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Hello and welcome back to new books in Japanese studies, the podcast channel of the new books network. I'm Jean-E-V. Today we welcome Dr. Laura Moretti from University of Cambridge to discuss her new additive volume, graphic narratives from early modern Japan, the world of Kusatoishi.
It was recently published through Brill, edited by Dr. Moretti and Dr. Sato Yukiko from Tokyo University. This volume is a comprehensive review and analysis of one of the most widely read kinds of literature from early modern Japan.
Well, welcome Florence. Thank you so much for joining us again today. Thank you very much for having me today. And I would really like first of all before we kick off to thank you Jean-E-E-Dr.
Lee. I understand now for inviting me today. I love this podcast series and I'm really honored to be here today. Thank you.
Thank you. It's been a while since it last joined us. Can you remind us again what you researched and teach about? Yes, of course.
Thank you very much. I am Professor of Early Modern Japanese Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge at this side of the pond, so in the UK. And I work on early modern Japanese literature. My focus is on fictional prose in the vernacular issued by commercial publishers.
And I come in quite a span of time, white span of time from the 17th to the 19th century. And for me, if I can just share with you why I love working on early modern Japanese commercial literature, for me the attraction is twofold. First, it challenges our expectations towards the literary. In particular, the need for literature to have gravitas, to address burning questions of identity, gender, belonging and much more.
And lots of the literature I work on is delightfully in consequential. So I'm very interested in digging this idea of the aesthetic of the inconsequential and how to learn how to talk meaningfully about it. It's no easy task, but it's great fun. And the second attraction for early modern Japanese literature is that it really asks us to think what it means to read a book.
Often reading those well beyond reading a story moved to by the purpose of curiosity to know what we happen to the protagonists. It asks us to do different things. So these are fascinating questions that also are present among others in this latest publication. The one we are here to talk about graphic narratives from early modern Japan, the world of Satoshi.
And this project, I had the great privilege to work with an outstanding co-editor, Professor Satayo Kiko from the University of Tokyo. And I collaborated with 15 exceptional scholars from Japan, the States and Europe. We approached the publisher, Brealy, in 2021. And the book was published in February 2024.
So we really marched on. And there is, ours is a 600 page volume. It's quite heavy, her, literally, heavy, organizing three parts and 16 chapters. And yeah, we really have free aims in mind for this volume.
We shaped it as a comprehensive companion to the study of early modern Japanese graphic narratives. Some of you are listening today might be familiar with Adam Kern's seminal monograph, Manga from the Floating World. Adam also features in our volume worked on a specific type of graphic narratives produced from 1775 to 1804. But our edited volume covers the entirety of the history of graphic narratives from early modern Japan, from the late 17th century into the 19th century.
That's why we needed to do it as a team really. So anyone who is new to this area can find a wealth of knowledge that rain forces augments, but also time, at times challenges, machine scholarships. The second aim that we had in mind was to produce fresh research. And we really asked all our contributors to infuse their chapters with something new.
In this way, all the chapters open up new vistas also for the seasoned scholar who might have worked in this field for many years. And so we do hope to ignite new research on this phenomenal type of typology of book. And third, and lastly, these volumes are hopes to position the study of early modern Japanese graphic narratives within the bigger questions that interest the scholar of literature. Going back to what I said, the aesthetic of it in conceptual, what it means to read are two, but we also look at others, including adaptation, metaphysics and much more.
And I'm also very proud I have two graduate students, Freddie Fielden and Joseph Zeck-Bills, who have contributed. And they also created an update to be geography of English translations. So it can be used as a starting point for any of you who is keen in knowing. Thank you.
Thank you. This is a very exciting volume. And I know that you've also been doing something else very exciting for many years at Cambridge and something big is coming up soon. Would you like to tell us a little something about the exciting workshop that you have been doing at Cambridge?
Yes, that actually brought us together in the first place, the year. And it is the summer school in Japanese, in early modern Japanese, paleography. And as you know, very well, we had another number of young scholars from all of the world. And we learned how to read early modern texting there or regional format and transcribe and translate.
So yes, it's an exciting moment. And for me, it's always a very exciting opportunity to know what young scholars are working on and create a wide network. So thank you again for participating in that. Thank you.
