Love hurts, more so if your lover’s a prostitute.
Did true love really exist in the pleasure quarters of Edo Period Japan?
These working ladies had many ways to express
love to their clients, most of them false.
These were called shinjū 心中, which initially meant “proof of love.”
A prostitute could give small pieces of herself
to her client in the form of a cute little vow,
some hair, her fingernail, or even more drastic things.
Clients even bought memento boxes to store these love items.
You can’t buy love, but you can rent it.
As time went on in the Edo Period [1603 - 1868],
men realized that they had been eating a fancy
sushi roll filled with imitation crab.
These items were not proof of love, only proof of her business skills.
Her hair and fingernails were often fake.
These love items became commonplace, and the
problem with common things is that they’re not rare.
Eventually the word shinjū came to mean only one thing,
the ultimate proof of love, something you couldn’t fake:
suicide.
Yes, even in the seedy underbelly, the gritty groin,
of the pleasure districts, love did exist.
Finding true love between a prostitute and
her client in the pleasure quarters was like
finding a surprisingly lovely cherry blossom tree
in the middle of a saltwater swamp.
You know it’s destined to die.
Once in a while, a couple would even kill themselves,
and the Japanese public would applaud.
Why did they clap?
And why did couples off themselves?
And most importantly, why haven’t you clicked the like button yet?
Don’t be like those couples, leaving things unfinished before you go.
It all started with a play called Sonezaki Shinjū.
Let’s see the play in cute form,
then we can talk about how it sparked a cultural phenomenomon embracing death.
A man named Tokubei has a problem.
He works at his uncle’s soy sauce shop.
That wasn't his problem, his problem was...
His uncle’s wife has a niece, and he asks Tokubei to marry this girl.
Tokubei refuses because he’s already seeing someone.
What he doesn’t know is that his life is about to go downhill.
The uncle is persistent, and makes the offer
to Tokubei’s stepmother, and she accepts immediately
because she wants what is best for her son,
and what’s best for her son is for her to
collect the dowry from the marriage for herself.
When Tokubei hears of this, he tells his uncle to forget it uncle.
Uncle Soy Sauce argues back by firing him,
demanding he pay back the dowry money,
and exiling him from the city.
It’s a compelling argument.
Tokubei snatches back the money from his stepmother
and is on the way to his uncle’s when he sees a friend,
who’s all, “Oh no I need a loan or I’ll go bankrupt.”
Feeling bad, Tokubei gives his friend the money,
but not before making the guy promise
to pay it back in the next few days.
The friend says, “Absolutely, I promise to return it
and not deny publicly that you ever gave it to me.”
Tokubei is satisfied.
The friend even writes him an IOU.
Few days later, Tokubei meets with his lover Ohatsu,
a lady of pleasure
and tells her about his troubles and they lament over his exile.
They happen to spot Tokubei’s friend walking with his buddies.
Tokubei comes up and says, “Hey pal, how about that loan I gave you?”
The friend says friendily, “What loan?
Are you accusing me of not paying back a loan?”
Tokubei is flustered.
He pulls a Ned Stark and takes out the IOU,
but the friend just accuses him of forging it
in front of the people on the street
and gets his buddies to beat him up.
During the fight, servants take Ohatsu away.
Bruised and shamed, Tokubei later visits Ohatsu at her brothel.
While they’re talking, the friend arrives too, wanting Ohatsu to entertain him.
She hides Tokubei under her clothes and sits there
listening to the friend mouth off to everyone
about how Tokubei was trying to steal his money.
Tokubei simmers in secret.
Ohatsu defends her lover, but while talking, she stretches her leg to him.
It is an offer of shinjū, an offer to die with him to wipe away the disgrace.
He takes her foot and moves it across his throat, accepting her offer,
an erotic act of love and death.
That night, Ohatsu and Tokubei sneak out,
cross a bridge into the woods of the Sonezaki Shrine, embrace,
and kill themselves with a knife.
The play was a hit.
It wasn’t the first, but it kicked off a whole era of shinjū plays.
It was similar to Romeo and Juliet,
but with two adults being unreasonable,
though Romeo and Juliet was technically not a shinjū play, those posers.
It only counts if both lovers plan to die together.
They just had a timing issue.
The guy who wrote Sonezaki Shinjū was a famous playwright
named Chikamatsu Monzaemon,
who was like a Shakespeare in his time.
One day he heard the news that a courtesan and her client
were found totally shinjū’d in the woods next to Sonezaki Shrine.
He thought it was so terribly sad, people would love it.
Shinjū plays were around before, but this one made it famous.
Afterwards, Chikamatsu and others were spitting out plays
like they thought it was 2023 and
AIs were about to make them obsolete in a year.
Many were based on actual events.
A new genre was born, and it was not mabiki’d.
The public started to see shinjū differently.
It used to be a last resort for couples who had hit rock bottom,
something to pity.
But these stories romanticized it into this tragic but empowering act
that allowed a couple to take their future into their own hands,
and kill themselves with those hands.
Now why was it a bad idea for a courtesan and a client to fall in love?
Unless the client was at a place in his life
where he could s--t gold coins and pee champagne,
he wouldn’t have been able to buy out her contract.
He could only rent out her time,
making him poorer by the minute
and even less able to buy her freedom.
Love don’t cost a thing, but courtesans do, and they ain’t cheap.
Clients often had wives and kids,
who were stuck with a man of the house who was too busy going out
to buy milk every night to spend time with them.
Fathers might disinherit sons who abandoned their family responsibilities.
