The boys loved each other to old age( NAGAME-TUZUKESHI-OIKI-NO-HANA-NO-KORO)
from Comrade Loves of the Samurai( NANSYOKU-TAIKAN)
by Saikaku IHARA

The drenched boy with an umbrella( another story, but not completed yet)

PROFILE
Saikaku Ihara is a poet and writer of popular fiction whose novels and stories are now ranked among the classics of Japanese literature. Saikaku is a literary name adopted in his early thirties; before that he used the name Kakuei IHARA; his original name is said to have been Togo HIRAYAMA. Saikaku was born in Osaka. After the death of his young wife in 1675 he devoted himself to his flourishing career as a poet of HAIKAI, travelling widely and continuing to frequent theaters and pleasure quaters. At the age of 40, Saikaku published his first work of prose fiction, KOSHOKU ICHIDAI OTOKO( 1682; tr The Life of an Amorous Man. Its great success made him a hardworking professional writer, the author of some two dozen books during the last decade of his life.
Terence Barrow, Ph.D. describes as follows;
In Comrade Loves of samurai the theme is the homosexual love of samurai for samurai or samurai for page or court boy bent on becoming samurai. The subject is potentially sordid, but to the old Japanese such love among samurai was quite permissible. The son of samurai families were urged to form homosexual alliances while youth lasted, and often these loves matured into life long companionships. Saikaku describes Japanese love scenes of all kinds with a frankness that has made him a favorite with expurgators, but he touches the subject of both normal and abnormal love with tenderness.

FULL STORY
A board hung in a narrow doorway read" We sell a good medicine for piles", and a shop with a blind also sold copybooks written in OHASHI-style for students. Rarely if ever, people are willing to buy the textbooks since the way of the writing is out of date, so the business was supposedly not enough out of it to live by. The little shop was in a street of the Monzen at the Yanaka district of Edo. There were bamboo seeds spattered at the porch, and were full of flowers in the garden. There was a summer chrysanthemum and the water from the well was pure enough to drink, and a crow was on the end of a pole. The shop owner was a jobless samurai(a warrior) who quitted his career when a young and lived on the money that he obtained by his sales of the former garments saved. He got along together only a friend who was about the same age of his and sometimes played "GO"( a kind of Chinese chess) with him. He kept a dog covered with spots. And no other visitors but for some customers.
On a hot summer day, the fan was not enough to relieve him from the heat and he was soaked with sweat even running from his cuffs, so he took a bath in the evening. His friend looked at the back when he removed his sweat with water, and the friend moaned out his worn old body and said " It's amazing how you have changed, given the time goes by." The friend caressed his bunched shoulder down ,looked his friend's wrinkly body beneath his waist with full of tears and said ' An ancient Chinese poet said in his poem " Young boys are proud of their beauty in a mirror, but that was only good yesterday and today is another day ...covered with grey hair." That story is totally true for us tracing our past. I have sung with you without much care when young. Now I felt miserable when I think about our memories dates back.' The two were hand in hand and wept tears until the hot water in the bath tub got chilled.
Those men were samurais and came from a castle town in the Province of Tikuzen-Fukuoka, though I think they are good friends indeed after their retirements. The younger one's name was Mondo Tamashita and he was so cute that many people took him for HAKATA-princess. The older one's name was Hanemon Toyoda and he was so skillfull of martial arts and keen on Mondo that Mondo also like Hanemon each other, when Mondo was 16 and Hanemon was 19. They fell in love and were involved with each other, that relationship was deeper than the sea. Some samurais eagerly proposed a date to Mondo and others spoke ill of the two to separate them. On a dark night, they secretly broke through a wooden gate, and were on a board to escape from their home town after they killed their associates for the duel. The two fled and hid themselves there.
Now, Mondo was 63 and Hanemon 66. So many years had pasted ever since they had their hearts and never involved with a woman as prototypic queer. Still, Hanemon regard Mondo as his younger partner. Mondo had thin and gray hair on his temples with a bit of dew covered with a flower, and it was quite funny he arranged his hair in a style of a page boy's. He never shaved his front hair, but the style is not a symbol to a samurai. He kept great care of himself like tooth-brushing with a toothpick and pulling out his beard as a page boy's manner. Noone knew the pederastic relationships between the two.
It is said page boy never forget his affectionate feudal lord after he has married, and that might be a good custom for us. In this sense, male love is totally different from the heterosexual love and is seemingly worth a try. The love to a woman is full of whims in comparison with a male love, and only the man who falls in love with a steady man makes sense what the male love is. The two old men hated woman as a bitch and were unwilling to associated with their neighbour toward the east, where a husband and wife started tangles each other and breaking a crockery, then the old men never try to stop and try to reconcile the couple since it was no good for the old men. On the contrary, funny the old men at their house cheered the husband up to the win , yelling " Hey, you can blast her to death and pick a new boy in place of your wife for your servant."
There were cherry trees loaded with full of blossoms at Ueno in March( the lunar calender) , so visitors came to see the cherry blossoms , where a first class alcohol( Japanese SAKE) like stuff from IKEDA, ITAMI, and OUNOIKE almost sold out. So many people got drunk like their head swirling and drunken pedestrians staggered with a sticky footstep. Amazingly, the two could judge man or woman from their foot steps, if they heard men's, then they ran out of the house in the hope of seeing some cute dudes, but if they heard women's, then they shut the door and were disappointed of their purpose and remained solid like a chrysanthemum before the blooming days.
One day in spring, it was a shower at last, and a party was off and women with a beautiful cloth forced to be come home to their regret. Some women was there under the porch for a temporary shelter. They said, " If we knew a friend living here around, we could get ourselves invited to tea and enjoyed till night, lend us umbrellas, and have a supper if they could. Unfortunately, we don't have any friend here." One ugly woman opened the door a little bit and took a look into the house. The old man went out of his house with a bamboo broom right after he saw her face intruded and said in fury" Get out of here, dirty bitch!" He expelled the women without mercy. He cleared up the place with dry sand, and purified the ground with salt water where the woman were there. I have never known such a woman-phobic man except him in a large city EDO.

webpages:
Opening Night in the CapitalIhara Saikaku, The Literary Review
Koshoku ichidai otoko Rare book collections of Waseda University Library both English and Japanese
Budo denraiki ; Saikaku okimiyage ; Yorozu no fumi hogu ; Saikaku nagori no tomo / Taniwaki Masachika, Fuji Akio, Inoue Toshiyuki kochu. North Carolina State University Libraries
Bayly Art Museum: Universes in Collisionthe University of Virginia University Library