Thank you for organizing it. And if we have any listeners interested in learning early modern Japanese, paleography, how we recommend this program now moving onto the book, a book about kusazoshi. Can you first tell us about what is kusazoshi and what distinguishes it from other kinds of narratives in Japan at that time? Thank you for actually using the word kusazoshi.
We only propose that it is left, I'm translated and we hope that readers will become familiar with it. As for the definition, what is kusazoshi, we do offer a concise definition in the introduction. And I like to read it and then unpack it for you if that is okay. I first read it from page eight.
Kusazoshi are a specific form of book length graphic prose. Multi-modal in essence, kusazoshi combine images and words and even sound, asking the reader to negotiate the complex interactions of these different modes on the page. Meaning is created out of such negotiations. So let's unpack a little bit this idea.
Kusazoshi is a form of graphic prose or graphic narrative. As such, they are multi-modal. What this means is that two modes, the verbal, the visual, text and images are combined on page and their combination is what creates meaning. We borrow the app to definition of multi-modality offered by John Bateman, who says that text and image not only commonly co-occur but together co-determining the meaning of the whole.
So to stress the point here, you need to read and to look. Read the text, read the images in tandem in order to make sense of what is on the printed page. And this sets Kusazoshi apart in answer to your question from other kinds of narratives in Japan at the time. As we know, images were a feature of many early modern commercial publications, not Oli Kusazoshi, but it is the key role that the images play in the creation of meanings that sets Kusazoshi apart.
And actually chapter 8 by Kobayashi from Nicole starts with a lovely quotation from 1803. And I think it's very effective to let us know the importance of images in Kusazoshi. In 1803, Kurekte Bakin, who is one of the authors that make his appearance in our volume. I'll just call to the importance of illustrations by invoking a powerful comparison with the World of Warriors.
So he says, the images are the master and the text is his way, Taylor. Pictures are King in Kusazoshi. You're also perhaps wanting to know a little bit about the basics of Kusazoshi. And I do point to our introduction where we unpack a lot of this.
But if I were to select a few key points, I would go with a few. So first Kusazoshi developed over the course of around 200 years from the late 17th century into the 1880s. So we actually go beyond early modern Japan as such. They developed in different formats.
We start with the so-called early Kusazoshi, which include the format of Acha-Hong, Red Cabibels, Kura-Hong, Black Cabibels from 1774, and Acha-Hong, like green Cabibels around the same time. We then moved to Kiyoshi, Yellow Cabibels from 1775. And finally to Gokan, combined booklet from 1804. They don't stop when the end of early modern Japan.
They go into modern Japan. And this is an area that we do not cover in our edited volume, but we do hope that somebody will take up the battle and work on all that. It is worth also mentioning that our chapter three, in our chapter three, Matabar Noreko, programatizing the neat development of Acha-Hong, she actually tells her that we do not necessarily move from Red Cabibels to Black Cabibels, so I need to read the book in order to discover more. Kusazoshi all share the multi-modal nature that I mentioned a few minutes ago, but the mise-en-page evolves into ever-increasing text, crammed in ever-more sophisticated images with time.
And second, Kusazoshi are the product of a creative team that involves a publisher, a writer, an illustrator, a calligrapher, a block cutter, and a printer. They are all equally important. And in chapter two, Akagi-en dissects a double page spread from an 1818, Kusazoshi, to explain in detail how this production team worked. And obviously, this complicates our understanding of authorship.
Who is the author? There are many authors, and this is something that we developed in that chapter as well. Third, Kusazoshi were produced by commercial publishers in the megacity of Adon nowadays, Tokyo, and they were sold in the many bookshelf that populated this urban space. So they are delightfully commercial products.
In the introduction, we take our readers to a virtual journey to one of these bookshelfs, that took Nishimura Yashin Dokkou by making sense of the of every verbal and visual detail from an 1801. So look forward to this virtual journey to a workshop. And by the way, next year, Paiadurama is about another publisher who was very active in graphic narratives, Sothaya Jusaburau. So we will see again how this was done, what was produced, and I hope to see Kusazoshi in there.
