Manga from the Floating Word: Comicbook Culture and the Kibyōshi of Edo Japan (review)

Manga from the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and the Kibyōshi of Edo Japan is a delightful introduction to the genre of illustrated popular fiction known as kibyōshi, described by Adam Kern as an irresistible “little yellow comic book” (p. 4). Kibyōshi captured the “visual-verbal imagination” of readers seeking to valorize and emulate the most urbane and profane aspects of life in Japan’s bustling capital city of Edo in the eighteenth century. While the composition and original production of these yellow-covered booklets flourished for little more than a decade, their popularity was so intense that near the end of the eighteenth century, “kibyōshi may have been one of the most widely read forms of popular literature—if not literature in general—up to that point in Japanese literary history” (p. 56). Kern, associate professor of Japanese literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, also points out, though all too briefly, that some of the most influential writers of the late Edo period, including Takizawa Bakin (1767–1848), Shikitei Sanba (1776–1822), and Jippensha Ikku (1765–1831), experimented with the genre early in their careers (p. 7). His comprehensive account of this relatively narrow, and among English-language studies largely overlooked, genre provides readers with a glimpse of the variegated world of Edo’s urban commoner culture from the inside out. Most admirably, Kern’s book conveys, through expansive research in part 1 (chapters 1–4) and adroit translation in part 2 (chapters 5–7), what made Edo readers laugh.

Kern’s study, building on scholarship in Japanese by Mizuno Minoru, Mori Senzō, and most recently by Tanahashi Masahiro in his monumental Kibyōshi sōran (Nihon shoshigaku taikei, Seishōdō Shoten, 1986–2006), extends to incorporate topics such as woodblock printing and manuscript production, visual and verbal puns, and the conventions of theater and performance arts. This analysis is complemented by illustrations and generous captions gracing nearly every other page (128 illustrations in all, with 10 in color) in the book’s first section. For example, Kern not only explains that kibyōshi were not “as a rule issued serially” but also juxtaposes this point with the prized image of an extant coverslip or “bag stasher” (fukurozashi) in which kibyōshi were sometimes sold to keep individual fascicles together as a set (pp. 38–39). Kern’s insightful description of the fukurozashi as a “delicately decorative shell” provides valuable contextualization for how individual kibyōshi, which Kern describes as no more than a “floppy pamphlet” (p. 38), were read in the Edo period. This additional context and physical description helps to account for the ad hoc connections readers tend to seek, and often find lacking, in the neatly bound and ordered versions of these texts as they are read today. Our appreciation for the idiosyncratic world of popular culture in eighteenth-century Japan is made all the richer thanks to Kern’s painstaking efforts to integrate literary analysis with a presentation of the material and visual culture in which kibyōshi flourished.

The tactical decision to equate manga with kibyōshi in the book’s title is understandable and bound to capture the attention of many readers. Major bookstores across the United States now feature entire sections devoted to manga, with dozens of titles translated from the Japanese shelved alongside manga written in English. This commercial success has been accompanied by an interest in graphic novels, comic books, and their connection to Japanese culture and literary history. Kern capitalizes on the ubiquity of this new global literary genre by offering readers “an introduction to the kibyōshi, its socioeconomic and historical contexts, readership, critics, narrative conventions, modes of visuality, history as a genre and a media and a format, relationship to the modern manga as well as to other genres of Edo’s popular literature, comic spirit, and satire” (p. 12).

Chapters...