Dispassionately and with tenderness?

We know ukiyo-e – the colorful woodblock prints that captured the beauty of courtesans, actors, and the landscapes of Edo. But before these images of the “floating world” appeared, its chronicler was the written word. Ukiyo-zōshi (浮世草子) – literally “booklets of the floating world” – were the literary prototype of the same urban imagination. “Ukiyo” derived from the Buddhist idea of impermanence and suffering, but in Edo it was paradoxically transformed into a celebration of the moment and of everyday pleasures. “Zōshi” simply meant a pamphlet, a cheap edition in several booklets – and this very format indicated that we were dealing not with court literature, but with the literature of the streets.

In these books, city life pulsed vividly. Saikaku, in “The Life of an Amorous Man,” was able to catalogue the hundreds of his hero’s adventures as if they were goods in a ledger. Other texts listed the prices of sake, described methods of serving customers in teahouses, or advised how not to squander a fortune on gifts for a courtesan. The authors created entire lists and enumerations – of hairstyles, kimono patterns, urban character types – as if they wanted to capture the impermanence of reality by recording its details. And alongside dialogues brimming with street wit appeared erudite quotations from classical texts, poetry, and sutras. This contrast built an ironic distance and reminded the reader that Edo itself was a theater – in literature and in life.

The style of ukiyo-zōshi was thus a miniature spectacle of the city: episodes instead of continuous narration, documentary detail instead of metaphysics, a narrator closer to a satirist than a moralizer. It was light literature, but not shallow – its lightness was rather an acceptance of impermanence, a philosophy of the moment. That is why, although this genre faded already in the middle of the Tokugawa shogunate, it can still tell us in astonishing detail what life in Edo was like. And perhaps therein lies its relevance: in its ability to find meaning not in grand systems or lofty ideas, but in an everyday gesture, a glance, a word – which, though fleeting, create the landscape of our lives. Ukiyo-zōshi teaches us to appreciate them, while at the same time remaining completely indifferent to human tragedies – death, bankruptcies, losses. This dispassionate power of looking at reality without embellishment, combined with the ability to notice beauty in small, earthly moments – that is a perspective, in my opinion, worth learning.

What does ukiyo-zōshi mean?

The word ukiyo-zōshi can be read like a tiny parable about what Edo-period Japan was. The first element – 浮世 (ukiyo) – has its roots in the Buddhist concept of the “floating world,” impermanent and filled with suffering. This classical understanding indicated that since life is short and illusory, one should abandon attachment to worldly affairs and seek liberation in spiritual practice.

However, the townspeople of Edo – merchants and artisans, the chōnin – turned this meaning on its head. Instead of fleeing from illusions, they began consciously to celebrate them. Ukiyo thus became a term not for vanity, but for the colorful surface of the world: tea sipped in a geisha’s house, laughter on the streets of Yoshiwara, fleeting romances, momentary fortune in the rice trade. The serene sadness of listening to raindrops tapping on the roof. The illusion of the moon reflected in a puddle. The beauty of a misty morning when the earth seems to melt into the whiteness of the sky. It was a world flowing, shifting – but precious precisely because of that.

The second element – 草子 (zōshi) – once meant a pamphlet, a booklet, a small book. A light, easily accessible form of print, folded from sheets of paper that fit in the hand. These were not monumental scrolls or heavy tomes of scholars in kanbun, but literature for people who lived quickly, who were curious, hungry for stories. Even the character 草 (kusa, “grass”) evoked the atmosphere of something ordinary, everyday, as transient as a blade swaying in the wind.

Ukiyo-zōshi thus literally means “booklets of the floating world.” They were usually written in simple kana script, the spoken language intelligible to readers outside the aristocracy and scholarly monks. Unlike high literature – based on the Chinese canon – these stories spoke with the voice of the city. It was in them that, for the first time in Japanese history, the language of the streets resounded so clearly: jovial, ironic, full of expressions from daily conversations.

