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Paper short abstract

This paper examines an understudied typology of early modern Japanese literature: the “mock” book. These seem like instructional items (textbooks, travel guides, etc.) but in reality are anything but, contributing to our understanding of how didacticism can be leveraged as a source of enjoyment.

Paper long abstract

It is an age-old adage that one should never judge a book by its cover. However, especially when it comes to instructional texts there is an assumption that the content should match the expectation. Something billed as a scientific journal should contain new research. A history textbook should contain information about the past. A travel guide should be a guide to places one can travel. This was certainly true in early modern Japan, where whole genres of instructional texts not only contained knowledge but laid it out using common visual languages. In general, when a reader approached one of these texts they knew what they would see and read.

So what happens when you undermine that expectation? In eighteenth and nineteenth century Japan a wide variety of authors started to do just that. They released sex manuals that looked like mathematics textbooks, get-rich-quick treatises posing as travel guides, almanacs that didn’t catalogue the stars, rather the actors on the kabuki stage. Many examples were designed to look almost indistinguishable from actual instructional works, from their physical formats to their styles of written language and their page layouts. Thus, the often humorous contents were shrouded in a cloak of seriousness, existing in tension between the familiar and unfamiliar.

Japanese scholars such as Kobayashi Fumiko have classified many of these under the broad term hyōgen mohō keishiki 表現模倣形式, literally “expression-imitating form”. This paper will build upon prior research to interrogate this phenomenon, which I will tentatively translate as “mock” books. Overall, it will apply humour theories to argue that the primary source of pleasure in these works derives from the incongruity inherent in their very natures. They present the reader with a puzzle: is this item instructional or not? And through the process of finding the answer the reader gets hooked, marvelling at the author’s commitment to the ruse. By examining these understudied resources, this paper will advance our understanding of the playful literary scene in early modern Edo, showing how authors leveraged their audiences’ familiarity with didactic texts as a source of cognitive enjoyment.