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

In the present volume, Adam L. Kern undertakes the challenging task of presenting the first comprehensive introduction in a Western language to the world of the kibyōshi, a fully illustrated form of Edo literature named after its yellow cover. Despite its popularity and financial success, illustrated literature of the Edo period was long ignored by Japanese and Western scholars. The hybrid character of these works that use words and pictures to tell a story was doubtless the main reason for their fatal dismissal by the academic discipline of National Literature (kokubungaku) as popular entertainment of little literary worth. Quite recently, modern manga studies have "rediscovered" Edo's illustrated literature as a precursor of the modern manga, but much of what has been published on this subject falls within the category of impressionistic essays (hyōron). An academic study such as the present volume is thus highly welcome.

Kern takes as his subject the kibyōshi's "socioeconomic and historical contexts, readerships, 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). The book is divided into two parts: a study of kibyōshi (part 1) and translations (part 2). After a brief glance at previous studies of kibyōshi in the introduction, chapter 1, "The Floating World in An'ei-Tenmei Edo" provides a comprehensive overview of the genre. Written mainly by male adult samurai for pleasure-quarter-frequenting juvenile or adult townsmen (including low-ranking samurai as well as merchants), the kibyōshi was a mass-produced, highly commercial, visual-verbal comicbook format that, in some respects, shows astonishing similarities to modern book production. Mutual influences between kibyōshi and a variety of other literary genres and mass media (kabuki theater, for example) within the Edo intellectual and cultural network were responsible, as the author convincingly shows, for the extensive intertextual and intermedial allusions found in most kibyōshi, allusions that the real connoisseurs of Edo's savoir-vivre could recognize and appreciate.

An investigation of the cultural environment of the kibyōshi follows in the second chapter, "The Blossom of Pulp Fiction." Looking at different kinds of literature such as the mock-sermon book (dangibon), fashion book (sharebon), or review book (hyōbanki), poetry such as madcap verse (kyōka) or comic haiku (senryū), and performing arts such as story-telling (kōdan), kabuki, or puppet theater, the author points out many elements that can be considered sources of the kibyōshi's visual and textual features. Although this detailed survey considers very different kinds of cultural "influences" on the shaping of the genre, the chapter, for no obvious reason, does not take a close look at the "grass booklet" (kusazōshi), a comicbook format (with a similar way of presenting text and picture on every page!) that the kibyōshi is generally counted among.

Chapter 3, "Manga Culture and the Visual-Verbal Imagination," is, judging from the title, the heart of the present volume. The starting point of this chapter is the assumption found in some treatises on manga history that the kibyōshi was the direct precursor of the modern manga. Kern points out correctly that the major factor underlying this assumption has been the desire to legitimize modern manga through the construct of a transhistorical manga culture. His critique of the connections that have been drawn between kibyōshi and manga is not really convincing, however. Manga studies have not, as he suggests, emphasized the element of pornography as the basis for a genealogy linking kibyōshi and manga so much as the aspects of satire (fūshi), deformation (deforume), and abbreviation (shōryaku), which Kern himself identifies as fundamental characteristics of kibyōshi. While acknowledging some "obvious" similarities between the kibyōshi...