The very term “ukiyo-zōshi” appeared only around 1710. At first it was used for love fiction, formerly called kōshokubon (“books of love”), but with time the name extended to all urban prose describing the lives of townspeople in their full variety. It was therefore a literature born from a new consciousness – the consciousness of Edo: the consciousness of a moment which, though it passes, leaves its trace in a story, in a woodblock drawing, in language inscribed on thin paper.

In this sense, ukiyo-zōshi became not only the name of a genre but also the expression of a spiritual attitude: reconciliation with life’s impermanence through enjoying its beauty. It is precisely this lightness, underpinned by the awareness of transience, that gives them their distinctive tone – at once sparkling and melancholic, light and wise, like everything that flows in the world of ukiyo.

Where did it come from?

Before ukiyo-zōshi appeared, other light booklets were already circulating in Japan – kana-zōshi. These were popular pamphlets printed in simple syllabic script, which made them readable to those without education in classical Chinese. They were sold in sets of a few thin booklets, easy to carry and to read while traveling or by the light of an oil lamp. In kana-zōshi one could find stories of miracles, anecdotes, fragments of legends, sometimes moralizing commentary – in short, everyday literature, aimed not at the court or monasteries but at the growing world of townspeople.

It was from this soil that a new genre sprouted. Its first strong impulse came from Asai Ryōi, the author of “Ukiyo monogatari” in the 1660s. That work was like a manifesto: instead of writing about impermanence and suffering, Ryōi described the “floating world” with humor and defiance. His protagonist – a monk who abandons temple rules and plunges into the whirl of pleasures – showed that even in play, in drinking sake, and in love one could glimpse enlightenment. This was the moment when the old Buddhist term ukiyo changed its meaning and became the name of a lifestyle (about one such monk you can read here: Ikkyū Sōjun: The Zen Master Who Found Enlightenment in Pleasure Houses with a Bottle of Sake in Hand).

The new genre, however, was born not only from an idea but also from the very concrete conditions of the Edo period. Japan, after long civil wars, entered an era of peace, in which merchants and artisans began to acquire wealth and influence. It was precisely the chōnin – the urban class – who were the main readers of these booklets. Though they had no political rights, they created a culture that shaped the entire face of the era: kabuki, haikai, pleasure quarters like Yoshiwara, fashions and city jokes. Yes – most of what we know today as “Japanese” did not, in fact, come from the samurai at all (more on that here: Honor Did Not Belong Only to the Samurai – Bravery, Courage, and the Ethos of Life of the machi-shū).

The publishing boom also played no small part. In Osaka and Kyoto, together called Kamigata (上方, “upper side”), many bookstores and printing houses flourished, which quickly discovered that prose for townspeople could be highly profitable. The standardization of formats, the development of woodblock printing techniques, and growing literacy made books more accessible than ever before. Printing in Edo and Kamigata began to resemble a modern publishing market: popular titles were reprinted, series were created, and publishers competed with illustrations.

Thus ukiyo-zōshi was the fruit not only of literary invention but of an entire social and cultural landscape. It was a literature born at the intersection of the bustling street, the printing house, and the teahouses of Yoshiwara. Its genealogy leads from the humble kana-zōshi pamphlets (about the “newspapers” of the shogunate era you can read here: “Suicide in Yoshiwara! Fire in Honjō!” – What kind of “newspapers” were read in the days of the Tokugawa shogunate?), through the bold gestures of Asai Ryōi, to the dazzling visions of Saikaku and his successors. And though these booklets were light and ephemeral, they captured in words the full energy of the new urban world, in which each day could be a festival – precisely because it passed so quickly. It was here, in this exact time and place, that the old Japan of the samurai ended, and the modern Japan of the townspeople was born.

Five Acts of the Ukiyo-zōshi Genre

The history of ukiyo-zōshi unfolds almost like a kabuki play: it has its acts, its climaxes, and its slow descent from the stage. One can distinguish five scenes of this literary performance, which together tell the story of the birth, flourishing, and transformation of the genre.

