One of the great fiction writers of Japan, Ihara Saikaku (1623-93) wrote of the lowest class in the Tokugawa world--the townsmen who were rising in wealth and power but not in official status. The title story in this collection of 12 works, told by an again beauty whose highly erotic nature is her c[...]
The first complete translation of Nanshoku okagami by Ihara Saikaku (1642-93), this is a collection of 40 stories describing homosexual love affairs between samurai men and boys and between young kabuki actors and their middle-class patrons. Seventeenth-century Kyoto was the center of a flourishing [...]