Session 25—Th, Nov 17: Genroku period’s Yoshiwara district, iki (chic, stylishness), giri-ninjō and shinjū

Topics

❖ Genroku period (late 17th c. – early 18th c.) & “Ukiyo” (the floating world, 浮世) and Yoshiwara (a district in Tokyo, 吉原) as common setting for Genroku literature
❖ Aesthetic term: iki (粋, chic)
❖ Conceptual frameworks: shinjū (心中, merged hearts, lovers’ joint suicides, suicides in pairs or more, double suicide)

Thoughts—read before class, revisit for tests

Giri-ninjō is a set of terms that is sometimes taught incorrectly, and beware the web on this one. I will try to show the element of shame involved, and please avoid the tempting ego-id Freudian model. Shinjū is not that difficult a concept, but I would like to connect it with earlier ideas of musubu (bonding), trust, and personal boundaries..

Required—to be completed for today's session

✓ Iki (bSpace, PPT)

✓　For those of you interested, take a look at the article on modern double suicides called Shinju psychology. (bSpace, PDF)

Multimedia notes

❖ The film segments I screened were from Yoshiwara Enjō (吉原炎上, 1987 aka Tokyo Bordello). Many students would prefer that I use Sakuran (2006) but I think the sensibility of that movie is too modern and not helpful for the purposes of this class.

Links

⇢ None, except the article listed below.

Other

Terms and such mentioned this day that are not otherwise in an obvious place on the web site, the powerpoints, the assigned reading, etc. (to help with capturing items mentioned, perhaps quickly, in class, not for test purposes)

Read from Fujimoto Kizan's (藤本気算) Shikidō Ōkagami ("Great Mirror of the Way of Love" 色道大鏡, 1678) as translated in "She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not. Shinjū and Shikidō Ōkagami" by Lawrence Rogers (Monumenta Nipponica, Spring 1994), stable URL–http://www.jstor.org/stable/2385503.