Fourth and final key point, Kusazoshi were cheap. Even considering the fluctuation of the price is in time, they would be somewhere around the price that you would pay to enter the public book, or you would pay to eat a bowl of soba noodles. I know when my money would have gone to buy books, but that means they were actually cheap. And therefore, they were attracting a wide range of readers across society, gender, and ages.
It was a reading book for everyone. But as I said, our introduction gives you many more details. These are the key points that I would like anyone who is listening today to do away here. Wonderful.
Now that you mentioned readership, I want to ask more about this point, which is obviously, I'm very interested in this question of readership. For informal context about the reception of Kusazoshi in the 18th century, what was reading literature like at the time? Who was reading what? And where could readers get their books?
Okay, so what was the reading literacy like? This is a tough question. And I remember wrestling with the same question also in my previous book, The 17th Century Popular Pro, and it is tough because we do not have statistics as such, which is so frustrating. We can only make inferences based on the traces that can be gathered from the books themselves.
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If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or the gambling of someone close to you, please contact connectcentario.ca. So, to answer your question, the answer to your question is not straightforward, but I'd go around to your question and hopefully we will get somewhere. First, we need to remember that Sadoshi not only 19th century. You mentioned 19th century, but not 19th century.
Work written almost entirely in phonetic script. Hiragata, for those of you who have worked in learning Japanese, Hiragata. Phonetic script. And I suppose almost entirely because actually some logographic character, some kanji, do appear in Kuzazoshi, and as a matter of fact, a serious research really needs to be done on this point, urgently.
What kanji, when, why, but living that aside, it is not incorrect to claim that Kuzazoshi worked written almost entirely in phonetic script. So this means that anyone with very basic literacy skills normally acquired in a couple of years at a Peirkoya school would have the required skills to read a Kuzazoshi on their own. But the beauty of Kuzazoshi is that they invited a form of communal reading. In chapter 4, so that Mayumi discusses a very interesting image from an 1814 Kuzazoshi.
In that image, the text explained that a bunch of people who are family actually, they all got together and had a look at their images of the Kuzazoshi that the children had received this presence for the new year. Now, Kuzazoshi were not only for children, but children were part of this reading. BOTIC. After that, after getting together and looking at their images, the little girl reads the text on that.
And being multi-modal, the message is further developed in a delightful image where there is a mother, the father, and a toddler, all sitting around a bratia, new year, so cold, and then little daughter holds a Kuzazoshi in her hand, presumably reading it. So the idea is that you cannot read it on your own, no problem, somebody will read it for you. And here is the little girl, going back to the idea that you need the minimum literacy. In Chapter 4, Sato Yukiko introduces us to a charming passage from an 1814 jess book that presents something similar.
A young girl has just been given a Kuzazoshi as a new year gift, and another person, most likely an adult, offers to read it aloud to her. And first, they read the pictures. And what follows is a humorous record of what happens, a series of these understandings that arise when looking at the pictures first. So it seems to me that the question of who was able to read is inherently problematized by a formal reading that could be and was communal, a formal reading that allowed for someone to read out Kuzazoshi for someone else.
But to come back to your question, if I were really pushed to answer it, I would also urge us to keep in mind the towering number of Kuzazoshi. So they are written in the easiest form of writing, and they are a lot. Our introduction gives the figures that we have, although they are still patchy. In particular for the 19th century, really they are patchy.
But we just think about the yellow cover books produced between 1775 and 1804. We do know that more than 3,000 titles have survived. That's a lot in less than 30 years. And to me that suggests that there was a number type for these books, which in turn points to a Kuzazoshi number of readers.
Where do they get these books? As I mentioned before, you go to a bookshop and you can buy the books. You go to a lending library and you can rent a book. So the opportunities to access the books were many.
And obviously, as I mentioned already, they were cheap. So you didn't need to spend a lot of money instead of your whole of Suba. So about today, you buy your Kuzazoshi and enjoy it. And if you can't read it, somebody will read it out for you.
So everyone was quite happy. And it sounds like a wonderful situation for any book lover or a story lover. Now, for the volume, the other chapters approach the issue of Kuzazoshi from many different aspects. So how do you best volume structure it?
And what are some of the main questions that the chapters are trying to answer? Thank you. And as I said, this is a team effort. I want to give my best to really make the scholarship of our wonderful contributors that shine through what I say.
