The Willow in Autumn: Ryutei Tanehiko: 1783-1842.

• Author: Rodd, Laurel Rasplica

By Harvard-Yenching Monograph Series, 35. Cambridge, Mass.: 1992. Pp. vi + 291 + illus. $28.

The Willow in Autumn is in many respects a model literary biography: Markus has an elegant and appealing style and a judicious approach to evidence that carry the reader through what might otherwise be a dry recitation of the few scraps of information that are actually known about his subject. As literary detective, Markus succeeds even when there can be no solution to the mystery.

Ryutei Tanehiko was one of the "ten principal authors of gesaku--popular illustrated fiction of the late Edo period" (p. 1), most celebrated as author of the gokan Nise Murasaki inaka Genji. Despite the almost complete lack of evidence about Tanehiko's life, Markus pieces together a remarkably vivid portrait from a few "cryptically laconic" diaries of Tanehiko, his published fiction, the "incidental remarks of contemporaries and gossip of his successors" (p. 2), and analysis of the political, social, and intellectual milieu of late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Edo.

Born into a family of hatamoto, or "petty samurai," Tanehiko was evidently a man of leisure and often idleness, able to devote his full attention, or the major portion thereof, to the passing social scene of urban culture and to his antiquarian interests. We know little of his upbringing or education, but there is evidence that he inherited an interest in books and amassed a large personal library and that he was an avid student of the theater and participated in amateur theatricals. Although he produced a few early kyoka and haikai, some antiquarian notes and bibliographies, and even a few advertisements for various commercial products, it was the yomihon romances published from around 1807 that brought him fame and the later gokan that form the basis of his continuing reputation.

Gokan were the final development of the Edo-period kusazoshi, popular texts that rely heavily on illustrations to tell the story. A comparatively simple text in kana wraps alongside and around the pictures in a way that makes it clear that text and illustration are complementary. Tanchiko's contributions to the genre include his use of elegant gabun style and Heian-influenced grammar, and his subjects, which reflect his enthusiasm for the theater, especially for Chikamatsu, and his interest in the Japanese classics. His first gokan series, the Shohonjitate, an attempt to translate the kabuki theatergoer's experience to...