Distribution Poetics: Ihara Saikaku and the Literature of the Marketplace

Abstract Late 17th-century Japan saw the unprecedented commercialization of woodblock-printed texts, as urban publishing communities steadily integrated into interregional networks and newly literate populations joined the reading public. In this context, entrepreneurial booksellers developed new forms of commercial print to address a geographically differentiated and socially stratified book marketplace. One of these forms was the ukiyozōshi (floating world booklets): collections of short fiction, pioneered by the Osaka-based merchant writer Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693), that fused the intellectual sophistication of serious books ( shomotsu ) with the popular appeal and accessibility of vernacular booklets ( sōshi ). This article uses a bibliographic study of Saikaku’s Nippon eitaigura (Japan’s eternal storehouse, 1688) to illuminate how popular fiction evolved as print commercialized. Building on Jerome McGann’s ‘socialization of the text’, it argues that Saikaku’s writing was both product and agent of the process of commercialization, shaped by the distribution networks through which books circulated just as it pushed those networks in new directions. Examining the initial printings of Nippon eitaigura , the article traces the mutual imbrication of literary text and commercial context at the level of print format, paratext, style and narrative, showing that an awareness of distribution networks and audiences is necessary for interpreting Saikaku’s idiosyncratic textuality.