Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the satirical potential of the medical body in 1790s kibyōshi, with a focus on Jippensha Ikku's Hara no uchi yōjō shuron 腹内養生主論 (1799). In it, I show how such works engaged with medical knowledge, as well as moral and educational discourses on the body in 18th-century Japan.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I explore the satirical potential of the medical body in 1790s kibyōshi, with a focus on Jippensha Ikku's Hara no uchi yōjō shuron 腹内養生主論 (1799). Unique in drawing on the most famous health manual at the time, Kaibara Ekiken's Yōjōkun, this work is at the same time representative of a whole series of fictional narratives and prints in the late-Edo period that were set inside the medical body. This late eighteenth-century fad for the body's inner workings in popular culture has previously been primarily attributed to the ascendancy of the Western-style scientific gaze and anatomy in Japan. Yet while the increased interest in anatomy may well have provided an impetus for engaging with the inner workings of the body, my contention in this paper is that such kibyōshi represented a response to indigenous medical, moral and educational discourses in which the body had risen to the forefront of attention during the eighteenth century - from health cultivation to Shingaku teachings.

In this context, such works made use of a cloak of medical authority to make satirical statements about the tumultuous body social and traditional learning. Kibyōshi have traditionally been judged to have entered their period of 'decline' in Edo at the time of the work's genesis in the 1790s, devoid of the irreverent spark that characterized earlier exponents of the genre. Space for satire could, however, still be opened up within certain parameters, and I argue that medical themes provided one such avenue for fiction writers in the 1790s. Referring back to centuries-old metaphors of the body-state, these fictional works transformed the medical body into a thoroughly up-to-date social microcosm of the late Tokugawa state, plagued by financial, political and natural disasters.