Act One: The Age of Saikaku (1682–1699)

Onto the stage steps Ihara Saikaku, a haikai poet, who in 1682 publishes Kōshoku ichidai otoko (“The Life of an Amorous Man”). It is like fireworks exploding over Edo – suddenly everyone is talking about a new kind of book. With extraordinary insight and humor, Saikaku paints the world of townspeople, courtesans, traders, and beggars, revealing its passions, weaknesses, and nuances. His style combines the energy of the street with brilliant observation, and the rhythm of his prose resembles a series of haikai – short, sparkling verses. The 1680s and 1690s were a true “golden age” of ukiyo-zōshi, in which Saikaku set the standards and themes: love, money, impermanence.

Act Two: The Wave of Nishizawa Ippū and His Followers (until 1711)

After Saikaku’s death, a generation of writers emerges who develop and disperse his legacy. Nishizawa Ippū and other authors explore new themes, create parodies of classical texts, and experiment with humor and grotesque. Ukiyo literature begins to live its own life – less cohesive, but more diverse. This was a time when readers wanted not only to relive the emotions of Saikaku, but also to see the world through the eyes of other narrative tricksters.

Act Three: Collaboration with Theater (1711–1735).

In the early 18th century, ukiyo-zōshi draws close to kabuki and to puppet jōruri. Adaptations of stage tales appear, books borrow theatrical effects, dialogues gain dramatic tempo. It is also a time of disputes – between authors and booksellers, over rights, influence, popularity. Literature becomes part of a larger spectacle of urban culture, in which text, image, and stage mirror each other.

Act Four: The Hachimonjiya Era after the Death of Ejima Kiseki (1736–1766)

When the great author Ejima Kiseki and his publisher Hachimonjiya Jishō pass away, their legacy becomes commercialized. The Hachimonjiya bookstore continues to produce new books, but they become increasingly formulaic – predictable plots, familiar character types, repeated devices. This is a time of stabilization and routine: ukiyo-zōshi becomes a publishing product, satisfying demand but rarely surprising.

Act Five: The Late Period (1767–ca. 1780–90)

Once more the genre tries to regain its brilliance. Ueda Akinari – later the author of ghostly tales – undertakes the writing of ukiyo-zōshi in which deeper reflection and greater psychological subtlety appear. Yet this is already the epilogue. Readers seek freshness in new forms: sharebon (tales of pleasure salons), yomihon (longer, quasi-historical prose), illustrated kibyōshi, and sentimental ninjōbon. Ukiyo-zōshi gradually dissolves into a sea of literary innovations, like a wave that has fulfilled its role and yields to the next.

The five acts of the genre are five moments of Edo sensibility. From the explosion of Saikaku to the subtle attempts of Akinari, ukiyo-zōshi told of a world that lived fast, changed violently, and constantly needed new forms of expression. It is not only a history of literature but also a map of the moods of the city, which itself was like a theater – a stage on which the spectacle of the “floating world” unfolded.

Subgenres of Ukiyo-zōshi

When we think of ukiyo-zōshi, we immediately return to Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693) – the haikai poet who dared to carry the brevity and conceptual brilliance of poetry into prose. His works were not meant to be beautiful illusions or moral parables. They were more like a street mirror: cold, gleaming, full of reflections that did not beautify but showed things as they were. In Saikaku’s stories, laughter mingles with bitterness, and tragic endings are devoid of sentimentality. It was precisely this cool, ironic distance that made him the father of the genre.

His very first work, Kōshoku ichidai otoko (“The Life of an Amorous Man,” 1682), opened a new era of literature. The story of Yonosuke, who from childhood to old age devotes his entire life to amorous conquests, was on the one hand a farce, and on the other – a metaphor of human desire that never finds satisfaction. A few years later, in Kōshoku ichidai onna (“The Life of an Amorous Woman,” 1686), Saikaku depicted the female version of the same obsession, again with an ironic punchline that left no illusions about the durability of passion.

Other works deepened the theme of everyday life: in Nihon eitaigura (“Japan’s Eternal Storehouse,” 1688) we find catalogues of merchant histories – their rises and spectacular bankruptcies. In Seken munasanyō (“This Scheming World,” 1692) Saikaku gathered the paradoxes and absurdities of townspeople’s lives, sparing no one. In these books his favorite devices recur – the rhythm of episodes, enumerations, lists, juxtapositions that resemble journalistic records or collections of anecdotes. This was literature “live,” flickering like haikai but composed into long prose.

