Romeo and Juliet's suicide in Shakespeare's books can be interpreted as "escape from reality". The war between the two clans gave the hearts to connect on the ground. That's why they took this sinful step. In Japanese culture, also raised the issue of suicide for the sake of eternal love. But, unlike Christian Europe, in Japan, suicide is not considered a sinful act.
Love in Alliance with death is invincible.
Heinrich Heine
The strange thing is the heart, how easy it is to excite it.
Say Senagon.
There is an area of life's mysteries. She belongs entirely to love as a special feeling put into the heart of man. Japanese classical literature has created amazing images of love, opening the passionate beginning in the Japanese national element. Images love are born in classic literature not love cult of women (the so was in Western Europe), but eroticism - this constant Japanese perception of the world. Eros as leading to the beginning of things and welcomet to him the well-known Japanese mythological times. Already in the era of Heian (IX - XI century) sensual sublimated in culture in a special aestheticism, subject to the law (customs) and form (etiquette). Love men and women is the main theme of the literature of the Heian era, who preached the cult of love, its intrinsic value.
The aristocratic environment that created hayskul literature, called the cult of love the word "irogami" (lit.: "love of love"), which meant the cult of sensual pleasures and their constant search as a lifestyle. Therefore, early Japanese classics have left us a Brilliant image of Prince Genji (Hikaru Genji), surrounded by many women, each of whom was the owner of one unique and charming features. And we do not find images of Tristan and Isolde, Dante and Beatrice in the Heian narrative literature. She did not know chivalry, for she did not know the chosen one in love; she did not know the cult of the beautiful lady, but she knew the cult of beautiful love moments. The Heian era left to posterity the mysterious commandment of worship "enchantment of things" (mono-but avare), in which the proceeding magic and hedonism and aestheticism generated by time were condensed in a certain density from an antiquity. The complex of Heian ideals became the indestructible Foundation of the national culture.
Chaunskii hedonistic and estetizirovat ideas about love men and women indestructible passed through the subsequent century feudal harsh kamakura-asimismo asceticism and Confucian odesskogo rigorism and atheistic positivism and pragmatism of modern times. We say "indestructible" in the sense of a constant component of human psychology. In cultural and historical terms, there was movement and diversity, there was an endless drama of passions. In chaunskiy literature and decided quite firmly, for centuries, women's ideal and the place of Japanese women in her Union with a man.
A woman should be fragile, petite, gentle and soft, restrained, loyal. She must have artistic taste, subtlety of feelings, the ability to create her own appearance, imbued with genuine charm. External attractiveness and origin were highly valued: they were considered the result of happy karma, beneficent previous births. A huge place was given to the costume and the art of wearing clothes. Unethical and unaesthetic was considered in the woman's resilience, discontent, over-learning, defiance, vindictiveness and especially jealousy. The spirit of a jealous woman was evil. The ideal Heian aristocrat was moderately educated, learned to compose poetry, had excellent handwriting and was able to correspond, played musical instruments (usually koto), danced, mastered the art of making fragrances. Such a woman was largely socially and morally independent. However, its position in the field of love relations, the family and the rest were not equal with men already in the Heian period. By its very nature, a man is more gender-free; a woman is much more dependent on this side of life.
This was exacerbated in Japan because there are very long preserved the primitive form of marriage "tsumagoi" (visiting wife), in which the husband lived separately from his wife and only from time to time visited her. Polygamy was a moral norm, and the absence of many wives in men was a sign of poverty and simple descent. A woman could receive other men in the absence of her husband, but officially polygamy was regarded as treason. Such a marriage was more like free love than marriage. Not by chance in chaunskiy literature there is no cult of motherhood. The woman here often becomes the object of male voluptuousness, the object of contemplation in it all especially female, but as feminine without motherhood. The woman in Union with the man held internally entirely subordinate position. It is no coincidence that the author of the novel about Prince Genji court lady Murasaki Shikibu composes such aphorisms: "a woman is in the hands of a man", "women are born only to be deceived by men". However, in this novel we meet women's images, which are not alien to determination, composure, pride, the ability to protect themselves from male self-will. There are also men who tend to remain faithful to a single woman. But society perceives such manifestations as strangeness and eccentricity, but not the norm.