A fairly long answer to your question. So do bear with me. First, I'd like to say that the volume is construction in such a way that it can be read as one volume. It has a structure that allows that.
But also, it allows a reader to choose a specific chapter or chapters only. Now, to answer your question, the volume is organized as a coherent poll in three parts. Part one, we call it Mediality in Kuzazoshi. And it entices readers into the world of early modern Japanese graphic narratives.
It's really enticing our reader and discusses Kuzazoshi as a medium. We really struggle to think about medium versus genre. We went with medium and if you want to know more, we can discuss a little bit more, but we really struggle with this. But for us, it is a medium.
In chapter one, Elistinius meticulously reconstructs the materiality of Kuzazoshi from cover to cover, analyzing all their material components. So if you have never seen a Kuzazoshi in its original format, we check to one and you form a mental picture of a Kuzazoshi. You can just, with your imagination, feel it in your hands. And if you are a book collector, even better, because you will understand what to look at when you buy a graphic narrative from early modern Japan.
In chapter two, Pakagigian explores, as I mentioned before, the production of a Kuzazoshi. So you understand what goes on in the head of the writer until the book is printed and sold. Chapters three, four and five are reading dialogue with each other and they zero in on the multi-modal nature of Kuzazoshi. So they look at how our text and image are brought together.
And we both chronologically, Matsubara Noriko with alcohol in the red cover books, early 18th century. So the Ma Yomi moves on to Kibyoshi, yellow cover books, 1775, up until the early 19th century, and then Sato Yukiko ends with Gorkan combined blueprints into the 19th century. And the analysis of the page layout reveals a rich panoply of modulations. And really, together these chapters point to some key findings.
First, we tend to talk about the verbal text in the singular. But actually, there were many different texts. There was narrative. There were captions.
There were speech lines. And how does this do this component of all the time? How are you meant to read them? What order?
These chapters tell us all that. Second, they show that the interaction of the verbal and the visual, which is what generates meaning, I've said it many times now, are not one kind. We really have a variety of different interactions. And so we learn more about this.
And finally, these chapters tend to say that Kuzazoshi have their own visual grammar. Now, they try to unpack the visual grammar, but much more work needs to be done. And we wait for our readers to then take up the challenge and tell us more about this. So once you have read part one, you will go away having a good grasp of how Kuzazoshi was given life, how it looked like, and how you must navigate all its components, including text and image.
So you are now ready to go on to part two. So part two, we titled the pleasures of reading. And it includes the seven essays that focus on what we think are the most exciting areas of research for Kuzazoshi. Now, it's our choice, obviously, so it is very subjective and it's only partial.
In particular, we made a very conscious decision not to include anything about satire. As we discussed in the introduction, Pregas Scholarship has often identified the value of Kuzazoshi in their ability to advance social and political satire. I go back to the idea that what we expect from literature is to make us think about bigger questions. We do acknowledge that satire plays a role in some Kuzazoshi, but we resist the idea that it is a be-all and end-all of Kuzazoshi.
So we have identified other areas of research which we think are interesting. As you can imagine, seven chapters are rich body or primary sources, different avenues, it's very difficult for me to pull together some lines for you today, but I try my very best. And I think that there are three lines that emerge across the chapters. For us, many contributors in this part two looks at how Kuzazoshi set exciting cognitive challenges for the reader and how the readily pleasure derives from succeeding in that challenge.
So let me give you an example from chapter six. Chapter six, we did dare to ask Tanahashi Masahiro. And Tanahashi Masahiro is one of the scholars in Japanese academia who really opened up the study of Yellow Cup books, spending the early years of his life in reading all the surviving Kuzazoshi, Yellow Cup books, and introducing them in four volumes are, I think, the man is incredible and put it bluntly, he knows his stuff. So Tanahashi asks us to rethink how we read to the foundational Yellow Cup book, Kinkinsensei Eganayuna, listed later in Gold, Dream of Flander, published in 1775.
You will always find this title, it is the first Kibyoshi everyone talks about it. But Tanahashi meticulously illustrates how this graphic narrative, the crux of it, is a celebration of the topic of economy and economical and political reality of the time. It is no satire, there is no political attempt to change anything. It is rather a hunting expedition.
