tant work of the new era was a novel by Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693) called “The Man Who Spent His Life at Love-Making.” It is obvious that in writing this novel Saikaku looked back to “The Tale of Genji” for guidance, although two novels basically more different can hardly be imagined. The world that Saikaku described in this novel and most of his subsequent ones was that of the merchant class in the cities. Heian literature had dealt mainly with the aristocracy. With the Kamakura Period the warrior class came to figure prominently in literature, but in the new literature of the Tokugawa Period it was the merchant who was the most important. It was for him also that the novels and plays of the time were written, and it was the merchant class which supplied many of the leading writers. Saikaku’s “Eternal Storehouse of Japan” is, in his own words, a “millionaire’s gospel,” a collection of anecdotes intended to help a man to make a fortune or prevent him from losing one. Saikaku was not, however, a dreary moralizer—his works are filled with a lively humor which sometimes borders on the indecent, and with a vigor that comes as a welcome relief after centuries of resigned melancholy.
Not all of the Tokugawa writers threw off the gloom of medieval Japan as readily as Saikaku did. The greatest of the poets of the age, Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694), was drawn in particular to Saigyō and the world of “Three Poets at Minase.” But there is a great difference between Bashō’s loneliness and that of the medieval poets. Bashō sought out loneliness in the midst of a very active life. There was no question of his taking refuge except from the attentions of his overly devoted pupils. The sorrows he experienced were those which any sensitive man might know, not those of a black-robed monk who sees the capital ravaged by plague or the depredations of a law less soldiery. There is much humor in Bashō, and indeed in his last period he advocated “lightness” as the chief desideratum of the seven teen-syllabled haiku. He is the most popular of all Japanese poets and one of the chief men of Japanese literature.
The third of the great literary figures of the early Tokugawa Period was Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725). Chikamatsu wrote most of his plays for the puppet stage, and the care he devoted to making his plays successful in this medium has sometimes, we may feel,
