12018-06-12T01:31:03-07:00Ronae Matriano8ed24d71e6036affdb22f6e2fd0ec83a8e515e95149432plain2019-01-30T23:24:20-08:00Ronae Matriano8ed24d71e6036affdb22f6e2fd0ec83a8e515e95Nowadays, very few people read Saikaku for his poetry. He’s better known for his fiction—especially a genre known as ukiyo-zōshi, which is often translated as “tales of the floating world.” Ukiyo is an interesting word, however: the term floating (uki) world (yo) usually refers to the world of the Japanese courtesan, and in particular, the fleeting, impermanent encounters between lovers that we see in a work like Life of a Sensuous Man. Our protagonist in Life of a Sensuous Man is named Yonosuke: literally “man of the world,” and the world we’re referring to is very much the world of the demimonde.
