pleasant manner, honesty, and imagination.

This chapter examines the state of Japanese crime literature prior to the emergence of detective fiction, from the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) to the early Meiji period (1868–1912). More specifically, it considers the continuities and differences between the preexisting native tradition of crime narrative and the newly imported genre. The two major forms of crime narrative in circulation before the detective story arrived in Japan were the courtroom narrative, such as Ihara Saikaku's Honchō-ōin hiji (Trials in the Shade of a Cherry Tree, 1689) and the criminal biography, an example of which is Kanagaki Robun's Tale of Takahashi Oden the She-Devil (Takahashi Oden yasha monogatari, 1879). This chapter discusses courtroom narratives in Japan during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as well as criminal biography in the early Meiji period. It also considers the genesis of Takahashi Oden yasha monogatari, with particular emphasis on its element of referentiality, incorporation of two actual legal documents, and its treatment of the themes of social identity and social mobility.