Saikaku established four main subgenres of ukiyo-zōshi, which over the following decades his successors developed:

   -   Kōshokumono (好色物) – tales of love and pleasure, almost always connected to the pleasure quarters. Here was born the colorful topos of Yoshiwara: courtesans, clients, illusion and disappointment.

   -   Chōnin-mono (町人物) – stories of townspeople, their businesses, debts, networks of credit. Profits and bankruptcies became an equally valid literary theme alongside romance.

   -   Setsuwa-mono (説話物) – anecdotes, urban legends, curiosities of everyday life. Often tinged with irony, as if city gossip had transformed into literature.

   -   Buke-mono (武家物) – tales of samurai, but seen not from the perspective of the warrior ethos, rather through the eyes of the market and the theater – as heroes of stories, commodities of imagination.

All these currents shared one denominator: “intense realism,” merciless toward illusions and idealizations. Ukiyo-zōshi did not pretend that the world was more beautiful than it was. And yet it was precisely in this raw, urban honesty that one finds lightness – a serene acceptance of impermanence, which was the very spirit of the “floating world.”

Booksellers, Formats, Illustrations — What Did Ukiyo-zōshi Look Like?

Ukiyo-zōshi were not only stories — they were also objects of material culture. How they looked, how they were printed and sold, had a huge impact on their reception. In the Edo period, a book was a visual product, almost a gadget: an object one wanted to buy, touch, and show to friends.

Format and Editions

A typical ukiyo-zōshi appeared in sets of five or six thin booklets, printed in the hanshibon format (about 165 × 235 mm). These were small, handy little books that one could, for example, take on a journey. Each booklet had a soft cover of dyed paper, often grayish blue, with a simple title written inside a vertical frame. The booklets were bound using the fukurotoji laced binding technique — with characteristic stitches visible along the side. When purchasing a complete set, one received not only a story but also a series of small, aesthetic objects whose appearance signaled the genre and style.

Text and Typeface

The interiors were printed from wooden blocks (xylography), thanks to which each page had the character of handwritten calligraphy. The characters were usually quite large and clear, written in cursive kana, which distinguished ukiyo-zōshi from scholarly texts in kanbun. This was meant to be popular literature, accessible to townspeople — everyday language recorded in the simplest, most reader-friendly way. The page was divided into square “windows” of text with clear margins so that the whole would be legible and rhythmically received.

Illustrations and Their Role

Illustrations were an integral part of the books. Without them, ukiyo-zōshi would not have had the same charm. Full-page plates often appeared, as well as smaller vignettes placed in the text. They were created by artists from the world of ukiyo-e: Hishikawa Moronobu, the genre’s forerunner who gave it its first distinctive visual framework; Yoshida Hambei, one of the pioneers of book illustration; Nishikawa Sukenobu, known for subtle genre scenes and graceful depictions of women. The image was not mere ornament — it conducted the narrative alongside the text, reinforcing its rhythm and highlighting key scenes. The illustrations depicted scenes in the pleasure quarters, the daily lives of merchants, grotesque situations — everything that built the “floating world” of Edo.

The Publishing Ecosystem

Behind all this stood booksellers and publishers who created an entire literary ecosystem. The most famous was the Hachimonjiya bookstore of Osaka, which published most of Saikaku’s works and for decades set the standards of the genre. Its publications even acquired their own name — hachimonjiyabon — and became a recognizable brand. Booksellers were not merely technical publishers — they shaped public taste, decided which works would reach readers, and even intervened in the content and layout of books (much like hanmoto in the ukiyo-e business — more here: The Ukiyo-e Business: How Hanmoto Balanced Between Shogunate Censorship and the Art Market Trends in Edo). In this way, the Edo literary market operated much like the theater or the world of ukiyo-e: as a collaboration among authors, artists, and entrepreneurs who together produced mass culture.

These books combined literature, graphics, and craftsmanship, becoming tangible evidence of an urban sensibility: light, colorful, and yet with its feet firmly on the ground.

