Geisha yobukodori. Verbal and visual narration in late eighteenth-century Japan

Dialogue-based witty books were a literary sensation of the second half of the eighteenth century, starting soon after the publication of Yūshi hōgen (The libertine’s dialect) in 1770. During this craze for books which shared a fairly clichéd plot and expressive thesaurus, a number of authors put some effort into innovating this literary format, mainly by moving the plot setting into different gay quarters, not only the shin-Yoshiwara. An outstanding example of originality is the oeuvre of Tanishi Kingyo (dates unknown), who experimented with various settings in and outside the pleasure quarters and depicted vivid portrayals of courtesans and women in love. The aim of this paper is to analyze the hypertextual practice of deriving narrative material from dialogue-based short stories in popular literature from late eighteenth-century Edo, determining to what extent narrative experimentations through hypertextuality converged into an ante litteram transmedia storytelling. The paper takes the short story by Kingyo Geisha yobukodori (Geisha and the lamenting cuckoo, 1777) as an example of this narrative appropriation, with the overall aim of describing the reception of the text in subsequent literature and media, and analysing the mechanisms through which the influence of Kingyo’s work on hypertexts informs the way these adhere or challenge their narrative genre.