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CITY AND COUNTRY FOLKS 349 prominence. The housemaid, perhaps, has succumbed to more than just a general inclination of finery and peacock display: by confusing at every turn ostentatiousness with true cultivation, she has become emblematic of the city in its decadence. translated by Andrew Markus  4 %.  2 SHIKITEI SANBA Illustrated by Utagawa Kuninao Z The core of the “funny books” (kokkeibon) corpus is a series of texts that began appearing in the early 1800s, filling the comic prose niche, which had been left empty since the decline of the “books of manners” (sharebon) and “yellow books” (kibyōshi) genres in the wake of the Kansei Reforms of the 1790s. Among the most notable writers in this genre were the professionals Jippensha Ikku, creator of the mega-bestseller Along the Tōkaidō Highway on Foot, and Shikitei Sanba, the author of the comic work introduced here. The prolific Sanba was himself a product of the Edo townsman milieu he delighted in depicting. Many of the characters in his works as well as their speech patterns represent typical nineteenth-century Edokko in their positive and negative aspects. Sanba is remembered principally for his kokkeibon, especially The Floating World Bathhouse and The Floating World Barbershop.* In the World of Men, Nothing But Lies (Ningen Banji Uso Bakkari, two volumes, 1813) was published in the same year as the first volume of The Floating World Barbershop and was sufficiently popular to inspire the creation of a sequel by Ryūtei Rijō, published in 1832. Unlike the kokkeibon of Ikku and others, which generally include at least a semblance of a fictive plot, however loose and episodic, the structure of Sanba’s best-known kokkeibon tends to be focused on character types and speech styles. This book, like several others by Sanba, features ironic pairs of monologuesinwhichspeakersvaryinginage,gender,occupation,status,and temperament reveal how their innermost thoughts are actually in diametric opposition to what they say in social situations. Each speaker characterizes himself or herself in a distinctive voice, giving full play to Sanba’s acute sensitivity to linguistic, social, and psychological nuance. Although lacking in narrative tension, these works were much appreciated by his Edo readership, which never seemed to tire of the vivid and precise rendering of such details. 350 CITY AND COUNTRY FOLKS Their humor is often based on the presentation of the speakers’ foibles and pretensions, which are characteristically revealed as much through their linguistic peculiarities as through their actions. Such revelations fit directly into the gesaku writers’ interest in exposing and probing the discrepancies between surface appearances (omote) and concealed realities (ura). They also typify the value that gesaku writers and readers placed on the quality known as ugachi, the penetrating or incisive observation of significant but easily overlooked elements of a character, situation, or institution. Humorous character portrayal based on lively colloquial voices and keenly honed depiction of realistic detail had already been conspicuous features of the earlier sharebon genre. But where the sharebon had focused on the rarefied customs, language, and tastes of pleasure quarter connoisseurs and courtesans, the kokkeibon regularly featured characters drawn from the middle and lower ranges of the urban merchant class, portrayed in idioms and situations familiar to a broader, less sophisticated readership. IntheWorldofMen,NothingButLiesconsistsofaformalprefacefollowed by six illustrated sections, each featuring Utagawa Kunisada’s caricature of the speaker along with a vivid monologue or dialogue in highly colloquial style depicting a particular variety of “lie” followed by a soliloquy labeled “the truth,” in which the speakers reveal what was really on their minds at the time, or their second thoughts on later reflection. Each section depicts a particular character type (the scheming freeloader, the boastfully nostalgic old-timer, the resentful mother-in-law, etc.) whose conventionalized traits would be readily recognized by contemporary readers. Five of the sections are translated here. The third of the original six, “The Lies of Men of Elegance” (Gajin no Uso), is a dialogue between two would-be gentlemen of refined taste out on a snow-viewing excursion, followed by soliloquies in which they confess that after all it is far better to be warm and comfortable at home than cold and miserable in the snow. The objects of Sanba’s satire here would have been instantly identified by his Edo readers as “pseudo-sophisticates” (hankatsū), a type frequently lampooned in sharebon works such as Playboy Lingo and kibyōshi such as Playboy , Grilled Edo Style, the latter of which is included in this anthology. This section has...

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