The Hearts of People in the World

This article explores the economic dimensions of the late fiction of the seventeenth-century writer Ihara Saikaku, asking how the author’s understanding of the marketplace shaped his humanistic studies of “the hearts of people” (hito-gokoro). Applying methods of economic criticism to the posthumous Tying Off Saikaku’s Loose Ends (Saikaku oridome, 1694), I argue that the author’s late writings develop a formal homology between the imperfect rationality of the early market economy and the ineffable dynamism of the human heart.