Pluralism and the Textual Construction of an Ideal Society: A Dialogical Approach to Hanabusa sōshi

Abstract

In 1749, Tsuga Teishō, an Osaka-based Confucian scholar and physician, had a collection of nine stories published, entitled Hanabusa sōshi (A Garland of Heroes). Different from the declining ukiyo-zōshi, a type of narrative fiction mainly published by the Hachimonjiya at that time, stories in Hanabusa sōshi feature more complex plots and characterisation. With sophisticated content and an elaborate style, Hanabusa sōshi is targeted at a more educated readership. In fact, its publication marks the very beginning of a new literary genre, the yomihon. The middle decades of the Edo period (ca. 18th c.), during which the yomihon emerged, are noted for their intellectual diversity and vitality, and deserve more attention than they have been received. In this period, Chinese discourses were infused with Japanese native discourses. Contact with Chinese philosophy and literature fostered new schools of thought and literary forms. Confucian scholars, such as Itō Jinsai and later Ogyū Sorai, responded to the Song Confucian ideology critically, freeing literature from the rigid moral perspective advocated by those Song Confucian scholars. Many issues raised in Hanabusa sōshi pertain to Jinsai's and Sorai's school of thought as well. The imported Chinese vernacular narratives along with related literary comments also transformed early modern narrative fiction, generating new literary discourses, and Hanabusa sōshi constitutes part of these discourses. Many of the stories in this collection are adaptations from three collections of Ming dynasty vernacular tales, now known as the San yan (lit. "three words"). Teishō wrote Hanabusa sōshi employing a mixed Sino-Japanese diction, which is indebted to the spread of Tōwagaku (Vernacular Chinese Studies). The emergence of Hanabusa sōshi is inseparable from the cultural pluralism that characterised intellectual discourse at this time. Hence our understanding of this work will never be complete without analysing the work in relation to those intellectual movements. I will apply Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic criticism in my analysis of Hanabusa sōshi, paying particular attention to the narratives' relationships with the "multi-voiced" discourses that they had responded to. I argue that, by incorporating these voices in his narratives, Teishō adapts the themes raised in the San yan source tales to generate an ideal society within the world of Hanabusa sōshi.