Kibyoshi

Abstract

The literature of Japan in the Tokugawa period is remarkable both for its quantity and its diversity. Between 1600 and 1868, about 10,000 different titles were published. After the focus of literary activity moved from the Kamigata area of Kyoto and Osaka to Edo around 1750, there was a particularly rapid increase in the number and variety of popular prose genres known collectively as gesaku. However, readers in Japan and the Western world are now more familiar with the classics of the Heian period, No, and modern novelists than with popular Edo fiction. Apart from a few connoisseurs, assessments of literary critics until quite recently tended to range from indifference to scorn, and the derogatory term ero guro nansensu has no doubt been a more powerful disincentive to serious study than any linguistic problem of decoding colloquial references to contemporary incidents.