Murdered for their Art? Censorship and the Dark Side of Edo-period Cultural Endeavours – Jenny Preston

On the eighteenth day of the second year of Enkyo [延享, 1746] Sekiguchi Kosan [関口黄山] died in his home on Ukiyo street off Nihonbashi. He was twenty-eight years old, and the author of a small handful of scholarly works: a seal script [篆書] version of the Toshisen [唐詩選, Tang Selection of Poems], a study of the history of Japanese pronunciation, and a collection of miscellaneous writings. On the face of it, his narrative is unexceptional. Yet there are indications that his death was suspicious and that his endeavour to resurrect the art of seal script was not simply the product of an archaizing imagination. Through its prefaces and afterwords, Kosan’s seal script version of the Tang poems confronts us with the dark side of Edo.

 

Jenny Preston is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School or Oriental and African Studies, and teaches classical Japanese literature. She is currently working on a book on art and dissent in Edo period Japan.

 

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