Style and Narrative Techniques

Ukiyo-zōshi were not a uniform prose with beginning, middle, and end. Rather, they were a montage of episodes — short scenes, anecdotes, and vignettes from life that together formed a kaleidoscope of Edo everydayness. Saikaku and his successors composed stories as if from fragments of conversations overheard in a teahouse, gossip from Yoshiwara, ledger notes, and city anecdotes. In one chapter the hero rides a boat to the pleasure district, in the next he loses a fortune at gambling, in yet another he gets into a brawl with a rival — and all of it is fastened together by the narrator’s lightly ironic commentary.

Catalogues and lists were highly characteristic. The authors loved enumerations: of the successive women visited by the hero, the sums entered in debt books, or the fashionable hairstyles and kimono patterns. Reading such passages, one has the impression of dealing with a document — except a document filtered through the eye of a satirist. In “The Life of an Amorous Man,” Saikaku could describe the hero’s hundreds of amorous adventures in the tempo of a rapid inventory, as if he were compiling a catalogue of consumer goods. In other works he presented tables of prices in the pleasure houses, procedures of customer service, and even advice on how to avoid financial losses during dates with courtesans.

This “documentary detail” was the genre’s hallmark. The authors did not hesitate to descend to the level of numbers and practical guidelines. Literature featured notes on the exchange rates of silver and gold, on the rules of extending credit, as well as passages stylized as manuals: how to choose a good courtesan, how to read the gestures of the staff in a teahouse, how not to be cheated when buying a gift. The reader had the feeling of participating in a realistic case study of street figures — a merchant, a craftsman, a rake, or a courtesan.

A huge role was played by mixing linguistic registers. Characters’ dialogues conveyed the colloquial rhythm of the street — quick, elliptical, saturated with wit. Alongside this appeared erudite allusions to the Chinese or Japanese classics, quotations from poetry, fragments of sutras. The contrast between these registers produced an effect of humor but also of ironic distance: the characters try to speak in the language of court literature, yet reality brings them back to street-level facts.

The narrator often resembled a guide through the pleasure quarter — explaining to the reader the topography of Yoshiwara, where a given teahouse was located, what was worth seeing at the kabuki theater, and what to avoid with a wide berth. At times the tone took on the form of stage directions — dry cues like “turn left here,” “this establishment is known for the best sake.” In this way fiction blended with a tourist guide, and the reader, sitting in Osaka or Kyoto, could feel as if wandering the streets of Edo.

Thus the style of ukiyo-zōshi was a kind of literary theater: episodes instead of continuous narration, documentary detail instead of lofty metaphors, an ironic narrator instead of a solemn moralist. It was prose that wanted to be like Edo itself — dense, chaotic, full of voices and contrasts, and at the same time fascinatingly alive.

Suggested Reading

To capture the spirit of the genre, it is worth reaching for a few works that became its milestones (for readers proficient in English, or of course in Japanese). Each of them reveals a different dimension of the “floating world”: from passion and economics to urban types and literary experiments.

“Kōshoku ichidai otoko” (1682) — The Life of an Amorous Man

The beginning of it all. Saikaku, formerly a haikai poet, built a tale of Yonosuke — a man who from youth to old age knows no other goal than love, or rather its bodily variants. Yet this is not an idealistic romance but a catalogue of experiences: courtesans, underage geisha (maiko), fleeting encounters on boats, nights in cheap inns. Saikaku presents the world like a ledger — how much a night with a high-ranking lady costs, and how much with a girl from a teahouse’s back room. The economics of pleasure here is as important as passion itself, and the reader receives something like a guide to the customs, prices, and rules of the game in Yoshiwara.

“Kōshoku ichidai onna” (1686) – “The Life of an Amorous Woman”

Four years later, Saikaku reversed the perspective. This time the protagonist is a woman whose fate reveals the darker side of kōshoku. This is no longer the cheerful bookkeeping of pleasures, but a drama inscribed in the life of a courtesan – seductions, betrayals, downfalls, sufferings. The story leads from a youth filled with passion to an old age spent in loneliness and poverty. Yet Saikaku does not resort to sentimentality: he writes coldly, matter-of-factly, as though recording yet another balance sheet. It is precisely this starkness that makes the text so moving – a story without illusions, of a woman who was a commodity in a world dominated by men and by the market of desire (how this worked? See here: Born in hell, buried in Jōkanji – what have we done to the thousands of Yoshiwara women?).

