Another World and a Return Home: Sinitic Literary Traditions in Early Modern and Modern Japan - Plucking Chrysanthemums: Narushima Ryūhoku and Sinitic Literary Traditions in Modern Japan and The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon

Plucking Chrysanthemums, by Matthew Fraleigh, and The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction, by William C. Hedberg, are both deeply engaged with the reading of Literary Sinitic texts in Japan. Fraleigh writes the biography of one of the most prominent poets and journalists of the late Tokugawa and early Meiji periods, Narushima Ryūhoku. Much of Ryūhoku's literary output was written in Literary Sinitic, and so, despite his celebrity during his lifetime, he was largely forgotten when the modern field of Japanese literature, which prioritized vernacular Japanese writings, coalesced in the late Meiji period. Hedberg traces the fate of the Chinese novel The Water Margin (Ch. Sui hu zhuan, Jp. Suikoden) in early modern and modern Japan. One of the most famous works of Chinese fiction, Water Margin enjoyed widespread popularity in both China and Japan, where it was repeatedly reinterpreted and redeployed in accordance with the changing...