Graphic Narratives from Early Modern Japan

Part of a formidable publishing industry, cheap yet eye-catching graphic narratives consistently charmed early modern Japanese readers for around two hundred years. These booklets were called kusazōshi (“grass books”).
Graphic Narratives from Early Modern Japan is the first English-language publication of its kind. It enables anyone new to kusazōshi to gain comprehensive knowledge of the field. For the specialist, our edited volume marks a turning point in scholarship, uncovering fresh research avenues.
While exploring the powerful effects of the visual-verbal imagination, this collection opens up bold new vistas on the act of reading and advances provocations around comics and manga.
Contributors are: Jaqueline Berndt, Joseph Bills, Michael Emmerich, Adam L. Kern, Fumiko Kobayashi, Frederick Feilden, Laura Moretti, Matsubara Noriko, Satō Satoru, Satō Yukiko, Satoko Shimazaki, Takagi Gen, Tanahashi Masahiro, Ellis Tinios, Tsuda Mayumi and, Glynne Walley.

Laura Moretti, Ph.D. (2003) is Professor of Early Modern Japanese Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge. She has published widely in English and Japanese, including Pleasure in Profit: Popular Prose in Seventeenth-Century Japan (Columbia University Press, 2020).
Satō Yukiko, Ph.D. (2000) is Professor at The University of Tokyo. She is one of the leading scholars working on early modern Japanese graphic narratives. She has several publications, including Edo no e’iri shōsetsu: Gōkan no sekai (Perikansha, 2001).