Who said that? Textuality in eighteenth century kibyōshi

Abstract

Modern presentations of kibyōshi, the ‘yellow cover’ comic books of the Edo period, present an illusion of textual orderliness that is not often present in the originals. Modern anthologies tend to use a playscript format with reduced pictures, and translators broadly follow this practice. However, the playscript format, with its convention that each utterance is labeled with the name of the character that utters it, creates an absolute attribution of lines to characters which is not necessarily evident in the original. Even when reproductions attempt faithfulness to the original and place text inline, they often indicate an authoritative textual perspective that is not found in the original by inserting textual markers for direct quotations. However, in the original text it is often difficult to figure out exactly who is saying what. This confused morass of undifferentiated text creates an interesting effect in the kibyōshi; all levels of discourse in the text are conflated. Denying distinction between different types of text also denies any privileging of one type of text over another. The effect of this seemingly confused textual presentation is precisely the destabilization of teleological dichotomies of fact and fiction, kyo and jitsu, past and present, and representer and represented.