Japanese writers, spurred by a radical expansion of print culture, were in search of genres that offered themes and vocabulary appropriate to the unprecedented expansion of urban culture in Osaka and Edo. Chinese texts offered new horizons and also provided literary criticism on vernacular narrative that inspired Japanese critics to write about their own vernacular narratives and drama, for the first time, as a form of literature. Whereas China has been understood previously through a narrow range of normative texts received as models for composition and conduct, the vernacular Chinese narratives introduced into Japan from the late 17th century revealed a larger body of heterogeneous and overlapping registers of language that made the question of what China was more complex. The rampages of bandits, the cunning of prostitutes and the scheming of petty merchants that inhabited Chinese vernacular narrative took the place of an idyllic realm of the ancient sages.

Acknowledgments

Introduction
1. The Status of Vernacular Chinese Language and Narrative in Japan
2. The Social Structure of Edo Japan and the Role of the Intellectual
3. Distinguishing Characteristics of Chinese Vernacular Language
4. The Historical Problematic of Vernacular Literature

Chapter 1 The Translation of Chinese Vernacular Novels in Edo Japan
1. The Implications of the Fall of the Ming Dynasty
2. Ming Exiles and Appropriation of Chinese Culture
3. The First Translations of Chinese Vernacular Narrative
4. Mature Translations of Chinese Vernacular Narrative: Inching towards the Modern
5. Translation as Understanding: Hagiwara Hiromichi’s Approach to Chinese Vernacular Narrative and Tale of Genji

Chapter 2 Okajima Kanzan’s Project: From Language to Literature in the Study of Vernacular Chinese
1. Okajima Kanzan as a Translator
2. Kanzan’s Primer for Vernacular Chinese: Tōwazan’yō
3. The Japanese Classic Taiheiki Reworked in Vernacular Chinese: Taiheiki engi and Okajima Kanzan4. Kanzan’s Later Years

Chapter 3 Ogyū Sorai and the Discursive Status of Chinese: The Argument for Direct Understanding in Yakubunsentei
1. Ogyū Sorai’s Intellectual Posture
2. Sorai’s Strategy for Interpretation
3. The Role of Translation at Sorai’s School and the Yakubunsentei(A Device for Translation)
4. Sorai’s Approach to Language in the Yakubunsentei
5. Language Becomes a Field: A New Universal Principle for Investigation
6. Deflating the Exterior Discourse; Extolling Internal Understanding

Chapter 4 The Confirmation of the Everyday in the School of Itō Jinsai
1. Chinese Vernacular Narrative in the Kansai Region
2. Itō Tōgai Turns to the Chinese Vernacular
3. The Birth of Vernacular Literature: Itō Tōgai's Students Reconsider the Overlooked

Chapter 5 Oka Hakku and Sawada Issai: Presenting Chinese Vernacular Narrative for the General Reader
1. Oka Hakku: a Professional Teacher of Chinese Vernacular Narrative
2. Sawada Issai’s Defense of the Vernacular in his Huaben Story Collection Novels in Refined Words

Chapter 6 Beyond Language; Vernacular Chinese and the Broader Investigation of the Overlooked
1. The Literary Experiments of Sawada Issai: Vernacular Chinese as Mirror of the Japanese Parole
2. Daily Life in Japan Reflected in the Mirror of Vernacular Chinese
3. Matsumuro Shōkō’s Pleasure Quarters Harsh Reality Reflected in a Sympathetic Eye

Chapter 7 Chinese Vernacular Language and the Literature of Play in Japan:The Rise of Gesaku in Eighteenth-Century Japan
1. Asobi Literature of the Pleasure Quarters and the Study of Chinese Language
2. Ryōhashigen: the Cutting Edge of Words
3. Sharebon Narrative after Ryōhashigen
4. Watō Chinkai and the Complete Assimilation of the Alien Vernacular

Chapter 8 Implications of the Reception of Chinese Vernacular Language for Popular Narrative for Japan
1. Towards a Visible Vernacular: Implications of the Chinese Language Studies Movement for Late Edo and Meiji Literature
2. Language and Universal Discourse in Japan: Prospects for the Future

Appendix
Introduction Yakubunsentei (A Tool for Translation)
Bibliography