Episode 6: High and Low Literature in Edo Japan

Check out Episode 6 of the Read Japanese Literature podcast.

This episode is marked mature.

How does “this fleeting world” transform from a Buddhist precept to a name for the red-light district?

What did reading look like in early Modern Japan?

And how many dildos does a man need to pack for a trip to the Island of Women?

It’s time to talk about high and low literature in Edo Japan.

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Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600-1900 ed. Hauro Shirane

Find Out More

The Freer-Sackler Library’s collection of Illustrated Japanese books.

Eminent scholar of Japanese literature Donald Keene on Saikaku: The Comic Novelist.

History of Japan Podcast, hosted by Isaac Meyer

• Episode 8: The Three Unifiers
• Episode 9: Pax Tokugawa

Linfamy’s Japanese History and Folktales YouTube Channel

“Literature” at Japanese Wiki Corpus

Understanding Japan: A Cultural History by Professor Mark J. Ravina. Produced by The Great Courses, 2015.

• 11: Japan’s Isolation in the Tokugawa Period

Japanese Literature at Facebook

Selected Sources

Drake, Chris. “Introduction” in Excerpts from Life of a Sensuous Man, Aksornsami Press, 2010.

Huffman, James L. Creating a Public: People and Press in Meiji Japan, University of Hawaii, 1997.

Korniki, P. F. “Literacy Revisited: Some Reflections on Rirchard Rubinger’s Findings” in Monumenta Nipponica, 2001.

Marcus, Marvin. Japanese Literature from Murasaki to Murakami. Association for Asian Studies, 2015.

Moretti, Laura. “Kanazoshi Revisited: The Beginnings of Japanese Popular Literature in Print” in Monumenta Nipponica, 2010.

Rubinger, Richard. “From ‘Dark Corners’ into ‘The Light’: Literacy Studies in Modern Japan” in History of Education Quarterly, 1990.

Shirane, Haruo, ed. Early Modern Japanese Literature—An Anthology, 1600-1900. Columbia, 2002.