Readers are challenged to find the references. It is a game of do you get it? As much in many Yellow Cup books is just that, do you get it? The set point is explored in chapter 8.
Kibyoshi Fumiko offers a fascinating, if not unconventional journey, into one of the most celebrated Japanese artists of all time, guess who? Hoxai. And Kibyoshi works on Kuzazoshi which have been written and illustrated by Hoxai. And she works on tech that play with Proverbs.
So imagine taking a proverb, and imagine playing between the literal and the metaphorical meaning of the word. You are asked to enjoy how the gap between the literal dimension and the figurative dimension have been breached in both text and images. It's a game. It's a very witty game.
And Kibyoshi argues that humor blissfully inconsequential humor is unleashed as a result, and we also stress the fact that it is this idea of satisfaction. As a reader, either you get it or not. So there's the first line of inquiry, and really chapter 6 and 8 play along that. The second line of inquiry that emerges from part 2 is adaptation.
We know that early modern Japanese literature is intertextual at its core, so you may think, oh not again adaptation please. I always like to quote an 18th century writer Miyakonori Shiki, he has no relationship with graphic narratives, but Miyakonori Shiki tells us that, and I quote, to create the new out-of-the-ought. This is what brilliant writers do, so he was a thing to create a new out-of-the-ought. Graphic narratives were no different.
Our chapters turn in 11, probably not ties what we know about adaptation. By looking at Gorg, the latest iterations of Akus to re-calibrate how we view adaptation as theorized in Western scholarship by people like Linda Hutchin and many others. And this is part of really the beauty of early modern Japanese literature. As I said, engagement with it asks us to rethink literary theory, which is normally formulated almost solelyly on Western examples.
Let's go beyond Western examples, let's work on Japanese examples, and we will be able to rethink what we know about literary theory. This is what they are trying to do. And actually chapter 10 by my co-edical starter Yukiko does the same, these are the metaphictions, but I will not give anything away on this. And the line of inquiring part two, asked to think about Kusazoshi within a complex media ecosystem.
I like to call it a media ecosystem. In chapter 12, Sakoko Shimazaki explores the rich cross-pollination between the stage of the Kabuki theatre and the page of Kusazoshi. And she's particularly interested in how sound is given voice on the printed page. She argues that the printed page is not mute, that the printed printed page is devised in a way packaged in a way that produces sound, before sound the recording, wherever it does.
And she explores what that means in term of the reading experience. And in my own chapter, chapter 7, I positioned Kusazoshi in one site called the Ecology of Plaguesick, and explore how Kusazoshi appropriate gates, different gates, turning reading into a former play. So altogether, part two is a treasure trove for anyone who wants to be exposed to fresh research avenues. And they're hoping that we will inspire new work, as I said already, of many more primary sources that we don't look at, and our new work that brings to the four trajectories that our chapters do not explore.
There is much more there. Thousands of books are waiting for you in the archive. Just go grab them and do something brilliant with them. Now, part three, we call it approaching Kusazoshi in a global context, takes us beyond the early modern period, and explores how graphic narratives from the 18th and 19th centuries have been consumed, framed, and reconceptualized within and without Japan, Japan after the 1880s.
As I mentioned before, we do not really look at what Kusazoshi work produced, for example, in the major period, but we hope that somebody will take up the challenge. But we do have exciting chapters. For example, Chapter 13, in Chapter 13, Michael Emmerich offers a sophisticated analysis of what he calls the death of Kusazoshi, but it's not actually a death. So I would do a brain disservice in trying to propose to you this sophisticated analysis in my words, so I really urge you to go and read Chapter 13.
In Chapter 16, Glenwali delights us with roomy nations on the history of translating Kusazoshi into English, and he reminds us that any act of translation is an act of interpretation. And this is also the part where we offer some reflections on the relationship with comic books and manga. Now that we ended on the comics and manga, I want to ask you this next question because one of the most important things about Kusazoshi is that there are graphics and narratives on the same page. And for that reason, we have seen interpretations of Kusazoshi as the earliest manga in Japan.
There are, as you definitely know, different opinions about this view. So how from the viewpoint of this volume, how might we approach this view without making generalizations about these early modern works? And one quick note, how does this help us think about mediality in Kusazoshi or early modern Japanese popular literature? Thank you.
