The Demimonde in Japanese Literature: Sexuality and the Literary ...

sexualized entertainment, the Japanese government was doing much the same as authorities in the Western world. As Michel Foucault stated in The History of Sexuality, those in charge of policing the Western metropolises such as Paris were realistic: as it would be impossible to completely eradicate all deviant sexual behavior, the best they could hope to do was contain it within a specific social space—and, in the process, exploit it for capital. Foucault wrote,

In Japan, where not just brothels but entire neighborhoods were allotted to these “illegitimate sexualities” beginning in the early modern period, the project of containment was nevertheless doomed to eventual failure, as it was in Europe.¹⁴ Curiously enough, during the Edo period and later, an ironic inversion of the paradigm of contamination occurred: pornography concerning the demimonde was usually produced by and for those outside the quarters. As Cecilia Seigle wrote, “Through the 18th century, it was outsiders, not the Yoshiwara, who generated pornography.”¹⁵

The benefit of reading these pornographic texts, aside from the vicarious pleasure they afforded, was practical: even as early as the Edo period, they were marked by a bourgeois conception of value for money. The texts supplied the reader/potential client

By convincing the would-be demimonde consumer that he could get the utmost value and satisfaction for his money, these books acted, in a