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In Strange Tales from Edo, William Fleming paints a sweeping
picture of Japan’s engagement with Chinese fiction in the early
modern period (1600–1868). Large-scale analyses of the full
historical and bibliographical record—the first of their
kind—document in detail the wholesale importation of Chinese
fiction, the market for imported books and domestic reprint
editions, and the critical role of manuscript practices—the
ascendance of print culture notwithstanding—in the circulation of
Chinese texts among Japanese readers and writers. Bringing this big
picture to life, Fleming also traces the journey of a text rarely
mentioned in studies of early modern Japanese literature: Pu
Songling’s Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange Tales from Liaozhai Studio).
An immediate favorite of readers on the continent, Liaozhai was
long thought to have been virtually unknown in Japan until the
modern period. Copies were imported in vanishingly small numbers,
and the collection was never reprinted domestically. Yet beneath
this surface of apparent neglect lies a rich hidden history of
engagement and rewriting—hand-copying, annotation, criticism,
translation, and adaptation—that opens up new perspectives on
both the Chinese strange tale and its Japanese counterparts.
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