Five Women Who Surrendered to Love. The Story of the Romantic Adventures of a Lonely Woman

The novellas of the 17th-century Japanese writer Ihara Saikaku gained recognition and widespread popularity among his contemporaries, but a century later, the country's government included them in the list of banned books. The desire for the free expression of feelings, celebrated by Saikaku, contradicted the tenets of the feudal state. The vibrant and vivid world of earthly passions and pleasures, the colorful life of a Japanese city was recreated by Saikaku with such mastery that it allowed the entertaining genre of koshaku-mono (tales of love) to rise to the level of true literature.

The famous Japanese "pleasure quarters" were not only a hotbed of vice but also the center of cultural life in the city, where the art of love was intertwined with theater, poetry, painting, and music. These were islands of freedom within the rigid framework of samurai ethics during the Tokugawa era. And Ihara Saikaku celebrated this untamed world like no one else. The book includes the most famous works of the "Japanese Boccaccio".

"Five Women Who Surrendered to Love" is five stories of Shakespearean intensity about women who follow the call of the heart despite strict Confucian morality, at a time when adultery was punishable by death.

"The Story of the Romantic Adventures of a Lonely Woman" is a confession of a former courtesan who has gone from an elegant oiran to a street caller. And although fate granted her chances to settle down more than once, the passion for romantic pleasures was stronger.

The edition is adorned with genre engravings by Nishikawa Sukinobu.