"The New Year's Eve is more precious than a thousand pieces of gold. It is the Great Divide between winter and spring, which none can pass over without copper and silver." --Ihara Saikaku Ihara Saikaku is regarded as Japan's first popular writer. The twenty lively stories in This Scheming World recount raucous events surrounding New Year's Eve--as crafty money lenders attempt to collect their money from equally crafty debtors. From the bawdy to the outrageous, these tales demonstrate how far 17th-century Japanese would go to avoid paying their debts--with hilariously unexpected and often disastrous results! These finely-crafted tales include stories of: Philanderers who slip off to hide in the homes of their mistresses Hustlers who leave town suddenly on "very important" business trips Connivers who become actors for a day to hide-in-plain-sight on stage Saikaku portrays his characters with such a deft and human touch that, even three centuries later, his stories still ring true. The new Introduction by Saikaku expert David J. Gundry explains how and why this entertaining work still resonates with modern readers today.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

The first complete translation of Nanshoku okagami by Ihara Saikaku (1642-93), this is a collection of 40 stories describing homosexual love affairs between samurai men and boys and between young kabuki actors and their middle-class patrons. Seventeenth-century Kyoto was the center of a flourishing publishing industry, and for the first time in Japan's history it became possible for writers to live exclusively on their earnings. Saikaku was the first to actually do so. As a popular writer, Saikaku wanted to entertain his readership. When he undertook the writing of Nanshoku okagami in 1687, it was with the express purpose of extending his readership and satisfying his ambition to be published in the three major cities of his day, Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo. He chose the topic of male homosexual love because it had the broadest appeal both to the samurai men of Edo and to the townsmen of Kyoto and Osaka, his regular audience. Homosexual relations between a man and a boy were a regular feature of premodern Japanese culture and carried no stigma. When a boy reached the age of nineteen, he underwent a coming-of-age ceremony, after which he took the adult role in relations with boys.