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Paper short abstract

In sharebon, authors embed Otherness within scenes of familiar urban sociability. This paper examines how foreignness is represented within Edo demi-monde and considers what these textual strategies reveal about the imagination of Otherness and the cultural relationship to the foreign.

Paper long abstract

Sharebon is traditionally understood as a literary corpus that is profoundly local, rooted in the tightly circumscribed diegetic space of the Edo-period shogunal capital and, at times, the provincial red-light districts situated along major travel routes. At the same time, as one of the artistic forms both shaped by and giving expression to the cultural phenomenon of the “pleasure quarters” in Edo–Meiji Japan, sharebon participates in the construction of Yoshiwara and other entertainment districts as exceptional, out-of-the-ordinary worlds: settings marked by a distinctive yet mainly rhetorical exoticism and “foreign” flavour. In their detailed evocations of Edo’s soundscapes, sharebon authors frequently stage foreign languages and portray certain teahouse patrons as enthusiasts of things foreign, thus embedding alterity within scenes of otherwise familiar urban sociability.

This paper examines how sharebon authors represent foreignness within the milieu of Edo’s red-light districts and considers what these textual strategies reveal about the Edo-period imagination of Otherness and Japan’s broader cultural relationship to the foreign.