The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction

Glynne Walley, author of Good Dogs: Edification, Entertainment, and Kyokutei Bakin's Nansō Satomi hakkenden:
William C. Hedberg argues convincingly for The Water Margin’s centrality to early modern and modern Japanese and Chinese literature. And like its subject, The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction moves across national, linguistic, temporal, and generic boundaries with energy and eloquence.

Pieter Keulemans, author of Sound Rising from the Paper: Nineteenth-Century Martial Arts Fiction and the Chinese Acoustic Imagination:
The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction manages to be scholarly, witty, engaging, and personable all at the same time—a rare combination for a subject that is so dense and requires such intimate knowledge of a premodern literary text and the complex scholarly debates that surrounded it.

Laura Moretti, author of Recasting the Past: An Early Modern Tales of Ise for Children:
In this erudite and sophisticated account of the Japanese appropriation of The Water Margin, Hedberg probes a series of compelling examples and raises important questions about the nature of texts, commentaries, and literary history. This excellent work embraces the marginal as a powerful hermeneutical tool to destabilize received views.

Michael Emmerich, author of The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature:
Concise, thoughtfully structured, and meticulously researched, The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction is one of those rare books that opens up a bracingly new perspective on a well established field of study. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the literary history of Japan from the seventeenth century into the first decades of the twentieth, or in rediscovering “the literary history of Japan” itself as a concept.