Asai Ryōi

Who They Were

Asai Ryōi (浅井了意) was an early Edo-period writer and a priest of the Shin school of Buddhism (Shin-shū, 真宗), a tradition that emphasised salvation through faith in Amida Buddha rather than through monastic discipline. He was born in 1612, in the seventeenth year of the Keichō era (慶長), and died on 29 January 1691. At one point in his career he served as head of a temple in Kyoto.

He is best known as one of the finest writers of kanazōshi (仮名草子), a form of popular prose that flourished in the seventeenth century. The term means, roughly, "kana booklets": short works of fiction and reportage written largely in kana, the Japanese syllabary, with few or no kanji. That made them readable by a far wider public than the Chinese-influenced scholarly literature of the day, including townspeople with only a basic education. Kanazōshi covered many genres, but a recurring theme was the celebration of contemporary urban life — the pleasures, fashions and intrigues of the growing cities.

Life and Career

Asai Ryōi was born in 1612, the seventeenth year of Keichō, and lived through most of the seventeenth century, dying in 1691 at the age of about seventy-nine. He was a Shin Buddhist priest, and at one time he held the position of head priest of a temple in Kyoto, then the imperial capital and the centre of traditional learning.

His career as a writer belongs to the world of commercial publishing that grew up in Kyoto and later Edo (modern Tokyo) during the Edo period (1603–1868). With the country at peace under the Tokugawa shoguns, a literate urban population of merchants and artisans created demand for affordable printed entertainment. Writers like Asai supplied it, producing prose that could be read for pleasure rather than studied.

His best-known work is Ukiyo Monogatari (浮世物語), whose title might be rendered "Tales of the Floating World". The word ukiyo (浮世), literally "floating world", originally carried a Buddhist sense of the sorrowful, transient world of suffering; in the Edo period it came to mean the pleasure-seeking world of the here and now. Asai's writing is noted for exactly this kind of reversal: he took traditional Buddhist teaching and turned it on its head, expressing the ideals of the new urban society rather than preaching renunciation of it. A priest by training, he wrote for townspeople as one of them.

Why They Matter

Asai Ryōi stands near the beginning of a long tradition of popular Japanese fiction. Kanazōshi was the immediate forerunner of the more elaborate ukiyo-zōshi (浮世草子) of the later seventeenth century, and through that of the novelistic writing that culminates in the great Edo-period authors. By writing in kana for a broad readership, Asai and his contemporaries helped establish prose fiction as a commercial product and a shared urban culture rather than a pastime of the scholarly elite.

His particular contribution was tone and attitude. The comic, this-worldly reworking of Buddhist themes in Ukiyo Monogatari gave literary shape to the outlook of the floating world — the sensibility that would later animate the theatre, woodblock prints and fiction of the Edo period. He is remembered as one of the finest writers of his genre, and his double identity as a Buddhist priest and a celebrant of urban pleasure makes him a revealing figure of his age.

The Name in Japanese

The name is written 浅井了意, read in kana as あさい りょうい, and romanised as Asai Ryōi. The surname comes first, as is customary in Japanese.

Surname: 浅井 (あさい, Asai)

• 浅 — read asa here — means "shallow". It is a common element in Japanese surnames and place names.
• 井 — read i here — means "well", as in a well for drawing water. Together, 浅井 is a well-attested surname, literally "shallow well".

Given name: 了意 (りょうい, Ryōi)

• 了 — read ryō here — means "to finish", "to complete", or "to understand clearly". It is a character with a strong Buddhist flavour: it appears in terms for enlightenment and for the settling of a matter.
• 意 — read i here — means "mind", "intention", "meaning" or "will". It is the character in such everyday words as 意味 (imi, "meaning") and 注意 (chūi, "attention", "caution").

The combination 了意 suggests a mind that has reached clarity or completion — an apt name for a Buddhist priest, and one that fits the two-character, Chinese-derived style of names common among educated men of his time. Note the long vowel in Ryōi: the う in りょう lengthens the "o" sound, so the name is pronounced with a held "ryō" followed by "i", not as three even syllables.

Legacy

Asai Ryōi died on 29 January 1691, having lived from the Keichō era to the eve of the Genroku period, the great flowering of Edo urban culture. He did not live to see the full development of the floating-world arts, but his Ukiyo Monogatari gave the age one of its defining phrases and helped fix the word ukiyo in its new, worldly sense.

His reputation rests on his standing as one of the finest practitioners of kanazōshi, and on the way his work fused Buddhist learning with the tastes of the townspeople who bought his books. For readers of Japanese today, his name and his most famous title are a useful entry point into the literature of the early Edo period — a moment when a newly prosperous, newly literate public began to read fiction written in their own language, for their own pleasure.