Bakumatsu no gōkan (Gōkan at the End of the Shogunate - the Death and Reincarnation of Edo Literature)

Gōkan (combined booklets) were a type of illustrated popular fiction published in 19^th-century Edo (Tokyo in the Meiji period). Almost every page bore an illustration, with text written into the blank spaces around these pictures. Readers would look at these illustrations as they read the text.
 
This intermingling of text and illustration on the gōkan’s pages was enabled by woodblock printing, wherein pages are printed from ink applied to woodblocks. With the rise of letterpress printing in the Meiji period (1868–1912), the gōkan declined. However, popular works and characters have been incorporated into other media such as kabuki and manga, surviving to the present day. Positioning gōkan as a source of present-day popular culture is one argument put forth in this book.
 
This book is composed of four parts. Part One outlines important information necessary for analyzing gōkan. Chapter One discusses the gōkan’s subject matter and distinctive creative methods while giving an overview of the history of the genre, covering the appearance of the gōkan in the Bunka period (1804–1818) through the creation of Jiraiya Gōketsu Monogatari (The Tale of Gallant Jiraiya), a long-form gōkan, in the Tempō period (1830–1844). Chapter Two considers how the gōkan has been treated as an object of literary research, tracing developments from the early Meiji period through the present day. Readers who have never read a gōkan will be able to gain a general understanding of the genre by reading Part One.
 
Parts Two and Three contain studies of Jiraiya Gōketsu Monogatari and Shiranui Monogatari (The Tale of Shiranui), respectively. Jiraiya Gōketsu Monogatari centers on the titular Jiraiya, who uses toad magic; the three-way stalemate between Jiraiya, Orochimaru, and Tsunade is one highlight of this work. Shiranui Monogatari is partially based on a jitsuroku (a written account of real-world events), Kuroda Sōdō (The Kuroda Affair), and features Princess Wakana, who uses spider magic. Although both works are representative end-of-Edo-period gōkan, neither has been sufficiently studied. This book explains the appeal of these gōkan, shedding light on them from numerous angles such as their subject matter, structure, and method of long-form storytelling.
 
Part Four’s theme is “transcending boundaries”. Chapters One and Two cover the transcendence of genre boundaries, e.g. between kabuki and gōkan, yomihon and gōkan, etc. Chapters Three and Four consider the problem of how the fantastical is joined together with period-accurate realism within a gōkan. Chapter Five discusses various works that draw on Jiraiya Gōketsu Monogatari as source material, such as shōroku (extracts), kōdan (oral storytelling), manga, and kabuki.
 
In this book, I reframe the phenomenon of stories and characters being recreated through their incorporation into other genres and media as the “reincarnation” of fiction. This perspective is not limited to novels such as gōkan; it is effective for discussions of a variety of genres. How does fiction that “reincarnates” differ from fiction that fails to do so? What is the driving force behind this “reincarnation”? I hope to provide answers to these questions in this book.
 

(Written by SATO Yukiko, Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology / 2025)