An Edo Anthology features selections from literary sources produced in the late Edo period (1750–1850) organized thematically in six sections: “Playboys, Prostitutes, and Lovers”; “Ghosts, Monsters, and Deities”; “Heroes, Rogues, and Fools”; “City and Country Folks”; “Artists and Poets”; and “Tourists and Onlookers.” Virtually every genre is represented: from sentimental books (ninjōbon) to funny ones (kokkeibon), from poetry (senryū, haikai, waka) to comic sermons (dangibon), from kabuki plays to books of manners (sharebon), and more. Flipping through its pages is like entering an imaginary salon where the Who's Who of late Edo-period writers, playwrights, and poets have gathered to revisit their masterpieces: here is Shikitei Sanba ventriloquizing the idiosyncratic patrons of the downtown barbershop (The Floating World Barbershop, 1813–14), there is Santō Kyōden mocking the wannabe connoisseur of the pleasure district (Playboy, Grilled Edo Style, 1785); in one corner Karai Senryū derides lustful clerics (“the priest / admits to the courtesan, / ‘There's no such thing as hell’”; p. 331) and spendthrift townsmen (“as for saving money: / the true Edoite / is disabled from birth”; p. 340), in the other Hiraga Gennai salutes the talented Ryōgoku fart artist (On Farting, 1774). Lined up around the block is the entire catalogue of Edo urban types—the high-end courtesan and the street hooker, the man-about-town and the quack doctor, the self-important samurai and the pompous ass who channels Confucius (“Everybody calls him . . . Conphheww-shit”; p. 373)—so that the imaginary salon echoes with peddlers' cries and smug harangues, screaming brawls and poetic ditties.
Iconoclastic humor is this anthology's first gift to its readers. Nothing is sacred: not Buddhist sermons, not Daoist parables, not the revered tradition of poetic travel (here turned into the adventures of lice crawling toward a young boy's private parts in Gennai's A Lousy Journey of Love, 1783), and certainly not the protocols and policies of the day and age—mocked more or less indirectly to avoid censorship, but mocked no less. Having said this, the anthology also includes a straightforward attack on the “monster magistrate” Tsuchiya Masasuke and, by extension, on the administration of the shogun Ieshige (pp. 108–9); its author, Baba Bunkō, was the only Edo-period writer to be executed for violating publication laws. Also, not all entries are about quick wits and slapstick; some are dark (Epic Yotsuya Ghost Tale, 1825) and some mostly pedantic (The Tale of the Eight Dog Warriors of the Satomi Clan, 1814–42).
The second gift of An Edo Anthology is the faithful reproduction of the original woodblock pages from “yellow books” (kibyōshi) in which the English translation replaces the original text. This editorial choice not only does great justice to such works as the aforementioned Playboy, Grilled Edo Style by Kyōden, Jippensha Ikku's The Monster Takes a Bride (1807), and Shiba Zenkō's hysterical Thousand Arms of Goddess, Julienned (1785), but also makes for a visually rich and, for lack of a better term, satisfyingly “organic” experience. For similar reasons, I found Alan Cumming's translation of Kawatake Mokuami's Benten the Thief (1862), which incorporates stage directions, equally effective in enabling the modern reader to approximate the feel of the Edo-period spectator.
Reproducing the illustrations may have posed an editorial challenge, but not one as colossal as rendering these works into unencumbered English. The editors and translators are to be commended for decoding an encyclopedia's worth of puns, wacky innuendos, “double and triple entendre[s]” (p. 283), riddles, vernacular expressions, intertextual references, and allusions to events past and present, and for delivering texts that flow smoothly and—most importantly—that elicit nearly as many giggles now as they did then; consider it the anthology's third gift. Those familiar with the originals will appreciate the amount of work carried out behind the scenes; everyone else will “just” enjoy the ride.
For a collection of “Literature from Japan's Mega-City” (“the hotbed for the production of this literature and its greatest market”; p. ix), An Edo Anthology includes selections whose place within popular culture writ large is clear, but whose connection to the urban spaces of Edo is not as immediate. For example, the growing taste for “the tragicomic or bittersweet” and for “a blemished humanity” (p. 341) is illustrated by way of a tirade against Kyoto (Dōmyaku Sensei, “The Housemaid's Ballad” and Other Poems); representing the appreciation for accounts of the eerie and uncanny are Tadano Makuzu's Tales from the North (1818); poems featuring stalks of frozen daikon in Okazaki (p. 418) and lowly Tottori fishermen (p. 417) indicate how humor and everyday scenes of commercial activities had (re-)infiltrated the world of waka. I do not cite this as a weakness but, in fact, as the book's fourth gift: by expanding the sensitivities borne out of the mega-city beyond its borders, An Edo Anthology effectively illustrates the strength and range of Edo's gravitational pull.
For its overall quality and its breadth of coverage, An Edo Anthology will provide a treasure-trove of references, readings, food for thought, and comic relief to scholars, instructors, and students of Edo literature, history, and culture for generations to come.