This is a very important question that really makes us rack up our brains for many, many months. And it's a rich question, so I try to answer as best as I can. If an avid reader of manga or of comic books from this century, the 20th century picks up a Kusazoshi, opens it and looks at a double-spraid, any double-spraid, then we'll see something that is familiar and yet alienated. It's somehow uncanny.
I look something I know, but I actually wait a second, really, this is not what I know, that kind of thing. So, so the Yukiko and I, as the editors, have decided to take a position and we make our opposition clear in the introduction. What we propose is to view Kusazoshi as a form of graphic narrative, multi-modal in nature, but different from comic books and manga. As you can imagine, it was really hard to translate the word Kusazoshi because literally it means grass booklets.
So at the beginning we thought, okay, and we explained actually the complexity of grass booklets, this word, in the introduction. As I mentioned, we want our reader to familiarise themselves with this word. Well, since day one, we were aware of the need to translate it into English and into a category that any 21st century West reader could easily relate to. And this is for two reasons.
First, these acts of translation makes this otherwise obscure early modern Japanese product immediately relatable in a feeling, you know, what we're talking about. And secondly, positions Japan on the global stage, avoiding any dangerous move to exoticise it is something inherently different. We don't like to do that. So after long debate and lots of readings, Sotheokiko and I decided to settle on graphic narratives.
And what made this term for us appealing is its nature depicted inherently more inclusive than let's say comics. So for example, Daniel Stein and Januel Thorne note that graphic narratives as a label is capable of encompassing different forms, forms, forms, genres and storytelling traditions across cultures from around the world. Yet we are aware that in using graphic narratives, we need to be very careful about two points. And we spell it out in the introduction.
First, we fully acknowledge that in some kusazoshi narrative, i.e. a story when the protagonists act and prove their actions they evolve, narrative plays little or no role. We have entire kusazoshi which has no narrative. So we will attempt it to go with graphic prose, but coming up with a neologism would have, neologism would have defeated the object of making this extra typology immediately relatable.
So yes, we have to accept a compromise there. The second danger that we are aware of is that in certain definitions, graphic narratives are positioned within the universal comics. For example, Hilary Schut, sorry I don't really have to pronounce her surname, and Marianne de Corven, for example, tell us that graphic narratives are book, length, works in the medium or comics. And they recognize the most basic composition in frames and gutters.
And yet kusazoshi have no frames, no gutters, they have no panels, they have no speech button. Second reality which is another cherished feature of comic books, comics, can be created across page turns, but we rarely have iconic solidarity in one, double page spread. So the degree of comic nests in kusazoshi is very low. So we use graphic narratives but not positioning kusazoshi within comics because they are never like comic features is low.
And that is why our definition, which I repeat, a form of graphic narrative, multimodal in nature but different from comics, comic books and math. Having said that, we are aware as you said that there are other views on the subject, and that is why we invited Adam Kern and Jacqueline Byrne to be part of our project. And we wanted to create the best. We wanted somebody to disagree with us on purpose, and they did it beautifully.
So first in chapter 14 Adam Kern takes the end opposite view from ours. And to be very clear, we are thrilled that he did that. This is what we asked him to do. We currently view kusazoshi as a form of comics with an X, C-O-M-I-X.
In other words, he pushes for a broad definition of comics, CS, as comics, which is the comics of words and images. We go back to multimodality. So Kern, C-O-M-I-X, is also a form of comics with comics, comics, comics, and in doing so, she argues for the decolonization of comics. That's a big thing.
And he trusts that bringing comic studies and kusazoshi studies together, we give us an opportunity to interrogate hidden assumptions of cultural hegemony. We have no doubt that this chapter was part debate among our readers, but this is precisely what we wanted. In chapter 14, Jacqueline Bent looks at the connection with manga. Story manga.
And she presents us a remarkable experiment. So Bent decides to work onto modern graphic narrative in translation, and she subjects them to what she calls a manga-esque reading. In other words, she is reading these two early modern graphic narratives from the point of view of a manga studies scholar, as you would dissect a manga story manga. And the results were actually eye-opening for us.
