Overview

In the seventeenth century, Japanese popular prose flourished as waves of newly literate readers gained access to the printed word. Commercial publishers released vast numbers of titles in response to readers' hunger for books that promised them potent knowledge. However, traditional literary histories of this period position the writings of Ihara Saikaku at center stage, largely neglecting the breadth of popular prose. In the first comprehensive study of the birth of Japanese commercial publishing, Laura Moretti investigates the vibrant world of vernacular popular literature. She marshals new data on the magnitude of the seventeenth-century publishing business and highlights the diversity and porosity of its publishing genres. Moretti explores how booksellers sparked interest among readers across the spectrum of literacies and demonstrates how they tantalized consumers with vital ethical, religious, societal, and interpersonal knowledge. She recasts books as tools for knowledge making, arguing that popular prose engaged its audience cognitively as well as aesthetically and emotionally to satisfy a burgeoning curiosity about the world. Crucially, Moretti shows, readers experienced entertainment within the didactic, finding pleasure in the profit gained from acquiring knowledge by interacting with transformative literature. Drawing on a rich variety of archival materials to present a vivid portrait of seventeenth-century Japanese publishing, Pleasure in Profit also speaks to broader conversations about the category of the literary by offering a new view of popular prose that celebrates plurality.

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In this exemplary study, Laura Moretti challenges the conventional wisdom in her choice of texts (outside the literary canon), in her treatment of genres (as 'porous'), and in her approach (comparative). Her book should appeal to students of comparative literature as well as to specialists on Japan.--Peter Burke, author of Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe Drawing on sources from etiquette manuals to literary works--and, tellingly, books that are both at once--Pleasure in Profit offers a nuanced portrait of popular publishing in seventeenth-century Japan, highlighting simultaneously its particularity and its echoes of European contexts. I can't imagine a more lucid, approachable, and grounded treatment of the topic.--Michael Emmerich, author of The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature The world of popular literature is often dismissed by scholarship, but it is precisely within the mundane that we are able to catch a glimpse of the authentic. Only by taking didactic prose seriously can we discover how the intellectual elite's ideas percolate down and influence the everyman. Moretti has put the study of early modern Japanese literature on an entirely new footing.--Richard Bowring, author of In Search of the Way: Thought and Religion in Early-Modern Japan Laura Moretti is an intensely learned guide through a forest of underappreciated popular prose books. She shows how didactic texts shaped the lives and fantasies of Japanese across class lines during the early decades of print, forever changing our view of publishers, audiences, and their multiple literacies.--Linda Chance, author of Ooku: The Secret World of the Shogun's Women

In this exemplary study, Laura Moretti challenges the conventional wisdom in her choice of texts (outside the literary canon), in her treatment of genres (as 'porous'), and in her approach (comparative). Her book should appeal to students of comparative literature as well as to specialists on Japan.--Peter Burke, author of Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe

Author Information

Laura Moretti is senior lecturer in premodern Japanese studies at the University of Cambridge and a fellow at Emmanuel College. She is the author of Recasting the Past: An Early Modern ""Tales of Ise"" for Children (2016).

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