ABSTRACT
The following translation represents the first chapter of Saeki Junko's Comparative Cultural History of "Iro" and "Ai", a study of the profound shifts in the conception of intimate relations between men and women that occurred with Japan's turn toward the West. The tentative translation of iro as "eros" in the title is merely offered as a way to distinguish it from "love," and not as an attempt to capture the multiple valences embodied by the Japanese term. In order to convey the complex processes by which the particular meaning of ai=love was developed in Japanese, this translation indicates the original Japanese vocabulary throughout, adopting several different methods to supplement the words' meanings in English. In 1885, in the famous modern theoretical tract known as The Essence of the Novel, Tsubouchi Shoyo announced that the primary subject of the novel is "emotion."
