Bulletin of Portuguese - Japanese Studies ISSN: 0874-8438
[email protected] Universidade Nova de Lisboa Portugal Fables and imitations. Kirishitan Literature in the Forest of Simple Letters Bulletin of Portuguese - Japanese Studies, núm. 4, june, 2002, pp. 9 - 36 Universidade Nova de Lisboa Lisboa, Portugal Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=36100402 How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative BPJS, 2002, 4, 9 - 36 FABLES AND IMITATIONS Kirishitan Literature in the Forest of Simple Letters J.S.A. Elisonas Indiana University and Williams College The great and floribund forest of traditional Japanese literature is occupied among other creatures large and small by the profuse but amor- phous species designated kanazôshi, a name that almost literally means feuil- letons in simple letters—or, if I may try to be more precise and Portuguese, folhinhas com letras simples japonesas.1 It is a taxonomic category that appears in histories of Japanese literature as the pre-eminent prose form of the first eight decades of the seventeenth century. Indeed, almost all of Japanese prose written between 1600, the beginning of the Tokugawa epoch, and 1682, when Ihara Saikaku’s Kôshoku ichidai otoko (The Man Who Spent His Life in Lovemaking), a new kind of novel, was published, is ordinarily entered wholesale under the label kanazôshi. In some chronologies the origin of this species is associated directly with the emergence of a print culture in the 1590s and is therefore set a few years before 1600, the epochal date of poli- tical history.