Part of a formidable publishing industry, cheap yet eye-catching graphic narratives consistently charmed early modern Japanese readers for around two hundred years, from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. These booklets were called kusazōshi (lit. “grass books”). Multimodal in essence, kusazōshi combine images and words asking the reader to negotiate the complex interactions of these different modes on the page. Meaning is created out of such negotiation. Graphic Narratives from Early Modern Japan: The World of Kusazōshi (Brill 2024) is the first English-language publication to investigate this textual typology in the round. Co-edited with Prof Satō Yukiko (The University of Tokyo) and featuring sixteen chapters written by scholarly giants in the field, this volume serves a dual purpose: it enables anyone new to kusazōshi to gain comprehensive knowledge of the field, while for the specialist it marks a turning point in scholarship, uncovering fresh research avenues. The appendix, which includes a complete bibliography of kusazōshi available in English translation, is an excellent starting point for any avid reader of graphic narratives who wants to discover kusazōshi but has no knowledge of classical Japanese.

In this book launch Laura Moretti selects what she views as the most thought-provoking lines of inquiry put forward by the contributors. These include an exploration of what is provocatively called “the aesthetic of the inconsequential” and ruminations on how kusazōshi align with but also differ from manga and comics. You will also have an opportunity to enjoy a selection of originals housed in the personal collection of the speaker.

About the contributors

Laura Moretti

Laura Moretti is Professor of Early Modern Japanese Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. Her research focusses on Japanese popular literature and culture from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Moretti’s projects are inherently interdisciplinary, placed at the intersection of literature, art history, book history, and textual scholarship. She has published widely in English and Japanese, including Recasting the Past: An Early Modern Tales of Ise for Children (Brill, 2016) and Pleasure in Profit: Popular Prose in Seventeenth-Century Japan (Columbia University Press, 2020).

Every year she runs the Mitsubishi Corporation Summer School in Early Modern Japanese Palaeography, which trains the new generations of scholars in decoding, transcribing, and translating early modern manuscripts and woodblock-printed texts.

Her next research project is tentatively called The Ecology of Playthings in Early Modern Japan and explores crosspollinations between early modern commercial literature and games.