Paper short abstract:

Namiki Sōsuke (1695-1751) was a major creative force behind the vibrant ningyō-jōruri theatre of eighteenth-century Osaka, his works including the masterpiece Kanadehon Chūshingura (1748). I shall here suggest how his rediscovered poems can enrich our appreciation of his dramatic oeuvre.

Paper long abstract:

The playwright Namiki Sōsuke (also Namiki Senryū, 1695-1751) was the principal author of some forty works for the Osaka ningyō-jōruri puppet theatre and the main creative force behind the masterpieces of the 'Golden Age' of this genre in the 1740s. Plays such as Sugawara and the Secrets of Calligraphy (1746), Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees (1747) and The Treasury of Loyal Retainers (Kanadehon Chūshingura, 1748) enjoy an enduring popularity on the modern bunraku and kabuki stages. These works were written by a team of authors, but it is now generally accepted that Sōsuke was the principal director of these artistic projects. However, the true extent of his contribution to Japanese theatre remained obscure until relatively recently.

The rediscovery of this playwright in the post-war period owes much to two twentieth-century findings. The first was the recognition of a 'longevity stele' that Sōsuke erected during his lifetime. As well as confirming several biographical details, this monument contains Sōsuke's 'death poem' (jisei), which refers to the author's escaping a 'burning house' at the age of nineteen. Is this a conventional allusion, inspired by a parable in the Lotus Sutra, to a Buddhist spiritual awakening? Or does the verse recall a particular traumatic event in his youth?

The second rediscovery consists of three early poems, written in an accomplished Chinese style during his time as a Zen monk. Probably composed on the occasion of a journey to the west of Honshū and the island of Kyūshū, they describe his encounter with a powerful earthquake on the road, as well as his visit to Dan-no-Ura, site of the final defeat of the Heike clan. The subjects that Sōsuke evokes here — the helplessness of the individual in the face of greater forces, the overlapping of present reality and past events, the principle of impermanence manifested in the extinction of the Heike — foreshadow themes that will pervade Sōsuke's entire dramatic oeuvre.

I shall here suggest how these rediscovered poems can enrich our appreciation of Sōsuke's works, opening fresh perspectives for the interpretation of this important part of the Japanese dramatic repertoire.

Paper short abstract:

In 1810, Santō Kyōden adapted the Peony Lantern story, which he decided to rewrite – and thereby ‘relight’ – as a gōkan picturebook. This paper explores why he did this and for whom, and how the multiplicity of his approach drew together theatre and literature, as well as creativity and commerce.

Paper long abstract:

At the beginning of 1810, the successful artist, author and businessman Santō Kyōden (1761-1816) published a gōkan picturebook in two volumes: 'Kabuki no hana botan tōrō (Blooming Star of the Stage: The Peony Lantern)'. Its attention-grabbing title and lavishly illustrated front cover were an invitation to aficionados of 'The Peony Lantern', a popular tale of supernatural seduction dating back to Ming China. In particular, Kyōden was targeting those readers who had seen its kabuki dramatisation the previous summer in 'Okuni gozen keshō no sugatami (Lady Okuni’s Makeup Mirror)', an unprecedented success ("hana") by Tsuruya Nanboku IV (1755-1829).

By the early nineteenth century, 'The Peony Lantern' already existed in several different versions – in literary Chinese, Korean and Japanese – across a variety of genres. The few scholars to have studied 'Kabuki no hana' so far have focused on establishing the source texts used by Kyōden. This paper goes one step further: by looking at this picturebook’s close-knit intertextual construction through the lens of adaptation theory, I consider not only how Kyōden drew on a wide range of literary sources, prints and theatrical materials, but also attempt to explain why he wove them together into this complex mélange. To do so, I introduce the concept of ‘multi-adaptation’, using my findings from this premodern Japanese case study to reflect new light onto existing literary theory.

This approach also involves a reconstruction of Kyōden’s ‘ideal’ readership and the feedback circuit, whereby he anticipated and attempted to satisfy a continuum of readers – from those with little or no knowledge all the way through to connoisseurs of 'The Peony Lantern' in its many forms – with the goal of turning a profit for himself and his publisher. Ultimately, this paper uses 'Kabuki no hana' to illuminate the multiplicity of early modern Japanese literature, and to reveal that it was in fact Kyōden’s strategies of adaptation that bridged the worlds of page and stage, fuelling and fuelled by creativity and commerce alike.

Paper short abstract:

Using yūrei Kasane's different version tales as an example to analyse how was the contest between Confucian study and Buddhist didactic dogma was reflected in the development of Yūrei's narrative throughout Tokugawa Japan.

Paper long abstract:

Over the centuries ghostly apparitions of yūrei have bedevilled and bewitched scores of Japanese scholars, giving rise to a significant body of literature which takes as its starting point the teachings of the Kokugaku nativist Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843) and the works of panthropologist Komatsu Kazukiho (1947-present). Often translated into English as simply 'ghost' (Komatsu 2017), the Japanese yūrei has since found fame as part of a global pantheon of supernatural creatures and beings (Davison 2015).

Through the analysis of multiple sources and media, my research seeks to cast a light on popular yūrei narratives as they developed in the Tokugawa period in order to expose a hitherto unexplored tension between Confucian moral codes and Buddhist didactic dogma. I posite this tension as a dialectic between forms of social control imposed by the Tokugawa Bakufu and a naturalized system of local laws.

My research endeavours to produce a comprehensive and critical examination of the development of this narrative. The analysis begins in the early Edo period and concludes in the initial decades of the Meiji Restoration. It looks to texts (monogatari and yomihon), pictorial references (nikuhitsuga and ukiyoe) and the stage (rakugo and kabuki) as primary sources in interrogating accounts of causation and methods of dealing with yūrei in an attempt to identify an over-arching ontology of the period. It also seeks to identify the core ideologies implicit in each source.

Thus far I have primarily analyzed the various incarnations of the story of Kasane, a woman-turned-yūrei. It begins with the first known apparition of Kasane's tale in 1684 and concludes with the well-known Rakugo of 1888. My findings have led me to approach the Tokugawa yūrei narratives as a syncretism of Confucian social norms and a Buddhist cosmology, which is often combined with Kokugaku aesthetics. These ideologies are revealed as being in a state of tension with each competing to establish a definitive ontological explanation of yūrei.