In the bustling cities of late seventeenth-century Japan, a new urban landscape was emerging, marked by diversity and dynamism. As individuals from various backgrounds converged, traditional social bonds evolved into expansive urban identities, inextricably linked to the rise of woodblock-printed texts. This confluence of social, spatial, and textual elements gave rise to a distinct social figure: the Tokugawa townsman.

Thomas Gaubatz presents an innovative exploration of Tokugawa townspeople’s literature. Through historical context, literary analysis, and print culture insights, including close readings of Ihara Saikaku and Ejima Kiseki, he reveals how popular fiction shaped the urban experience. It modeled how individuals could reinvent themselves through shared social norms.

Challenging the notion of townsman literature as mere resistance against authority, Gaubatz argues that print fiction articulated new identities, legitimized emerging social power, and symbolically managed the tensions within the urban community and the contradictions within the townsman self. This vision of textual self-fashioning offers a new understanding of the politics of popular fiction in Tokugawa society.