Santō Kyōden
Kyōden's works were affected by the shifting publication laws of the Kansei Reforms which aimed to punish writers and their publishers for writings related to the Yoshiwara and other things that were deemed to be "harmful to society" at the time by the Tokugawa Bakufu.
During the 1790s, Santō Kyōden became a household name and one of his works could sell as many as 10,000 copies, numbers that were previously unheard of for the time.
He had one younger brother, Iwase Momoki (岩瀬 百樹) who later became a famous writer under the name Santō Kyōzan.
[1][3] Ukiyo-e Kyōden began his career by studying ukiyo-e or woodblock prints which typically depicted "the floating world" of the Yoshiwara under Kitao Shigemasa (北尾 重政), and began illustrating kibyōshi under the pseudonym Kitao Masanobu (北尾 政寅).
In this work the main character, Enjirō, is drawn with a pig's nose that became a distinctive feature of Kyōden's illustrations.
At the end of Edo umare uwaki no kabayaki, it turns out that Enjirō commissioned Kyōden to write his story.
[1] Kyōden continued to write kibyōshi until the eventual decline of the genre due to censorship laws during the Kansei Reforms.
David Atherton, assistant Professor of East Asian languages and civilizations at Harvard University, in his essay The Author as Protagonist claims that the works were "deemed to contain indecent material" and Kyōden's punishment reflected a "moral connection between author and book that differentiated his position from the others that were punished.
"[2] During the Kansei Reforms, the bakufu tried to hold artists and publishers accountable for works that they considered to be "harmful to society" for various reasons, such as depicting the Yoshiwara.
Adam Kern, professor of Japanese literature and visual culture at the University of Wisconsin, in his extensive thesis Blowing Smoke: Tobacco pouches, literary squibs, and authorial puffery in the pictorial comic fiction, argues that Kyōden was punished not because of the material present within Kyōden's sharebon, but because of a technicality.
During the Kansei Reforms, however, writers and publishers were required to display their names on the cover of the book, something which Kyōden and had failed to do with the three offending sharebon.
[3] Immediately following his punishment, Tsutaju issued a public apology and admitted that he pressured Kyōden into releasing those works.
Yomihon are known for being large scale and for being more dramatic and didactic rather than episodic and humorous like many of the works Kyōden had previously written.
In the autumn of that year, Kyokutei Bakin, who would later go on to write Nansō Satomi Hakkenden, or "Tale of Eight Dogs," was made Kyōden's apprentice.
Adam Kern argues that most of the writers during this time were more concerned with establishing themselves as an identifiable brand first and then writing derivative literature.
As Adam Kern states, "most denizens of Edo in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Japan would have recognized the Kyōden name as that of the best selling author of numerous genres of light fiction.
In response to his competitors knock-offs of his products, Kyōden began giving out handbills with rebuses, or puzzles where words are represented through both pictures and letters.
[20] However, in Japanese one of his advertisements reads "announcing [the goods] on sale this weekend" (kono setsu uridashi mōshi sōrō).
[20] Charlotte Eubanks, a professor of comparative literature, Japanese, and Asian studies at Penn State University, argues in her article Visual vernacular: rebus, reading and urban culture in early modern Japan that in setting up his advertisements this way Kyōden "takes the distant and makes it close, turning the pandering tone of the business solicitation into a shared joke, bringing the niceties of language down to street level, and asserting the novel appeal of the vulgar.
"[20] In juxtaposing these two ideas together, Kyōden is able to take what would've been a straightforward and plain advertisement and turn it into something more memorable and do so in a way that would appeal to common folk at the time.
"[20] Kyōden's advertisement employs mitate by combining the higher more formal language with the lower, less refined streetwalker.
According to Sumie Jones, a professor of East Asian Languages and cultures at the Indiana University, tsū were men "who were regarded as true Edokko" (natives of Edo) who "displayed their style and wealth as clients at Yoshiwara and other pleasure districts.
[3] While this isn't anything impressive today, the idea of "affixing a courtesan's name to her portrait" was a recent innovation according to Adam Kern.
[3] On top of this, Kern also states that it seems that collecting courtesans autographs had become a "fashionable hobby" of the time and the letters within Kyōden's work had become one of the "most sought-after" mementos of the Yoshiwara.
Within his work, the main character Enjirō, pays off many different people including news criers and numerous Geisha to try and spread the word that he is a tsū.
The ending of the story is similar to what happened in Kyōden's own life, as Enjirō winds up marrying Ukina and living happily together.
[1] According to Jane Devitt, professor of Japan/Australia relations at the University of Melbourne, Kyōden "married Okiku who completed her indenture at the Ogiya in the Yoshiwara in the winter of 1789.
"[3] Unlike Okiku, though, Yuri had not yet completed her indenture, so Kyōden paid a sum of twenty ryō to redeem her.
[3][1] Bakin claims that Kyōden had originally planned on adopting Yuri's younger brother, but he died at the age of twenty.
[3] However, Mizuno Minoru, a researcher of early modern Japanese literature, claims that Kyōden died of a heart attack.
