Sexual Desire, Amorous Sentiment, and the Production of Ethical Ambiguity in Bakin’s Nansô Satomi hakkenden

Abstract

Kyokutei Bakin’s (1767-1848) yomihon (“books for reading”) and especially his monumental narrative cycle Nansô Satomi hakkenden (Eight Dog Chronicle of the Nansô Satomi Clan, 1814-42) have been often described as sustained by rigid moral dichotomies and oppositions that seem well defined by Bakin’s own didactic formula kanzen chôaku (“promoting good and chastising evil”). My presentation seeks to problematize this rather reductive perspective on Bakin’s moral universe by examining the ethically ambivalent role of feelings and desires – especially amorous feeling and sexual desire – in Hakkenden. On the one hand, Bakin’s text discursively links sexuality and amorousness to evilness and crime – Hakkenden’s evil figures, both female and male, conspicuously indulge in sexual desire – while virtue seems predicated on the chaste absence or suppression of desire. On the other hand, however, Bakin also dramatizes how virtuous figures are ambiguously receptive to sexual desire and amorous sentiment, a fact that is most prominently allegorized by the ethical hybridity of the text’s dog warrior protagonists who are emblems for specific Confucian virtues while also implicitly carrying the markers of canine sexuality. My presentation shows how attributes of virtue and transgression, chastity and desire, good and evil are in fact not only closely intertwined but also resurface under different guises and in different characters in the Hakkenden narrative, thus producing complex and ethically ambivalent interconnections throughout its long plot. I argue that Bakin’s narrative thus radically complicates a plot structure based on the kanzen chôaku paradigm while still operating within its discursive parameters.