The Textual Townsman: Writing Urban Identity in Early Modern Japan

In 17th-century Japan, the rapid urbanization of Tokugawa society and the formation of a market economy led to the rise of a new social class of merchants and artisans: the “townsman” (chonin). The emergence of the towsnman was catalyzed by the rise of a commercial woodblock printing industry, which aided in the articulation, circulation, and standardization of norms of townsman identity. Popular fiction played important roles in these processes of textual self-formation, orienting the diversity of urban society around the centripetal pull of shared values while giving symbolic resolution to tensions in the urban community and contradictions in urban identity. In this book talk, I follow one of the threads of the The Textual Townsman, showing how literary works by Ihara Salkaku and Eljima Kiseki shed new light on the forms and functions of the didactic mode in Tokugawa popular fiction.

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