Gender Roles In Ihara Saikaku's Life Of A Sensuous Woman

In Ihara Saikaku’s Life of a Sensuous Woman, the author illustrates various gender roles in both women and men. In the works Saikaku composed, he also demonstrates some parts of Japan’s developing cultural values with that of the European Enlightenment period. Japanese culture has a lot in common with that of the Enlightenment period because of the way that women are treated and the roles they should play to serve the man in the household. In Saikaku’s Life of a Sensuous Woman, he displays numerous similarities with Voltaire’s Candid and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women of the values that men share and also what the role women and society have in each of the different stories.

Japan’s cultural values has various similarities with the European Enlightenment period. Japanese culture had little emphasis on death and the afterlife. They did

One of the similarities include religion and about death. In the West, religion plays a major role in society and there are also various form of religions practiced. Religion also plays a key role in the story because that’s what the old woman turned to after all that she has sinned in her life. A friend of the old woman said “Free yourself from all your false words and actions and return to your original mind. Meditate and enter the way of the Buddha” (pg. 611). Like many people in the West, religion in the story was an escape from someone’s own sins and a safe passage to the afterlife. Death comes up a few times throughout the story and in the old western days, death wasn’t seen as an immoral entity to be afraid of. In the story, the old woman tried to commit suicide when someone she used to know saved her and said “let your death come when it comes” (pg. 611). Japanese culture sees little importance in death and most of the time they welcome it rather than ignore