Section 3b, Pre-Modern Literature | Session 10, Panel
Discussant: Sumie Jones (Indiana University)
Beginning around 1750 in Japan, we see the emergence of a genuine popular culture centered on theatergoing, artistic pursuits, and the large-scale production of printed texts of all kinds, all supported by an emerging commercial economy. We also witness an epistemological rupture as this commercial economy causes new tensions at all levels of society and makes visible cracks in the old social and ideological order. Each of the three papers in this panel isolates a particular cultural form—chapbooks (kibyoshi) of the late eighteenth century, theatrical culture of the early nineteenth century, and the long illustrated fiction (gokan) near the middle of the nineteenth century—and describes specific tensions inscribed in these texts.
Van Compernolle's paper finds a tension between satire and didactic intent in the pictorial fiction of the late 18 th century.
Zwicker's essay focuses on the tension between individuality and reproducibility in the printed ephemera of the kabuki world—specifically, actor likenesses—in the early 19 th century.
Selden's paper focuses on a tension in Ryutei Tanehiko's bestselling work, Nise Murasaki inaka Genji (1829-42), between the valorization of martial ideals and the undermining of those ideals by exuberant improprieties and flagrantly rakish behavior. Each of these papers goes on to explore the social forces and energies flowing through these texts, which work to produce such tensions. The ultimate goal of this panel is to begin a dialogue on the way popular texts covering a span of 75 years impacts and is impacted by large-scale social processes.
The kibyoshi, a species of short pictorial fiction, flourished in Japan from 1775 to about 1806. Although the kibyoshi are not coterminous with satire, the satiric spirit nonetheless pervades this genre. Such texts poke fun at contemporary mores, social groups, and individuals. One of the most recognizable social types to become lampooned in the kibyoshi is the hankatsu, the half-baked sophisticate, who aspired to become a tsu, that is, a dandy renowned for his intimate familiarity with the demimonde. In many kibyoshi, the aspirer to tsu-ness is very often the son of a wealthy merchant family. In his foolish attempt to be a tsu, the prodigal son threatens to bring ruin upon his family with his frivolous spending at brothels and teahouses. Thus, many of the prodigal son narratives advance a highly didactic message as the merchant son is humbled, realizes his foolishness, repents, and becomes a model spendthrift. Satire necessarily implies a kind of didacticism, or at least an alternative social vision. We might conclude from this that satire is meant to uphold certain class ideals at a historical moment when the commercial economy is creating a large group of middling-level townsfolk. However, this conclusion seems to be at odds with what we know of the kibyoshi authors, many of who were connoisseurs of demimonde culture. Indeed, if we focus on other aspects of their playful writings, we might interpret the satiric spirit as an effort to create, by way of lampooning the hankatsu, a community of individuals who transcend narrow class ideals.
This paper draws on three examples—Koikawa Harumachi's Kinkin sensei eiga no yume (1775) and Santo Kyoden's Edo umare uwaki no kabayaki (1785) and Shingaku hayasomegusa (1790)—in order to explore the vexed relationship between didacticism and satire in the kibyoshi.
Jonathan Zwicker (University of Michigan)
In 1817, Utagawa Toyokuni produced a small book titled Yakusha nigao hayakeiko, an introduction to the techniques of drawing actor likenesses. And Hayakeiko was just one of several somewhat experimental, and variously successful, ventures in which Toyokuni collaborated with the publisher Tsuruya Kizaemon in the second decade of the nineteenth century – the moment when he was at the height of his fame and commercial success. As an idea, the book seems counterintuitive for it makes commercially available and reproducible – it puts into the marketplace – the very individuality and individualistic techniques on which Toyokuni's fame and livelihood rested. But Hayakeiko raises another interesting paradox: the tension between the premise, on the one hand, that each actor's face is distinct and thus the production of its likeness rests on the approximation of certain individual features – Matsumoto Koshiro's large nose, for instance, or Iwai Hanshiro's curling lower lip – and, on the other hand, that individuality was itself reproducible both by hand - given knowledge of proper technique – but also, and of course more profoundly, through the mass mechanical reproduction of the actor's image in prints, fiction, theater guides, and on various printed ephemera from fans to kites.
Using a variety of printed material from the first quarter of the nineteenth century, this paper will examine the status of the individual visage at a moment of an emerging tension in the early decades of that century between an epistemology of reproducibility and discourses on individuality. This paper aims to situate the mass reproduction of the actor's image in prints and novels within a framework bounded on one end by technologies of reproduction and on the other by an increasing anxiety over the status of the unique and the authentic.Alternately dramatic and romantic, didactic and playful, the sumptuously illustrated annual installments of Nise Murasaki inaka Genji (1829-42) inaugurated a Genji craze in kabuki, ukiyoe, shunga, and women's fashions for years to come. However, within this lively narrative — which is ostensibly set in the Muromachi Period yet unmistakably filtered through a cosmopolitan Edo sensibility — the feudal counterpart to the eleventh-century Shining Genji is no dreamy soul who squanders his evenings with music-making and incense-sniffing. Mitsuuji, the hero of writer Ryutei Tanehiko and print artist Utagawa Kunisada's ambitious re-working of the courtly Genji monogatari is instead the valorous and filial second son of the shogun, the wise but overly doting Ashikaga Yoshimasa. The loyal Mitsuuji must preserve the security of the land, first by ensuring the rightful succession of his elder brother, rather than himself, and second by recovering the stolen Sacred Sword that legitimates the shogun's authority. Clearly, then, his duty is to immerse himself in the pleasure quarters, both to convince the shogun of his inadequacy to rule, and to root out the villains who have hidden the sword away until an opportune moment to declare their claim over the locus of military and political power.
This paper examines the text's playful balancing of the need, on the one hand, to satisfy shogunal censors by endorsing Confucian ethics in general and martial valor in particular, with the desire, on the other, to gratify consumers who expect to be thrilled and entertained by feats of martial prowess, romantic passion, and perhaps the occasional acknowledgment that the warriors lording it over everyone else seem to live by an outmoded creed.