Paupers, poets, and paragons: Eccentricity as virtue in 'Kinsei kijinden' ('Eccentrics of Our Times', 1790)

This dissertation examines the values promoted in the first Japanese biography collection on eccentrics (kijin), Kinsei kijinden (Eccentrics of our times, 1790), as a response to moral, economic, and poetic issues of that time. By doing this, I trace an emerging consciousness that elevates the individual in the late Tokugawa Period (1600-1868).; The greater portion of this dissertation discusses Kinsei kijinden as a response to crisis. In Kinsei kijinden, kijin are celebrated as individuals who act according to their own sensibilities, not according to the dictates of custom or law. The first chapter introduces the problems I will address in the dissertation and discusses kijin as role models in times of crisis. The second chapter describes the specific historical context of crisis during the lifetime of Kinsei kijinden author Ban Kokei. The remainder of my discussion centers on three problems that the stories in Kinsei kijinden address through the terms of virtue (tokko), abandon (hoto), and elegance (furyu ). I trace the etymology of these terms, their broader intellectual context of ethics, economics, and aesthetics in eighteenth-century Japan, and the way these ideas appear in Kinsei kijinden. In the third chapter, I argue that Kokei works from within a concept of virtue defined by one's individual qualities, rather than by a standard of moral rectitude. In the fourth chapter, I argue that through the figure of the self-indulgent kijin Kokei criticizes the economy of profit and wealth preservation. In the fifth chapter, I argue that through the figure of the poetic kijin Kokei celebrates the ability of people to judge with their own moral and aesthetic intuition, as opposed to relying on authority or common custom. In the concluding chapter, I discuss the use of the figure of kijin, and ideas of strangeness in texts that appear after Kinsei kijinden.; While deviance is often seen as a common response to crises faced in the Tokugawa Period, in this dissertation I show that in Kinsei kijinden it is individuality, rather than deviance, that is celebrated as a solution to the problems of eighteenth-century Japan.