The Author as Protagonist: Professionalizing the Craft of the Kusazōshi Writer

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the now-canonical authors Santō Kyōden, Jippensha Ikku, and Shikitei Sanba produced a handful of kusazōshi (a form of heavily illustrated popular fiction) in which the main character is the author and the plot concerns his struggle to write the book in the reader's hands. Despite their relevance to the study of early modern commercial authorship, these works have received little sustained scholarly attention. In this article, I analyze how the authors used various representational strategies to showcase their creation of books. Situating their books within a broader history of transformations in the role of the kusazōshi writer and the conception of his work, I argue that they reveal an effort to shift earlier perceptions of kusazōshi writing as a supplementary or amateurish pursuit and to characterize it instead as a unique form of professional labor. Collectively, these books constitute a rare, sophisticated overview of the dynamics of authorial creativity in kusazōshi.