In the Heian era, the rules of love relations, a kind of language of love in gestures and words, enshrined in the etiquette Canon, were formed and passed on in subsequent times. In this regard, the man highly appreciated the experience in matters of love; he had to own the art of love Dating, to know how to elegantly start and complete a visit to his beloved. All this as spirit and tone of the love relations was transferred in generations, and the Japanese literature and theater created touching, defenseless, meek and fragile images of women at which femininity is poured on all essence which have no man's properties, there is no androgyny (that, by the way, some European philosophers and poets so loved to glorify). The demonic destructive nature of female jealousy also belongs entirely to the female element; it is opposite to its irrationality and unbridled duty of revenge or jealousy in men.
The man is in front of us from the pages of Japanese classics as the embodiment of pure masculinity. His elegance, grace, knowledge of sense in clothes, fragrances, colors - all this is inherent in him in a masculine way. It is also not androgynous and androgyny does not seek. A man and a woman as carriers of pure started do not come therefore in a grueling "battle of the sexes" (this only occurs in modern times), but we see a steady decline of female to male, her happy or passive urejenost in it, silent and often devotional service.
The Japanese medieval woman recognizes her subordinate nature as a world order and considers it her duty - both by instinct and by upbringing - to follow this natural order (it is expressed in ancient Chinese wisdom in the form of the harmonically-movable coupling of the Yin-Yang twin). Therefore, the highest karmic task of a woman is to develop and realize the femininity given to her by nature. And the higher the karmic purpose of men is to exercise their masculine journey. The meeting of the man and the woman was thought in the philosophical plan as the co-existence of the male and female cosmic beginnings ordained by the very nature and thus the achievement of the fullness of being. Therefore, jealousy - as the element destroying the Union of man and woman-was deeply condemned. But not only female jealousy was an obstacle to harmonious love. The further in time we move away from the elegant gentlemen and ladies Heian (where the game of love was conducted gracefully, according to all the rules of etiquette and religiously painted humbling belief in the transience of earthly life), the sharper and more dramatic sound motives of love in Japanese literature.
If from the narrative literature of the early middle ages to refer to the popularized in the XIV century. Japanese drama for the theater But then-to the drama of the XVIII century., represented by drama for Kabuki and Bunkaku, it is easy to notice that classical drama developed mainly on the Heian material (of course, we mean here only the theme of love). She delves into Heian material, solving Heian themes in a new, first ascetic Buddhist vein, and then immerses them in the Confucian world. Thanks to the drama (especially in its stage incarnation), we with special force and clarity feel the "climate of love" in medieval Japan: this is a "touch" of the sexes; though passionate, but without the intention to complete the merger in "one flesh".
Love is not an impulse to dissolve into a loved one, but an attraction, attraction and longing, resolved by meeting and intimacy. Love men and women as experience life - this, typically, sequence of meetings (especially for men); in them there is no dramatic and often unfeasible thirst full mergers, full possession of. Japanese culture historian Saburo Ienaga argues that in medieval Japan "there was no clear distinction between love and marriage, love without physical intimacy was unthinkable." Japanese literature does not give us until the XX century the image of Platonic love. A model of strong marriage is, as a rule, only an elderly couple, but not surrounded by numerous descendants. Beautiful in itself such a couple who lived together until old age. One of the most common poetic metaphors of such marriage are the twin pines growing from the same root. These pines are called "Aioi" in Japanese, which means "born and aging together." The trunks of these pines are equally directed upwards, they are of the same girth, they stand close to each other, without a gap, but their crowns are not intertwined, and one trunk does not embrace the other.