Page 41 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

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Melon-shaped dish with
melon design, 1691/1749,
Utsutsugawa stoneware,
7
14.9 (5 /s) long,
The Kyushu Ceramic
Museum, Saga

Spring and Autumn Annals, about the appearance of a unicorn signaling the coming of a sage (a puzzle
for generations and generations of commentators), renders its meaning through a play of words: one
beggar wonders, in mock surprise, whether this mysterious unicorn (feirin) means that Confucius had
the clap (rinbyô). At a recent conference where Kyóden's piece was discussed, scholars of Confucianism
from China, Korea, and Vietnam insisted that they had never come across such a burlesque assault on
the Master in their own literary traditions, where such satire would have been, if not unthinkable, cer-
64
tainly unprintable. To the list of developments in "early modern" Japan that seem to have parallels
in the West, one should perhaps add burlesque as a literary genre, which also peaked in Europe about
the turn of the nineteenth century.
It would be a mistake to associate the burlesque genre with a lack of culture, because it is not
the absence of cultural seriousness but merely its clever negation through exaggeration and distortion
of form. There were poetic circles in Edo where people from all walks of life mingled as long as they
were "well-versed," literary clubs that were themselves symbolic negations of the eveiyday world. At