Household and Its Discontents: Ejima Kiseki's Seken Musuko Katagi

This article examines the “character pieces” (katagi-mono) of Ejima Kiseki (1666–1735), with a focus on Seken musuko katagi (Characters of Worldly Young Men, 1715), in the context of the normalization of the townsman household (ie) around the turn of the eighteenth century. In light of the increasing centrality of the household to townsman identity and the control it exerted over the energies of all its members, Kiseki’s humorous sketches of deviant heirs represent a comic deconstruction of the ideology of the household, alternately subverting its norms or exemplifying them ad absurdum to reveal their internal contradictions. In particular, Kiseki’s work focuses on the contradictory roles played by the “leisure arts” (yūgei) in townsman culture, both as a means of exemplary status performance and as a highly stigmatized form of status transgression.