Restaging the Forty-Seven Rōnin: Performance and Print in Late Eighteenth-Century Japan

Performance and print enjoyed a complicated but productive relationship in early modern Japan. An examination of a 1796 parody of the popular play Chūshingura, or A Treasury of Loyal Retainers (1748), shows printed pictorial fiction to rely heavily on kabuki visuality, performance practice, and even specific actors and productions. At the same time, such works are richly allusive, witty, and multivalent texts in their own right. Kabuki and other forms of performance are appropriated as organizing principles, but the end result is a unique performance in itself—one that, in the parody considered, weaves together many of the diverse strands of Japan’s eighteenth century.