The latter half of Saikaku’s collection focuses on relationships with men and young kabuki actors, but it’s the samurai tales that interest me, one in particular, called “Implicated By His Diamond Crest.” The love story starts with Shimamura Daiemon, a 27-year-old samurai, renowned weaponist and engineer a masterless samurai devoted to his family.ĭaiemon attends a firefly viewing party near the outskirts of town near a statue of Buddha said to be carved by Kkai (posthumously known as Kb-Daishi), the founder of Japanese Buddhism - rumoured to be the man who brought homosexuality to Japan - where he anonymously foils an intrigue, saving the reputation of a young samurai named Haruta Tannosuke.Īs it turns out, the man attempting to implicate Tannosuke in the poisoning plot (foiled by Daiemon) is a spurned admirer - the evidence given to Tannosuke anonymously by Daiemon allows him to identify the schemer, but the younger samurai lies to save his spurned lover from punishment.
By this point in Japan’s history, monastic and samurai traditions of age-based hierarchal relationships legitimized homosexuality, so a culturally legitimized “cult of sexual connoisseurship” developed around adolescent boys without any stigma. To these chnin, “townsmen,” the assumption was that romantic and sexual love was to be found outside of the institution of marriage. This was at the height of the Tokugawa period when merchant classes, while still considered lower social status than farmers, were enjoying greater wealth that gave them access to prostitutes, urban pleasure quarters, art and popular fiction - the four were often interlinked.