This dissertation examines the reception of Chinese language and literature during Tokugawa period Japan, highlighting the importation of vernacular Chinese, the transformation of literary styles, and the translation of narrative fiction. By analyzing the social and linguistic influences of the reception and adaptation of Chinese vernacular fiction, I hope to improve our understanding of genre development and linguistic diversification in early modern Japanese literature. This dissertation historically and linguistically contextualizes the vernacularization movements and adaptations of Chinese texts in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, showing how literary importation and localization were essential stimulants and also a paradigmatic shift that generated new platforms for Japanese literature. Chapter 1 places the early introduction of vernacular Chinese language in its social and cultural contexts, focusing on its route of propagation from the Nagasaki translator community to literati and scholars in Edo, and its elevation from a utilitarian language to an object of literary and political interest. Central figures include Okajima Kazan (1674-1728) and Ogyû Sorai (1666-1728). Chapter 2 continues the discussion of the popularization of vernacular Chinese among elite intellectuals, represented by the Ken'en School of scholars and their Chinese study group, "the Translation Society." This chapter discusses the methodology of the study of Chinese by surveying a number of primers and dictionaries compiled for reading vernacular Chinese and comparing such material with methodologies for reading classical Chinese. The contrast indicates the identification of vernacular Chinese as a new register that significantly departed from kanbun. Chapter 3 provides a broader view of the reception of Chinese texts in Japan in the same time period, discussing Hattori Nankaku (1683-1759), a kanshi poet and Ogyû Sorai's successor in literary criticism. Nankaku's contributions include a translation and annotation of the Tang shi xuan (J. Tôshi sen), an anthology of Tang poetry compiled by Ming poet Li Panlong (1514-1570). Such commentaries in accessible Japanese prose reflected the changing readership of Chinese texts, as well as the colloquialization of literary Japanese. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on literary translations and adaptations of Chinese narrative texts in different language styles. Chapter 4 analyzes kanazôshi ("kana booklet") stories by Asai Ryôi (1612?-1691) in comparison to their source text, the Ming Chinese anthology of supernatural stories New Tales Under the Lamplight (Jian deng xin hua). For a comparative perspective on translation style, this chapter also addresses adaptations of the same source story by Korean and Vietnamese authors. Chapter 5 looks into the literati genre of yomihon ("reading books") and focuses on Tsuga Teishô's (1718?-1794?) adaptations of Ming vernacular fiction by Feng Menglong. Teishô, a prolific author considered to be the inventor of this important genre, has been grossly understudied due to the linguistic complexity of his works. His adaptations of Chinese vernacular stories bridged different narrative traditions and synthesized various language styles. This chapter aims to demonstrate Teishô's innovative prose style and the close connections between vernacular Chinese and the development of early yomihon as a sophisticated, experimental genre of popular literature. This dissertation illustrates the inextricable relationships between language transformation and genre development, between vernacularization and narrative literature. It departs from the long-standing paradigm of Sino-Japanese (wakan) literary study, which treats Sinitic writing as an integral part of Japanese literary discourse, emphasizing rather a comparative linguistic approach that addresses Chinese and Japanese linguistic and literary movements in parallel. Within this framework, this project is intended as a platform for further explorations of issues of cultural interaction and translation literature.

This project explores Japan’s complex literary and cultural negotiation with China from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, focusing on the role of intermediary texts (dictionaries, encyclopedias, and commentaries) and the different modes of receiving and constructing Chinese culture depending on historical periods and scholarly lineages. As the larger process by which Chinese history and literature became part of the Japanese literary culture has long been studied on the assumption that there is direct textual continuity between Japanese texts (in literary Sinitic) and Chinese continental texts, the tracking down of citations, allusion, and references to Chinese source texts has commanded great scholarly attention. Yet this assumption obscures other, equally important histories – such as a popular understanding of Chinese culture, or a conceptual perception of Chinese culture, that was NOT based on direct textual continuity – that lies at the heart of this project. The introduction outlines three modes of receiving and constructing Chinese literary culture in pre-modern japan. One was the text-based, canonical view of Chinese history and literature, which relied almost exclusively on texts and genres that were canonized in the Nara and Heian periods state university (daigakuryō) – Confucian classics, Chinese official dynastic histories, and Chinese poetry. In contrast with it was a more popular, name-based understanding of Chinese culture that emerged from various intermediary genres (such as anecdotal literature, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and commentaries) both in China and in Japan. This mode of reception and construction was not based on texts so much as on what I call “cultural signs” (particularly Chinese names, well-known anecdotes, and visual cues) and required no knowledge of the original literary Sinitic. Third was a conceptual, term-based perception, manifested in such concepts as “loyalty” and “filial piety.” Written in the same kanji characters, these terms served as common threads linking Chinese and Japanese literary writings on the one hand, but also took on new meanings and associations in the Japanese cultural imagination. Chapter 1 outlines the importation of Chinese books and manuscripts in relation to the center of scholarship and the main intellectual groups up until the twelfth century. Drawing on evidence from commentaries on the Wakan rōeishū (The Collection of Japanese and Chinese Poems for Recitation, 1013) and from The Tales of China (Kara monogatari, late Heian period) on the themes of exile and loyalty, I discuss the rising interests in referencing anecdotal literature and compiling intermediaries (dictionaries, encyclopedias, and commentaries) in the twelfth century that eventually contributed to the formation of a more popular, name-based understanding of Chinese history and literature. Chapter 2 investigates the Japanese medieval interpretations of Chinese official histories (“Chūsei Shiki”), which features a tension and negotiation between the canonical and the non-canonical texts and