A Consideration of “<i>Ko wa ukiyo no hodashi</i>” (Children are the Fetters of This Floating World): The Child-Avoiding Theory in the Works of Saikaku

<p>Through an examination of the discourse on sexual love between man and woman, pregnancy, and childbirth, this paper explores the view of children in the early modern period and its social background. This paper analyzes the works of Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693), a representative of late seventeenthcentury Japan. Saikaku depicted many people who lived a life of sexual love between man and woman which differed from the ethics prevalent in society. In this context, the idea of avoiding children appears again and again.</p><p>Firstly, this paper explores the statement of an old nun, “ko wa ukiyo no hodashi” (children are the fetters of this floating world) in “Ukiyo eiga ichidaiotoko” (1693). These words simply state that children are obstacles to her, a woman who was forced to give up marriage and became a nun; in order to seek her own sexual pleasure, she abandoned her many children.</p><p>The protagonist of “Koshoku ichidaionna”(1686) also had many abortions, having no intention of raising children that resulted from her dalliances with various men. This attitude, however, were not limited to women in Saikaku’s writing. Yonosuke, the protagonist of “Koshoku ichidaiotoko” (1682), also had sexual relations with many women and men, but he never raised children or had a family. Taking into consideration that these works were bestsellers, it appears that Edo society was rather tolerant of abandoning and aborting children.</p><p>While it was a conventional ethic that women establish their place in the family system as a wife and mother by bearing children, the trend was to live a life of sexual love between men and women, reviling the constraints of such ethics. Discourses of avoiding the responsibility of children in such literature depicted women and men living their lives outside of this ethical convention.</p>