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.