![]() His titles say it all: Life of a Sex-Mad Man (Kōshoku ichidai otoko 好色一代男, 1682), Life of a Sex-Mad Woman (Kōshoku ichidai onna 公職一代女, 1686), Five Sex-Mad Women (Kōshoku gonin onna 公職五人女, 1686), and Great Mirror of Sex between Men (Nanshoku ōkagami 男色大鏡, 1687). Saikaku talked of “floating worlds” ( ukiyo), places of pleasant and carefree existence, indeed, of irresponsibility and profligacy. Saikaku captured an age of peace, after Japan's long civil war, which then flowered in the rich and free-spending Genroku period (1688–1704). He dominated the field, we are generally told, with a series of best-selling titles that gripped readers across the Japanese archipelago's major cities and went through multiple print runs, and still do so. The name we all know is Ihara Saikaku (1642–93). Many people work on Japanese popular fiction of the seventeenth century, and even more engage with it as enthusiastic readers. ![]()
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