Manga and Western Comics: A History Part 2: Kusazōshi and Chapbooks

Kusazōshi were wood-block printed illustrated literature created during the Japanese Edo Period and the Early Meiji Period. These books were cheaply made and therefore became popular with the working class of the time. The “chapbooks” of the West were similar to kusazōshi in that they were cheaply made and mostly read by the working class. In fact, scholars use both chapbooks and kusazōshi to examine pop culture of the era.

Early kusazōshi was made up of akahon, kurohon and aohon all published before 1775. Kibyōshi is kusazōshi produced in and after 1775. It was born out of earlier aohon, with the form of the two genres being exactly the same.

Akahon were illustrated fiction with decorative covers, also called hyoushi, that were red in colour, hence giving them the nickname red book. They first appeared in 1662 and were popular until 1750. The books were directed at children and contained fairy tales and ghost and monster stories. The stories were written in a colloquial style for the common folk and were accompanied by illustrations which were integral if not more important that the text itself. Noted illustrators who contributed to akahon were Kondou Kiyoharu, Nishimura Shigenaga, Shigenobu, Okumura Masanobu, and Hanegawa Chinchou.

Kurohon were illustrated novellas that appeared between the 1740's and the 1790's. They had black hyoushi and were printed on half sheets of coarse minogami. The kurohon contained adaptations of popular dramas, great battles, myths and legends, including tales of Buddhist and Shintou literature. Early kurohon were written and illustrated mostly anonmyously or by obscure artisans. Later artists such as Okumura Masanobu, Torii Kiyomitsu and Tomikawa Ginsetsu. Ginsetsu alone created over 200 titles. By the 1750's most of the illustrations were produced by Torri-ha artists.

Aohon are illustrated pop-fiction that emerged around the same time as kurohon. It grew in popularity between 1744 to 1774. Identified by it's yellowish-green hyoushi, it contained stories adapted from plays, ballads, martial subjects and vengeance stories and were generally geared towards young readers. Although artists often wrote their own text to accompany their illustrations, in aohon we begin to see authors and artists acknowledged separately for their work. Among the author-artists and print designers of aohon print were Tomikawa Fusanobu, and the Torii artists, Kiyomasu II, Kiyomitsu and Kiyotsune. Most notably, Fusanobu's Ryuuguu Soga Monogatari, pioneered techniques used later on by other kusazōshi writers.

Kibyōshi was a kind of kusazōshi that was produced during the middle Edo Period from 1775 until the early 1800's. They are known for their yellow hyoushi and were often referred to as Japan's Yellow Books. Kibyōshi are attributed as being the first purely adult comic books in Japanese literature. Due to the numerous characters and letters in the Japanese language, movable type took longer to become popular, it was easier to carve the text onto the same wood block as the illustrations. This resulted in a closer partnership of the pictures and the text. With either a delicate balance of the two or with text dominating the piece. These books were printed with ten pages in a volume with the total number of pages being thirty and were therefore spread over several volumes. Kibyōshi usually contained satire, urban culture and early works involving the pleasure quarters. The end of kibyōshi came in 1806 through the Kansei Reforms and the weakening of the genre by attempts to increase readership by creating books for a wider audience.

Chapbooks were never really broken down into categories the same way kusazōshi were but they were definitely comparable media. Chapbooks were inexpensive, illustrated booklets mostly sold to the common people and were popular from the sixteenth century until almost the end of the nineteenth century.

Records of the ephemera, more commonly known as chapbooks, stem from anecdotes in 1553 of a man offering a vulgar ballad at an alehouse. Chapbooks get their name from the men who sold them, “chapmen”. Chapmen would wander the country selling them to whomever they could, usually for two or threepence and they usually had a large variety of titles on hand.

Chapbooks contained everything from tales of chivalry to religious and moral instruction, cookbooks, guides to fortune telling and magic, and bawdy stories. Chapbooks were presented in one of two ways, neither of which relied heavily on reading, ballads and pictures. Ballads were bought and sung by musicians who could read. The songs were then sung in alehouses or inns. Then the people who heard the songs would sometimes repeat them and sometimes the lyrics would change, then the new lyrics were transcribed and new chapbooks were created. The other books, contained large woodcuts. Often times they featured moral lessons or biblical sayings that people could remember or infer from the picture. Even those who did not read would hang these books on the wall to be admired.

During this time period, information moved back and forth between print and oral media. The stories would develop and information would change as time went on. New literature was included as the upper class literati grew tired of reading “the same old thing”. The old woodcuts would be sold off, vulgarized and printed as chapbooks for the middle and lower class. As chapbooks grew in popularity so did literacy, as is suggested by the increase in need for schoolteachers around the same time.

There are a lot of similarities between kusazōshi and chapbooks. They were both cheaply made with materials that were readily available, both were mass produced and distributed and both were sold to the middle and low class as a form of inexpensive entertainment.

Due to complications with moveable type, Japanese printers creatively overcame the problem by simply incorporating the text into the illustrations on the same woodcuts. They went so far as to continually experiment with how to visually present the illustration and text together in a unique fashion. While Japan was taking steps to perfect this art, the Western printers were mostly rehashing and vandalizing old literature that the upper class no longer wanted around.

In conclusion, we can see the differences between Western illustrated literature and Japanese illustrated literature becoming more apparent and initially why these differences arose in the first place.