Pleasure in Profit: Popular Prose in Seventeenth-Century Japan by Laura Moretti

Abstract

Reviewed by: Pleasure in Profit: Popular Prose in Seventeenth-Century Japan by Laura Moretti David J. Gundry (bio) Pleasure in Profit: Popular Prose in Seventeenth-Century Japan. By Laura Moretti. Columbia University Press, 2020. xvi, 416 pages. $140.00, cloth; $40.00, paper; $39.99, E-book. Encompassing histories of publishing, literacy, and letter-writing as well as close readings of a wide range of hitherto little-known texts, Laura Moretti's Pleasure in Profit is a must-read for students of Japanese literature and of great relevance to specialists in early modern Japanese history and religion. Moretti sets out to examine and evaluate the popular prose of Japan's first century of commercial publishing according to its own terms rather than to impose on it modern or Western conceptions of what constitutes the literary. In so doing, she seeks to expand the category of early Tokugawa literature to include, for example, letter-writing manuals and cookbooks. She argues [End Page 500] that such works of instructive prose, in addition to providing readers with knowledge that could potentially better their lives and help raise their social status, brought their original audience cognitive pleasures that rival those provided by less utilitarian texts. Moretti traces the exclusion in the English-speaking world of such works from the canon of seventeenth-century Japanese literature to a 1957 article by Richard Lane. Lane, Moretti writes: favored undisrupted narrative above other textual elements; considered the modern, realistic novel the telos toward which literature developed; and viewed prose works written in the vernacular between 1600 and the publication of Ihara Saikaku's (1642–93) Kōshoku ichidai otoko (The life of an amorous man, 1682) as "'a transitional form, bridging the gap between the medieval romance and the modern novel'" (p. 6). She credits Lane's article with motivating the translation into English of a small selection of fictional narrative works from this period that provide a skewed sample of what commercial publishing produced then. Moretti characterizes as belletristic, elitist, anachronistic, and Eurocentric the criteria used by Lane and his successors to exclude or neglect the texts she seeks to rehabilitate. She eschews teleological considerations and excludes even Saikaku's fiction from the category of the novelistic, let alone of the novel itself, writing in characteristically emphatic language that the period in question was "centuries before any hint of the novel breached the horizon" (p. 10). Moretti does so without defining the notoriously porous category of "the novel" or providing any close examination of any text by Saikaku. She convincingly justifies the absence of Saikaku's fiction from her already ambitious study as necessary for keeping her project to a manageable size, in part due to the vast amount of Saikaku scholarship she would have needed to engage with to include consideration of his works. Moretti also notes that Saikaku's fiction has already received considerable attention from scholars and translators writing in English and maintains that their work, while valuable, has the regrettable disadvantage of having created a Saikaku-centered view of the seventeenth-century literary market and popular prose. … Thinking of Saikaku's prose as the pinnacle of the seventeenth century is the norm. As should be clear by now, I strongly disagree with this notion. … What if we write a literary history of the seventeenth century that is not Saikaku centered? This is what my monograph aims to achieve. (p. 21) Upon reading the study that follows these assertions, one trained by the copious learned allusions of Saikaku's fiction to look out for the same when perusing the works of other authors might perceive in the void left by Saikaku's absence from Pleasure in Profit an erudite reference to the [End Page 501] empty center of Tokyo posited by Roland Barthes in his semiotic schema of the Japanese capital.1 It is difficult to convince one's readers that Saikaku's fiction does not constitute the pinnacle of seventeenth-century Japanese prose without extensively comparing his works to those foregrounded in Pleasure in Profit, and readers well-versed in Saikaku's fiction might find little in the synopses provided that rivals their favorite Saikaku narratives. Furthermore, Moretti's implied characterization of...