Graphic Narratives from Early Modern Japan: Reshaping the Field

Part of a formidable publishing industry, cheap yet eye-catching graphic narratives consistently charmed early modern Japanese readers for around two hundred years, from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. These booklets were called kusazōshi (lit. “grass books”). Multimodal in essence, kusazōshi combine images and words asking the reader to negotiate the complex interactions of these different modes on the page. Graphic Narratives from Early Modern Japan: The World of Kusazōshi (Brill 2024), co-edited with Prof Satō Yukiko (The University of Tokyo), is the first English-language publication to investigate this textual typology in the round.

In this book-launch Prof Moretti explores the intellectual ambition behind the volume. The first half of the talk touches upon key features of kusazōshi as they emerge from the edited volume and offers reflections on how kusazōshi align with but also differ from manga and comics. In the second half the speaker delves into how the volume reshapes the field of Kusazōshi Studies, engaging with questions that lie at the heart of literary studies and literary theory. You will also have an opportunity to enjoy a selection of originals housed in the personal collection of the speaker.

Laura Moretti is Professor of Early Modern Japanese Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. Her research focusses on Japanese popular literature and culture from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Moretti’s projects are inherently interdisciplinary, placed at the intersection of literature, art history, book history, and textual scholarship. She has published widely in English and Japanese, including Recasting the Past: An Early Modern Tales of Ise for Children (Brill, 2016) and Pleasure in Profit: Popular Prose in Seventeenth-Century Japan (Columbia University Press, 2020).
 
Every year she runs the Mitsubishi Corporation Summer School in Early Modern Japanese Palaeography, which trains the new generations of scholars in decoding, transcribing, and translating early modern manuscripts and woodblock-printed texts.