Bent asks us to think about aspects of visual storytelling, which are rarely taken up by us by scholars of early modern Japan. So she asks us to dissect the visual flow, to follow the gaze, to engage with the body language, and to explore the empathetic, unpathetic response enabled by the visual language. She asks us to engage with aspects that are key in manga, and the result is that, then, Bent identifies inherent differences between how story manga work and how kusazoshi work. So, on the surface they might be very similar, but actually, if you analyze kusazoshi as a manga, you realize that there are many differences.
In particular, in creating this classic connection with your readers and much more, it is also exciting in her coda that she mentions something that to me was certainly new, and I think needs urgent research. Bent in the coda suggests that illustrated novels fascia short-sitsu, and picture stories at Moruga Thari, produced between the 1930s and the 1950s, should be viewed, could be viewed, as occupying an intermediate position between kusazoshi and contemporary manga. So they suggest that kusazoshi are not the earliest manga in Japan, and we are very happy to say that, they are not the earliest manga in Japan. Then there are a form of multi-modal books that can be brought into fruitful dialogue with manga, in particular via this 1930s-1950s materials.
And we really hope that other scholars will take on more than words, and test these materials and tell us whether that works or not. So, it's not a straightforward answer, but certainly our volume brings into dialogue different views, and we think it is important to leave open different views on this topic. We did find a very fruitful connection in the research done on manga, story manga, in particular when thinking about kusazoshi as medium, and so the mediality of kusazoshi to address the last bit of your question. As I mentioned before, we really struggled.
Do we see kusazoshi as a genre? Do we see kusazoshi as a medium? We did allow both terms to be used in the chapters, and we say it in the introduction that this is what we are doing, but we also say that for us kusazoshi is a medium. And by choosing medium, we put emphasis on how the text verbal and visual is presented, so the modes of encoding, as well as on the material features of kusazoshi.
And so, this is one side of the medium. So, what are its modes of encoding and the material feature as a concrete object? But we also engage with really art historians' work, Mitchell and Hausen, with what they view as mediality, which is the communicative and social dimensions of a specific product. Looking at who produced kusazoshi, how they were distributed and consumed.
And we understand from Burns' chapters that that is also key in understanding manga. But obviously, they lead to, again, quite different results. Yes, they were conventional products, but then there are also very big differences. Our kusazoshi later on in the 19th century were serialised, but they were never magazines.
And that's a big difference, for example, with manga as we understand from chapter 14. So, I hope I addressed the issue of mediality. Even though we must say, we did struggle with coming to terms with it. Now we've spent a lot of time talking about the other authors' chapters, what about your own chapter?
Well, that's your chapter address or answer. Okay, I prefer to talk about other people's brilliant research than what I do. But if I have to answer your question, which from your face I do. So, as I said, in this chapter, I look at three kusazoshi, two later Gokan and one yellow cover book.
And I study how they appropriate contemporary games. So, one looks at how Gokan appropriates magic tricks books. So, the well books that allow you to do a magic trick, and that is appropriated in Gokan. I look at board games, and I look at visual play.
And ultimately, I argue that these three texts double up as games, confronting readers with cognitive conundrums and problematising the actual reading. We're not reading only. We're reading a story, but also playing a game. And we really go back to the idea that kusazoshi presents us with challenges, with obstacles, and we need to run with and do something with them.
And that's really their beauty. I just mentioned today the text that incorporates a board game. Because this is not a very well-known board game. It's called Jurokum Musashi.
I don't know if you ever played it. It's very different from other more famous board games. Like a lot of people know Aceurokum, but this is different. So Jurokum Musashi is a strategy game, an easy one I can play, so it's very easy.
When one player moves the so-called parent piece. And another player moves 16 so-called children pieces. And the parent piece wins when eating the children. And the children win when cornering, putting in a corner, their parent.
I see that you're laughing here. Yes, indeed. Parents eating their children cornering their parents. You can still play this game, by the way.
There is a fantastic app, and when working on this chapter, I got so... I was asked with the game. Yes, I spent a lot of time gaining rather than writing. Now, back in who is the author of the text I'm looking at, I'll pre-create this game metaphorically.
So he illustrates how wicked children-parents relationships can be. So the text so far had been dismissed like a boring piece of didactic literature that uses a board game to talk about human relationships, a metaphor for life. But in my chapter, I argue against this reading. I actually engage with the presence on the printed page in every single scene of a miniature board.