gravitates towards recurring themes, character types, and core values. In particular, I look into the themes of wisdom, virtue, loyalty, and filial piety in A Miscellany of Ten Maxims (Jikkinshō, 1252) and The Tales of the Heike (Heike monogatari, ca. 1308-1311), which were largely constructed from a relatively more classical, Tang-based perspective, in despite of the fact that Chinese Song dynasty culture had already been imported to Japan along with the introduction of Chinese Chan (J. Zen) Buddhism in the thirteenth through fourteenth centuries. In Chapter 3, I examine the Taiheiki (A Chronicle of Great Peace, 1340s-1371), a unique text that acts as a nexus for many themes of this project. Analyzing the use of Chinese tales, maxims and proverbs, and poetry in relation to the themes of loyalty, wisdom, righteousness, and filial piety, I show that, unlike The Tales of the Heike, the Taiheiki revealed a thriving concern with the Song culture, which involved new editions, new commentaries, and new poetic theory. I also show that a conceptual, term-based perception of Chinese culture was taking shape. Chapter 4 explores the suddenly intensified scholarly exchange among different intellectual groups – the Zen monks, the Shintō priests, warriors, and court aristocrats – in the fifteenth through sixteenth centuries. Tracing the threads of new books and new theories in Kiyohara Nobukata’s lecture notes on the Mōgyū (Inquiry of the Youth), The Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars, and the picture scroll (emaki) of the Xianyang Palace, I discuss the expansion of knowledge and audience from priests and aristocrats to influential military families and wealthy commoners in late medieval Japan, the formation of new imaginations regarding Chinese history and literature, and the final transition from a pro-Tang prospective to a Song-centered understanding of China. In conclusion, I argue for the literary and cultural reception and construction of Chinese culture as not only a large and complex source text, in a long history of Sino-Japanese intertextuality, but as a complex cultural construction that was packaged and modified, sometimes for easy consumption, to reinforce key values (such as loyalty and filial piety), and that was readily identified even by those with limited access to literary Sinitic. By illustrating the processes by which Chinese history and literature were largely filtered through and transmitted by intermediaries into medieval Japanese literary culture, this project provides a new history of the reception of Chinese culture in the Japanese literary imagination.

In the early modern period, literary Sinitic (also known as classical Chinese) was a shared writing system and cultural asset in East Asia. The Sinitic text, while being voiced in various local languages, remained largely the same across the region. The shared Sinitic writing enabled educated people in East Asia who spoke different languages to engage in conversation through writing. It was the silence of literary Sinitic that enabled it to be a trans-local communicating system. However, where is the place for the Chinese sound in the neat picture of the Sinitic writing system versus its various local vocalizations in different countries? Focusing on the effort of Japanese scholars in restoring Chinese sound to the Sinitic text, this dissertation brings the conceptualization and practice of spoken Chinese in the eighteenth century Japan into the supposedly silent Sinitic culture. The early modern Japanese learners of contemporary spoken Chinese intended to vocalize the written Sinitic. When they realized that contemporary spoken Chinese and literary Sinitic writing were actually not compatible, they solved the problem by resorting again to writing. One solution was to propose a new form of Sinitic writing using colloquial expressions, the zokugo (colloquial [Chinese]) writing. The other was to retreat to the comfortable zone of how to pronounce individual sinographs and Sinitic terms—the phonological study of tōon (contemporary Chinese sound). This dissertation studies vocality as the interrelation and interaction of speaking and writing, to illuminate an early modern East Asian concept of language that cannot be contained in the modern, Western phonocentric view. Through examining the language learning and fiction writing that related to contemporary spoken Chinese in eighteenth-century Japan, this dissertation argues that spoken Chinese and literary Sinitic were not the two opposites of a binary, nor was the spoken language the preliminary to the colloquial Chinese writing. In both the spoken language and the colloquial writing, vocality was a spectrum of speaking and writing, the proportion of which was attuned to the preferences of different speakers, social settings, and literary genres. The chapters of this dissertation delineate the trajectory of early modern Japanese engagement with contemporary spoken Chinese in relation to writing. It begins with chapter 1 on Chinese popular fiction—the primary learning material for the study of contemporary spoken Chinese—and its colloquial style that imitates storytelling performance. Chapters 2 and 3 are devoted to the study of contemporary spoken Chinese in early modern Japan. Chapter 2 contextualizes the study of contemporary spoken Chinese in the early to middle Tokugawa (1600–1868) period—a time when Chinese language study gradually gained attention. Chapter 3 reconstructs the learning of tōwa (contemporary spoken Chinese) in eighteenth-century Japan by pointing out its spectrum of vocality. Chapters 4 depicts the contemplation of the incompatibility of contemporary spoken Chinese and literary Sinitic writing, as well as the transformation from the language learning tōwa to the phonological study tōon. Chapters 5 and 6 deal with the other transmutation of the tōwa study from language study to the zokugo writing, as showcased in the spread of colloquial Chinese fictions in early modern Japan. Chapter 5 examines how Chinese popular fiction was conceptualized and approached in early modern Japan. Chapter 6 shows how eighteenth-century Japan witnessed a gradual increase in the attention paid to the literary format of colloquial Chinese fiction, despite a general emphasis on the colloquial vocabulary. The epilogue discusses colloquial Chinese fiction in nineteenth-century Japan. Together, these chapters delve into the vocality of early modern Japan, as a fascination with speaking that is complexly entangled with writing. The early modern era offers illuminating cases of vocality, with fiction writing intending to capture the essence of oral performance and spoken language, and speech making full use of the literary Sinitic to enhance its cultural flavor. Whereas the eighteenth-century study of contemporary spoken Chinese did explore the spoken language, it was not based on modern phonocentric concepts but to seek to vocalize the written language in its most authoritative version. The multiple efforts to invite speaking into a conversation with writing reveal an early modern perception of language that could not be fully comprehended without considering writing-centered literacy.