ABSTRACT
The elevated tone with which Saikaku’s fiction depicts sexual love between males is closely linked to the association during the era of age-structured male homosexuality with the samurai, such that erotic relationships between males were seen as partaking of the samurai ethic of honor and loyalty at all costs, as well as sharing in the prestige of a status-group that, under the Tokugawa system of hereditary social categories, enjoyed a monopoly on political power and whose members were, in theory at least, owed deference by even the wealthiest commoners. Saikaku’s fiction repeatedly highlights the factitiousness and arbitrariness of the transition from wakashu to man in stories featuring bending or transgressing upon the rules surrounding it. The difference in tone between portrayals of heterosexual erotic interactions, male homosexual interactions involving coercion and consensual sexual relationships between males is evident early on in Amorous Man.