A man might even borrow from friends and families,
then lose them when he couldn’t repay the money.
And when he ran out of enough cash to regularly
meet his courtesan lover, he’d be depressed and humiliated,
and might even want to take his own life.
It wasn’t much better for the courtesan.
Love was a ticking pair of testicles ready to explode at any time,
causing devastation for her, but more importantly,
for her brothel.
If there was even a hint that she had a single butterfly in her stomach,
she was in for a scolding, a beating, or even torture.
The only love brothel owners wanted in their establishments
was the temporary kind.
They couldn’t have their employees refusing to see other men,
either because they no longer wanted to or because of pressure from their lovers.
Everyone was against these couples.
Some became outcasts.
A few chose shinjū to fight against the society that wronged them.
You might be confused about how shinjū was a fight against anything.
Japan had a history of glorifying suicide.
They even had names for different types,
like seppuku for samurai ritual stomach cutting
to junshi for following your lord in death.
Now it was rare okay,
people were not offing themselves over getting scolded by their lord once.
“Manji, you didn’t lock the rear gate last night.”
“Indeed, my lord, please accept my resignation dagger.”
But when self killing was done for a higher purpose, it was celebrated.
Shinjū was an act of extreme love and extreme defiance.
Lovebirds in the pleasure district constantly
fought a battle between duty and passion.
A man’s duty was to his family and society,
and a courtesan’s duty was to her job
and also to her family, because it was often her family
that gave her to the brothel under contract.
They were stuck between a rock and a pp as hard as one.
Lovers shinjū’d to express a love so deep
that they were willing to leave everything to reunite in the next life.
One can only wish for a love so pure.
Some plays were about people who wanted to exit life,
but doing it alone was too shameful.
They tried to find someone, anyone, who would do it with them.
That way, it wouldn’t be an act of weakness
by a loser who couldn’t hack it in life,
but a meaningful and beautifully tragic act of love.
This could turn dark quick.
There was a play about a couple who was found dead,
but the woman’s body was stabbed in the back.
Besides love, shinjū was also an act of defiance.
They rejected their obligations to others and
threw away their duty to society,
fighting back against the community that abandoned them.
Brothels invested mad money on each woman.
Even one death was a huge blow.
There’s one more piece of this shinjū puzzle
that might be the most important:
Buddhism.
Buddhism was the methylamine cut into the blue crystals of society.
You could see its colors everywhere.
There’s a temple in Tokyo that has seen more prostitutes
than your husband’s bachelor party.
The Jōkanji temple was a popular gathering place
for corpses of secks workers from Yoshiwara,
the red lantern district of the Edo capital.
Working women who were too poor to have families didn’t get large funerals.
When they died, they were just wrapped in a straw mat
and dropped off at the temple like it was a Goodwill.
After a massive earthquake in 1855 killed a bunch of people,
the bodies of 500 women from Yoshiwara
were thrown in a mass grave in the temple grounds.
From then on, it gained the nickname of “Throw Away Temple.”
They say 25,000 prostitutes have visited the temple after they died.
Over the years, the monks kept whatever records they could
of the bodies given to them,
and apparently they recorded many cases of shinjū.
The Japanese saw death through Buddhist VR glasses.
This life was a pit stop on the way to the next life.
The major Buddhist sects were against offing yourself,
but people had a romantic notion
that dying with honor was better than living without meaning.
Lovers escaped their unhappy lives hoping to
reunite in the next, or often,
in a Buddhist paradise where they could be together forever.
For them, it wasn’t til death do us part,
but til death bring us together.
In Japanese Buddhism, the mythical Sanzu River
separates the living from the dead.
You cross it to enter the realm of the dead.
Shinjū plays almost always had a bridge at the end.
The lovers crossed a bridge to find a nice place to shinjū,
representing their journey to the Buddhist afterlife.
People also had this idea that your thoughts and actions
at the moment of death were more important than anything.
Shinjū made sure that a couple’s last moments
were spent doing a good karmic act and thinking karmic thoughts.
If your last thoughts were correctly focused on Amida Buddha,
it erased a lifetime of sin and got you a horse ticket to paradise.
Looking through Buddhist VR glasses lets us see these stories in a different way.
You might think that shinjū stories were about
passion winning over duty, but not necessarily.
The couple seems to be trapped between the two.
They were rejected by both the world of passion,
the pleasure quarters,
and the world of duty,
the normal world with all its responsibilities.
They only escaped by following a third path, the Buddhist path.
People loved shinjū plays so much that they were banned.
The government saw them as protests against
the samurai values of loyalty and duty,
a threat against the social order.
The plays put outcasts on a pedestal.
This idea that people at the bottom of society
could rise above all others and enter paradise?
Disgusting.
The authorities publicly displayed the rotting corpses of
the shinjū’d in case anyone thought it was a beautiful thing.
They banned the burial of lovers' corpses.
They even punished survivors of shinjū
by sending them to work with the outcasts of society.
The ban against shinjū plays was lifted in the Meiji Period [1868 - 1912],
and everyone ate up these plays like
they were free samples at Costco, especially wives.
Wives adored the prostitutes in these stories.
They probably identified with the desire for love that they felt
when their husbands were out visiting prostitutes.
Their husbands found romance in the tea houses, they found it in these stories.
“Oh, to be stabbed in the throat by your man.”
Courtesans actually had all sorts of extreme ways
to show their love to a man before going the death route,
and they’re all fascinating and terrible.
Click here to learn about them.
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Devon Lupton, The AlcheMiz,
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and Keke97.
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Alright, I love you and spread the knowledge!