Pleasure in Profit: Popular Prose in Seventeenth-Century Japan by Laura Moretti (review)

Anyone who has ever tried to come to terms with the vast corpus of seventeenth-century Japanese woodblock-printed books will recognize the tremendous achievement of Laura Moretti's Pleasure in Profit. Her work, which she describes as a study of "the Great Unread of seventeenth-century popular prose in Japan" (p. 4), grapples with a host of seemingly intractable problems that are all too familiar to students and scholars of early modern Japanese literature: What are the bounds of the literary in a seventeenth-century Japanese cultural context? What is the place of works of discontinuous, nonnarrative prose, including instructional manuals, guidebooks, doctrinal treatises, miscellanies, and the plethora of narrative/nonnarrative hybrid publications that resist classification? Who could read, and who could read what? And what is the nature and significance of authorship in a world of powerful, profit-driven publishers? Moretti addresses all of these questions and more, marshalling theory and data to chart new conceptual paths through a sea of early modern books.

Pleasure in Profit focuses on works published in the seventy- to eighty-year period from the Kan'ei era (1624–1644) to the end of the seventeenth century, an age known to most literary scholars today as that of kanazōshi, a vague and anachronistic term for a diversity of vernacular prose in the relatively accessible kana syllabary. Kanazōshi have been poorly regarded by Japanese and Western critics alike, who since around the Meiji period have tended to celebrate the emergence, in the 1680s, of the ukiyozōshi of the haikai poet and author Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693) as one of the great literary events of the time. (Ukiyozōshi, or "fiction of the floating world," is a likewise anachronistic term for a body of published prose works that supposedly succeeded kanazōshi.) As an avid reader, collector, and bibliographer of seventeenth-century woodblock-printed books, Moretti takes a stand against this conventional and generally simplistic judgment, pointing out the folly in "the received view that most publications of the time were either poorly formed entertainment or dismal didactic things, waiting to be swept away by a brilliant development late in the century." Her goal is nothing less than the rehabilitation of nearly eighty years' worth of works that previous scholars such as Richard Lane and Noda Hisao "have dismissed, silenced, trivialized, or discredited" due to their perceived failings on the basis of what she describes as inappropriate narrative criteria (p. 7).

Moretti's task is Herculean—impossible, even, given the thousands of works that she might seek to explore—but she handles it with grace, wit, intelligence, and aplomb. The resulting study is highly sophisticated, thoroughly researched, and extremely well written. Moretti draws on a wide range of primary sources in various linguistic and orthographic registers, and she cites secondary scholarship in English, French, German, Italian, and Japanese, taking special care to identify her own positionality vis-à-vis her Japanese and Western peers. Inspired by Franco Moretti's notions of "distant reading," she draws on a number of seventeenth-century booksellers' catalogues and Oka Masahiko's exhaustive surveys of book colophons to provide a broad, statistically driven analysis of Japanese publishing trends and booksellers' genres. Also following more traditional practices of close reading, she examines selected works in particular publishing categories to illuminate the broader world of books that she seeks to reclaim. In the process, she provides essential and previously unexplored context for properly understanding such relatively well-known works as Usuyuki monogatari (The Tale of Usuyuki), Ikkyū shokoku monogatari (Tales of Ikkyū from All the Provinces), and Chikusai, as well as some of the more famous works of Asai Ryōi (d. 1691) and Saikaku. By articulating a vision for moving "beyond aesthetically pleasing fiction" in order "to recover other voices that have been silenced in previous literary histories" (p. 12), Moretti pushes the fuzzy boundaries of what most contemporary scholars consider...