In every scene you have the scene with text and images, but then you have this spurious element of a mini board with pieces laid on it. As if they were frozen in a real life game. You might have seen the Queen's Gambit on Netflix, and there are many images of these chess boards with the pieces laid on it. If you're a player, you're meant to do something with them.
Actually, there is a website where they do something with that. It's very much seen. I explore how the presence of this visual element in every scene asks readers to do something. The answer is to stop reading and start playing.
I would like to invite you to read the chapter to discover that there is not only one kind of play enabled, but many different types of play, including going back to the board and play in order to get out of the situation that you find on the play. But that's not only the only one, the only play. So this brings me back to where we started today. This is all inconsequential.
To use an early modern Japanese term, it is muda, completely pointless, trivial, inconsequential. How can we meaningfully talk about what is inconsequential? And this is really a key question that many of our chapters address, and in doing so we want to foster appreciation of one of the chance of engaging with early modern Japanese graphic narratives. They allow us to expand our view of literature.
In my chapter, it is about gaining and reading. But there is much more. And I will not bore you any more with my chapter, but this is roughly what I do. That one's a very fun chapter to read.
I really enjoyed it. I really liked the point you brought up in the chapter. As we were talking about these chapters, another question that I thought of was the problem of translation. So in this volume, you included many scholars from Japan.
And I think the number of chapters from Japanese scholars is probably more than most of the edited volumes on early modern Japanese studies in recent years. So I do want to ask you this question about including Japanese scholarship. While we are in Japanese studies, of course, it will be impossible to not have a conversation with Japanese scholars on these subjects. So I was wondering in the process of including Japanese scholarship and possibly translating them, translating these research pieces from Japanese to English, what kind of difficulties did you run to and what were some...
How did you overcome those difficulties in translating scholarship? I lost your game? Yes, I think I lost you at the end, but I think I got the gist of your question. So first, there was one scholar, Kobayashi Fumiko, who actually wrote her piece in English, but the other were all translated from Japanese as you say.
And you may have noticed that we included the name of the translators and their old graduate students from Cambridge. But what they did, I mean, we kept their name because really they did the bulk of the work. But what we asked the students to do is to produce first for us to produce a literal translation of the chapter, an accurate, correct, and literal translation of the Japanese of these chapters. And then Yukiko and I, but Mr.
Sato and I sat down and tried to ask ourselves, does this work for an English reader of scholarship? And as we know, it is very important that we push forward an argument that goes through the whole chapter. And for us, then we initiated a dialogue back with the author in the format of meetings and discussed how we can better flesh out the argument that is running out of through the fantastic close reading of primary sources. And so it became a dialogue between us, the editors and each author in honing the English to make the argument come through.
And of course, we always wanted to achieve agreement with the author. The author had to be happy with the changes we made. So in my files, I do have raw literal translations, and then I have all the work of editing that we did on the English, which somehow sometimes is a little bit more removed, not far, a little bit more removed from the Japanese than the original raw translation. But it has been negotiated and agreed with each author.
And that was actually a fantastic learning experience because you learn how to approach a close reading that is so meticulous and rich in details, how to retain that while also making a big splash argument. So for me, it was a very humbling experience. And I must say, our authors were wonderful. Some of them said, of course, we understand it's different in English, less work together.
So it was really a hard warming and humbling experience. I'm not sure if I answered your question, but yes. Yeah, absolutely. That was really great to hear.
Yes, it was. I mean, right. I can't get so much more. I'm very happy.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
And others. So it was quite nerve-wracking at times, but so they were very understanding. So we're very helpful. We're very grateful to them.
Yeah. Sorry. Thank you. Thank you for your time and for joining us again today.
Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to present the work called our team. For while many of the chapters in this volume are too detailed and complex to be covered in this short conversation. So if our listeners want to learn more about Satoi, make sure to check out this new volume, graphic narratives from early on in Japan, the world of Kusa Doshi, edited by Laura Moretti and Satoi Yukiko. It's currently available in hardcovering ebook.
You can also find a discount code on the page of this episode of the new books now. This is Jeannie Lee. Stay tuned and I'll see you next time.