Ejima Kiseki, “Keisei iro-jamisen” (1701) and katagimono

At the beginning of the 18th century, the baton was taken up by Ejima Kiseki, an author associated with the Hachimonjiya publishing house. His Keisei iro-jamisen (“Courtesan and the Colorful Shamisen”) introduced a new sensibility: portraits of urban “types” – sons of merchant families, daughters of respectable households, doctors, kabuki actors, shopkeepers. These so-called katagimono (“books of characters”) became a gallery of figures that an Edo reader could easily recognize in his own surroundings. Kiseki combined prose with the spirit of kabuki and jōruri: the types are exaggerated, the scenes dynamic, the language saturated with theatrical humor. Reading it is like wandering across a stage – colorful, a little farcical, but also brimming with satire on urban manners and flaws.

Ueda Akinari, “Seken tekake katagi” (1766)

When the genre was already in decline, Ueda Akinari – later the celebrated author of Ugetsu monogatari – offered one more variation of literature on urban types. In Seken tekake katagi (“Characters of Women Running Brothels”), he created portraits of women who managed the world of pleasure – brothel owners, go-betweens, traders in bodies. It is a gallery of sharply drawn characters, where irony mingles with moral reflection. Akinari shows that the world of pleasure had its backstage, full of cold calculations, endless intrigues, and female entrepreneurship. This is a late variant of katagimono, already more reflective and tinged with bitterness, foreshadowing the more mature literature Akinari was to create in his ghostly tales.

The Thought of Ukiyo-zōshi: Comic Hedonism or Existential Philosophy?

At the heart of ukiyo-zōshi beats a paradox: the word ukiyo (浮世), which in Buddhist discourse meant “the world of suffering, illusion, and impermanence,” was perversely reinterpreted in Edo as “the world of the moment, of fleeting pleasure.” Instead of fleeing from the illusory world toward enlightenment, city dwellers began to see in impermanence itself the very source of meaning. As Asai Ryōi wrote in Ukiyo monogatari: “Live today, enjoy today – tomorrow is uncertain anyway.” It was a philosophy of lightness, which did not mean shallowness, but rather a profound acceptance of the transience of all things.

Here was born what might be called the “cheerful melancholy of Edo.” Saikaku often ended his stories tragically: the hero goes bankrupt, the courtesan dies, lovers are separated. And yet the tone of narration was not heartrending, but serene, even playful. The reader did not sense moral condemnation or bitter warning. Rather, he felt an awareness that this is simply how the world works – impermanence, transformation, the cycle of rises and falls. This was close to the philosophy of haikai: a smile through tears, a lightness that carries within it gravity. Such an ethics of everyday life was what the townspeople of Edo needed, living in a world of dynamic economy, perpetual loans, and sudden bankruptcies.

One could say that ukiyo-zōshi taught how to maintain balance between hedonism and the acceptance of impermanence. Pleasure was affirmed here, but without illusions about its end. It was like hanami – the joy of cherry blossoms, though one knows the petals will fall in just a few days (about sakura here: Understanding the Kanji “sakura” (櫻) – the cherry blossom as a way of seeing the world).

Censorship, Morality, Didacticism

Naturally, the world of “floating” pleasures could not develop entirely freely in Edo. The Tokugawa shogunate imposed moral and political censorship – books could not openly undermine social hierarchy or promote licentiousness. Authors and publishers therefore learned the art of skirting boundaries. In many texts, alongside descriptions of amorous adventures, there appeared a moral or didactic conclusion. Thus works like Nihon eitaigura emerged, where behind the façade of tales about merchants lay praise of thrift and diligence.

