Provincials in an Urbane World: Rural Japan and the Transformation of Edo Comic Fiction

The sharebon, or “fashion-book,” emerged in the early eighteenth century as a hybrid form combining brothel guides with elements of Chinese courtesan fiction. Such works quickly coalesced as a genre with its own unique conventions. Almost from the start, the fashion-book constituted a sort of proto-anthropological study of strange peoples, manners, and customs. Authors later developed a concern with dialogue, wit, and ostensibly realistic speech, as well, creating intensely polyphonic works populated with a variety of characters. But this concern with realistic detail was for the most part limited to the artificial and highly localized context of the urban pleasure quarters. Provincials, when they appeared at all, were subjected to caricature, linguistic and otherwise, and generally disdained for their lack of sophistication. This talk centers on two fashion-books by Morishima Chūryō, an early popularizer of Western learning, in which he sought to complicate these conventional representations. Chūryō’s gaze beyond the walls of the pleasure quarters is seen to resonate closely not only with his nonfiction studies of foreign cultures, but with contemporary nativist inquiry. And in transplanting an established form outside its narrow, circumscribed world, he introduced new literary possibilities. Gentle humor began to supersede sharp wit. In particular, a close reading, supported by careful attention to issues of format and materiality, shows the early nineteenth-century kokkeibon, or “humor-books,” of Jippensha Ikku and Shikitei Sanba to owe much to his new settings and uses of language. William Fleming specializes in the literature and cultural history of early modern Japan. His dissertation, titled “The World Beyond the Walls: Morishima Chūryō (1756-1810) and the Development of Late Edo Fiction” (Harvard, 2011), explores the rich interrelationship between early modern Japanese fiction and contemporary intellectual movements, including nativist studies and inquiry into Dutch, vernacular Chinese, and Russian materials. The dissertation challenges the view of Edo fiction as largely isolated from outside influence and offers a new way of thinking about the transformation of gesaku, the period’s so-called “playful literature,” from a pastime of the intellectual elite into a form of true popular fiction. As a postdoctoral associate at Yale, William will reformulate his dissertation into a book and complete research projects on the representation of disease and the body in premodern Japanese literature and on the reception of Chinese fiction in the late Edo period, with a particular focus on the case of Pu Songling’s celebrated collection of “strange” tales, Liaozhai zhiyi. He looks forward to teaching an undergraduate seminar titled “Pop Culture in Early Modern Japan” in the 2012 spring semester.