Sharebon

Sharebon (洒落本), which can be roughly translated as "book of manners", was a pre-modern Japanese literary genre, produced during the middle of the Edo period from the 1720s all the way to the end of the 18th century.

[1] According to James Araki, Yūshi Hōgen (c. 1770), or "The Playboy Dialect," by an anonymous author whose signature reads Inaka Rojin Tada no Jijii ('Plain Old Codger, an Old Man from the backwoods')[1] is the work that established the conventional structural and stylistic pattern for the sharebon.

Yūshi Hōgen combined dramatic dialogue with the satire of Edo-based Dangibon to create the form that typifies sharebon as a genre.

[1] The goal of the sharebon was to simultaneously satirize and showcase the floating world of Yoshiwara, a licensed district that was wholly separate from everyday life and society.

The pleasure quarters themselves had a myriad of rules and customs and to know how to conduct oneself in this world was to be considered a Tsujin (man of Tsu) a sophisticate or connoisseur.

However, sharebon largely focused on the Half Tsu, satirizing his attempts at connoisseurship and emphasizing his inability to achieve this social and aesthetic ideal.

Santō Kyōden, "the leading writer of fiction at the end of the eighteenth century," wrote a number of important sharebon, which moved the genre away from describing the Tsu and half-Tsu dichotomy and focused more on the emotional consequences of the relationships formed between the male customers and female courtesans of the licensed quarters.

For example, Kokuga's Keiseikai Futasujimichi, which argues that a courtesan's affection is more easily obtained by an ugly older man because "his feelings are deeper and purer," lacks the satirical mockery of connoisseurship that previously defined the genre and instead focuses on sentimentality, emotions, and sincerity.

[7] This shift in attitude and the general decline of the sharebon genre eventually "gave way to the ninjōbon in response to popular demand for sustained stories with greater depth of character.