Paper short abstract:

This paper will consider in detail a number of usage examples of the term tsukuri-monogatari, from the Heian period up to the modern era. By examining the history of the word's usage, I hope to shed light on the changing literary environments in which texts of tale-literature have found themselves.

Paper long abstract:

The term tsukuri-monogatari (lit. "made-up story") seems never to have been out of use, from its first recorded usage at the end of the Heian period up to its appearance in Tsubouchi Shōyō's critical work on the novel, Shōsetsu shinzui (1885). In recent years, a thorough survey of all extant texts of early tale-literature (monogatari) was conducted by Katō Masayoshi (2009), in an attempt to determine precisely of what elements a tsukuri-monogatari can be said to consist. With the conclusions reached by Katō in that study, this paper largely concurs. However, in the famous collection of poems from early works of tale-literature known as Fūyō wakashū—an important text for any study of the word tsukuri-monogatari—the definition given for the term differs from that deduced by Katō. And again at the tail-end of the Edo period, the renowned scholar Kurokawa Harumura in his encyclopedic glossary of ancient tales, Furumonogatari ruijishō, offered yet another, differing definition.

This paper will consider in detail a number of usage examples of the term tsukuri-monogatari, ranging from the end of the Heian period up to the early 20th century. When tsukuri-monogatari as a term of analysis began to be used at the end of the Heian period, its motivation lay in contemporary attempts to collectively label those literary texts that now reach us under that name. Or to put it another way, its motivation sprang from the antecedent fact that contemporaries had begun, already, to see such texts as a separate group. What prompts use of the term is a felt need to draw distinctions, explicitly relative ones, between examples of tsukuri-monogatari and other kinds of text. As such, when we survey the history of changes in the term's usage, we reveal thereby the changing literary environments in which texts of tale-literature have found themselves. By examining, therefore, the usage of the word tsukuri-monogatari, I hope to shed light on the literary vicissitudes experienced across the ages by texts which that term has served to designate, as well as on those interested readers whose changing reception of such texts kept them in motion.