The “culture of play” in the narrative strategies of “Tōkaidōchū Hizakurige” by Jippensha Ikku

The paper examines the main narrative strategies of “Tōkaidōchū Hizakurige” (1802-1809) by Jippensha Ikku (1765-1831) in terms of the “culture of play” concept. The phenomenon of the “culture of play” was connected with the search for new forms of expression, perception, and rethinking of the social order carried out by the townspeople of the Tokugawa period (1603-1868) in Japan. Playful literature gesaku, including Ikku’s literary work, was the embodiment of this concept, based, mainly, on the carnivalesque overturn of the usual, official reality. The “culture of play” is represented in “Tōkaidōchū Hizakurige” by a number of narrative strategies, namely, the chronotope, the communicative system of characters, and the special structure of episodes. The inner space of Ikku’s kokkeibon is a grotesque world, where the sensual pleasures and the rude humor linked to it prevail. Construction of such world takes place with the use of a literary device called ugachi - a combination of opposite ideas and phenomena in one scene. There is also a special type of time represented, concentrated on the pure everyday being, the endless motion of the life cycle. Attention is paid to the “voices” of the numerous characters of “Tōkaidōchū Hizakurige” as well as to their interaction. The characteristics of their speech become the only personal traits of the characters’ portraits; the polyphony of different “voices” enables Ikku to create the panorama of everyday life, close to reality, and to represent many points of view not taken into consideration by the official rhetoric. The figure of a narrator occupies a unique space in this system of characters, on the one hand, taking part in the protagonists’ fictional journey, and, on the other, being just a spectator, recording the events, both from the widest perspective possible and in detail. The structure of episodes is close to that in theatre genres. The characters represent a certain stage type; the episodes contain a specific mechanism of development, often with the allusions to the famous plays and comic stories. Such humorous profanations become a powerful device for the playful rethinking of reality.

Japan, Tokugawa period, gesaku, humorous fiction, the culture of play, narrative strategy, chronotope, kokkeibon, Jippensha Ikku

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