Ueda Akinari

[2] Born to an Osaka prostitute and an unknown father, Ueda was adopted in his fourth year by a wealthy merchant who reared him in comfort and provided him with a good education.

Throughout his life he remained a strong believer in the supernatural, and this belief seems to inform important elements of his literature and scholarship such as his most famous work, a collection of ghost stories titled Ugetsu Monogatari.

This work places Ueda alongside Takizawa Bakin among the most prominent writers of yomihon — a new genre that represented a dramatic change in reading practices from the popular fiction that came before it.

Ueda took a highly independent position within these circles, and his vigorous polemical dispute with the leading scholar of the movement, Motoori Norinaga, is recorded in the latter's dialogue Kagaika (呵刈葭 1787–1788).

In the years after his wife's death in 1798 he experienced temporary blindness, and although eventually sight returned to his left eye from that point on he had to dictate much of his writing.