When courtesans or actors were described, not only their colorful daily life was emphasized, but also the dangers awaiting the reckless. Katagimono – books about “character types” – were sometimes advertised as a kind of “treatment” of manners, since they showed social flaws in a distorted mirror. This was unobtrusive didacticism: the reader laughed at the mistakes of others, while at the same time learning how to avoid them.

Readers and Readership

Who, in fact, bought ukiyo-zōshi? Above all, townspeople (chōnin) – merchants, craftsmen, shopkeepers, actors. These were texts written in simple kana, easily accessible thanks to cheap publishing in Kamigata and Edo. But women readers also played an important role: women – from merchant’s daughters to courtesans themselves – found in these books both entertainment and behavioral models. Contemporary accounts mention courtesans learning appropriate phrases and poses precisely from Saikaku’s books (I do not know if this is true, but between the lines one can glimpse something of the sort in later sharebon – for example in Santō Kyōden’s “江戸生艶気蒲焼” Edo umare uwaki no kabayaki – “The Playboy, Roasted à la Edo Style”).

For some, these were “guides to the world of entertainments” – catalogues of prices, establishments, and customs. For others – literary mirrors of their own lives. For yet others – simply evening amusement, something to be read by lamplight just as one today might browse a newspaper or watch a series. And it was precisely this universality – the combination of instruction, satire, document, and literature – that made ukiyo-zōshi for several decades the most vivid voice of urban Japan.

The Later Fate of the Genre

Ukiyo-zōshi, like ukiyo itself, could not last forever. The genre exhausted itself after a little over a century – not because it lost its readers, but because its formula became too predictable. Episodes, catalogues, urban types – what in Saikaku’s day was sparkling innovation, by the mid-18th century began to sound like variations on one and the same theme. Literary fashion was also changing: Edo readers craved new formats, more satirical (sharebon), more narrative (yomihon), more graphic (kibyōshi), and finally more sentimental (ninjōbon). Ukiyo-zōshi thus dispersed into many currents, like a river that breaks into numerous channels.

And yet this dispersal was also a form of legacy. Without Saikaku and his successors, there would have been no Kyōden or Ikku, no Hizakurige (see here: Yaji and Kita on the Tōkaidō Road – Samurai-Era Japan Through the Eyes of Two City Rogues in Trouble on the Countryside), no irony-filled sharebon. The genre prepared the ground for the entire era of gesaku – the free, urban prose of late Edo. Moreover, ukiyo-zōshi had its graphic sisters – illustrations created by the masters of ukiyo-e. From this fusion of text and image arose the later visual-textual culture of Edo, where the book was not only content but also an aesthetic object, full of rhythm, images, and signs. In this way ukiyo-zōshi became a bridge between the first explosion of townspeople’s literature and the later flowering of illustrated print – and afterward? Manga, and finally anime.

But how should we read these books today, in the 21st century, when Yoshiwara has long ceased to exist, and prices of sake and kimono expressed in mon tell us nothing?

Perhaps attentively: not so much searching for a coherent plot, but savoring the rhythm of the episodes. It is worth looking closely at the catalogues – what the author places side by side, and why. It is worth following the details of the economy: the cost of meals, the size of debts, the terms of contracts. It is worth listening to the play of words, reviving the spirit of haikai, and looking at the illustrations, which often carry additional layers of meaning. This is a slow kind of reading, more of a stroll than a marathon, like a walk through Edo, where behind every corner hides an anecdote.

Fortunately, we are not completely cut off today. Saikaku has been translated into English in many editions (for example, The Life of an Amorous Man, trans. Ivan Morris; Five Women Who Loved Love, trans. Wm. Theodore de Bary), and in Polish one can find fragments in anthologies of Japanese literature. Online there are also scans of the originals from the Waseda University Library or on archive.org, where one can see not only the text but also the illustrations, covers, and characteristic fonts. This is why perhaps the most beautiful way to encounter ukiyo-zōshi is precisely through such a combination – reading and viewing at once, allowing us to see in these booklets what they were in Edo: literature both light and wise, a chronicle of impermanence and joy, a serene lesson about a world which, though long gone, still speaks to us.

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 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

Write us...

Ciechanów, Polska

dr.imyon@gmail.com

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