Kyokutei Bakin’s Philological Research and the Writing of Historical Narrative

Abstract

Chinsetsu yumiharizuki 椿説弓張月(The Marvelous Story of the Drawn-Bow Moon, 1807–1811) enjoys a long-lasting popularity among Kyokutei Bakin’s 曲亭馬琴 (1767–1848) readership and has also been the subject of numerous scholarly studies and commentaries. Among these, Gotō Tanji’s 後藤丹治 edition, published in 1958 and 1962, laid the foundation for contemporary source criticism.1 Since then the identification of hypotexts has been considerably expanded and refined, ranging from Cui Xianglan’s 崔香蘭 excavation of new Chinese sources to Miyake Hiroyuki’s 三宅宏幸 focus on Edo-period editions of medieval sources—to name only two recent examples.2 But as Glynne Walley has pointed out in his review of the scholarship on Nansō Satomi hakkenden 南総里見八犬伝 (The Lives of the Eight Dogs of the Nansō Satomi, 1814–1842), locating sources is an endless and sometimes sterile task, because it does not always answer the hows and whys.3 Why was a source selected in the first place? How was it adapted, and for what purpose? This process of adaptation or transposition has often been understood within the framework of the sekai/shukō aesthetic derived from the dramatic arts.4 In kabuki 歌舞伎 or jōruri Kyokutei Bakin’s Philological Research and the Writing of Historical Narrative: Study of the Izu Islands in the Marvelous Story of the Drawn-Bow Moon