Twenty Cases of Unfilial Children in Japan: Selections

The Chinese had their Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety, held up to every schoolchild in East Asia. In 1686 Ihara Saikaku, the great comic novelist of the merchant class, answered with twenty Japanese children who robbed, cheated, abandoned and killed their parents — each story told at speed, in the shops and back streets and brothels of Osaka, and each ending in a punishment considerably worse than the crime.

Nobody in Saikaku is improved by suffering. A son pawns his mother's clothes; a daughter runs off with a man and sends home for money; a stepson calculates. The narrator's tone is genial throughout, which is what makes it terrible: he is amused by these people, and expects you to be, right up to the moment the ground opens.

Miyamoto Yuriko's modern-language selection gives the sharpest of them. Complete as she selected it, with an afterword on Saikaku, the Chinese paragons he was answering and Miyamoto's own remaking of him, and 14 notes on the money, measures and Osaka geography.