Short Abstract

Kanzen chōaku shaped Edo-period literature beyond didactic works. It worked as a narrative vector organizing texts through value points. This paper examines its evolution across yomihon, kusazōshi, and ninjōbon, demonstrating how its manifestations corresponded to era's ideological transformations.

Long Abstract

Kanzen chōaku (rewarding good and punishing evil) was among the most prominent didactic mechanisms employed by authors to shape readership values during the Edo period. Rooted in Confucian ideology, its sphere of influence extended beyond conventional didactic fiction, such as yomihon (reading books), to encompass entertainment-oriented literary productions as well.

As Tanaka Norio has argued, kanzen chōaku evolved into a crucial element of text organization, functioning analogously to what Gérard Genette termed a “narrative vector”, since it determined the overall architecture of texts, enabling readers to understand character roles and narrative developments through the lens of numerous “value points” – what Vincent Jouve describes as “expressions of values at the textual level”.

While kanzen chōaku constituted a foundational element of explicitly didactic literary works, it gradually came to influence texts unrelated to an educational strategy. This paper examines the evolution of narrative structures and dramatis personae in a corpus comprising yomihon, kusazōshi, and ninjōbon under the action of kanzen chōaku. The study aims to demonstrate how different manifestations of kanzen chōaku – and different textual structures – correspond to transformations in the broader ideological landscape of the era.