English translation of the prose
AI-assisted English translation of the prose; quoted poems remain in Japanese. The Japanese original remains authoritative.
Originally published:
This is material published on the Japanese website. Dates and notices describe circumstances at the time of its original publication.
The prose is translated into English. Quoted poems and song lyrics are retained in Japanese.
Three Meditations on the Torments of the Bedchamber
Seishu Hamano, Chairman of Japan Romanticism Academia
1. Is the Bedchamber an Arena of Political Struggle?
Human beings sleep. Animals and plants are much the same. Many living things seek to restore their strength through dormancy. Humans, however, are animals that spend their time in the 'bedchamber' in anguished reflection.
嘆きつつ ひとり寝る夜の明くる間は
いかに久しき ものとかは知る
右大将道綱母
The poet is, of course, the author of 『蜻蛉日記』. In the 拾遺集, the poem is placed among the love poems. In an age when visiting marriage was customary, a man came to a daughter's bedchamber and left her carrying his seed. The spread of this custom through aristocratic society was underpinned by the reality that bearing the child of a high-ranking official permitted to attend court could secure a woman for life. If the two loved one another, all was well, and her parents could rest easy. But if she conceived and the child was not properly acknowledged as a legitimate heir, an unspeakable life lay ahead. This woman safely gave birth to a son and splendidly advanced him to the position of Commander of the Right, proudly making that achievement her own designation.
Waiting for a man against the background of such a path to advancement seems calculating and unattractive. Yet the system under which an aristocratic house could not be sustained otherwise is itself cause for a sigh.
She laments a man's change of heart when he fails to arrive late at night, even after the promised hour. If the rumors are true and he has another lover whom he comforts before coming to her bedchamber, it makes her angry. Thus 『蜻蛉日記』 contains the passage in which, after waiting and waiting, she at last sees him arrive, only to refuse to open the gate, keeping him impatient for a while before finally letting him in. She is said to have welcomed him with a single chrysanthemum and a poem—but is that true?
A clever woman who devises this sort of strategy is not especially well liked. Knowing this and still doing it, she might be expected to drive the man she has kept waiting still farther away. But the account does not go that far.
In the end, she admitted him to her sleeping chamber and duly became pregnant. The 'bedchamber' can thus also be regarded as an arena of bewitching combat, entangled with politics and conducted with political rivals in view. The mood of love must wither away. Read Murasaki Shikibu's 『源氏物語』 in this light, and even half one's Romantic feeling seems likely to disappear.
2. The Bedchamber Is No Place of Rest
『よさこい節』 has the following passage:
ぼんさん
簪
買うを視た…
I remember laughing as a child: a monk has a shaved head, so why buy a pointed hairpin that he cannot stick into his hair? Of course, the song was not written for that sort of wordplay. It was fashioned in a commercial spirit to welcome visitors from the capital and the Kamigata region: come to Kochi in Tosa; at Harimaya Bridge a monk is buying a present for his sweetheart—what a stylish place!
Even outside Mount Koya, where women were forbidden, there were many Buddhist monks prohibited from relations with women who secretly visited pleasure quarters and kept mistresses, thinking nothing of breaking their vows. Hence:
夜もすがら もの思ふころは明けやらで
寝屋のひまさへ つれなかりけり
俊恵法師
As this poem, too, is placed in the love section of the 『千載集』, it can also mean that, even in his sleeping chamber, he recalls nights spent with women in the past and finds himself unable to sleep.
There is the story of the unfortunate child 石堂丸 at Mount Koya: the poignant reunion of a beloved child with his father, 刈萱, who entered the priesthood in repentance for the wrong he had done in taking a mistress in addition to his wife.
Does 俊恵, too, brood in anguish over the wrongdoing of his worldly days? If so, he would hardly have been able to sleep. In 刈萱's case, he was startled by silhouettes on a paper screen a room away. His wife and his mistress seemed to be chatting amicably, but their long black hair appeared to him as hundreds of snakes baring their fangs at each other.
Something similar happened in my own family, during and after the war. When my father suddenly brought to our main home in Osaka the child he had fathered with a Gion geisha, my mother said, 'The child who has been born is not to blame,' and admitted the adorable little girl with bobbed hair, 雪ちゃん, to the inner sitting room. But she absolutely refused to let the girl's mother, the geisha, enter the room. Knowing nothing of this, little 雪ちゃん and I played innocently with the gramophone, as I remember…
So when I heard the story of 石堂丸, I thought: that is me. I was still in elementary school, but I can still recall the complicated feelings I had then.
The monk whose name is written here as 恵恵法師 must likewise have found himself unable to sleep after entering the priesthood, as the sufferings of his many worldly years appeared one after another in the darkness of his bedchamber.
3. Wrongdoing and the Stillness of Night
Seen this way, the bedchamber begins to look less like a place of rest than a place in which one torments oneself. Better not to think. It is also a place where one rebukes, one after another, one's own unruliness, infidelity and lack of judgment. Yet this process will differ greatly from person to person. The person who is ashamed of their failures has a wholesome bedchamber. Someone bad by nature, however, may casually set aside their own shortcomings, take a self-affirming position, and turn over one scheme after another for asserting themselves, however unreasonable. To think that the bedchamber might be a place for devising ways to attain a higher position!
Yet only a thin line separates good people from bad. One night we cannot sleep for memories; another, for plans of self-justification. Their intermingling is surely the unvarnished condition of ordinary people.
Many, even from a young age, regard the bedchamber not as a place for blaming and tormenting themselves, but as a place to plot how to contain their political enemies.
People of that sort would never compose poems of self-examination. In the bedchamber, people reveal their true natures. That is why sexual impulses so like those of dogs and cats are also realized in action. Metaphysically and physically alike, the bedchamber is forever a place of wrongdoing and remorse.
April 10, Reiwa 6 (2024)
Seishu
Original wording, author credits, notes and source materials are preserved there.