| This dissertation is a study of two Edo-period narratives that circulated for over 200 years and purport to tell of the arrival and expulsion of the Christian missionaries in Japan. Combining the results of archival research and an ideological analysis of representations of Japan and the Kirishitan as a Western "other" in the tales, the work employs a cultural studies approach to examine the place in Edo popular culture of Kirishitan monogatari (Tale of the Kirishitan), printed in 1639 and 1665, and Kirishitan shumon raicho jikki (Record of the Arrival of the Kirishitan Sect), which circulated in manuscript from the late seventeenth century until its first printing in 1868. A translation of the latter text is included in the Appendix.; The first two chapters detail the startling results of archival research in twenty libraries in Japan, which reveal that over 150 extant copies of Kirishitan shumon raicho jikki exist under at least 65 different titles. They further trace the evolution of the tales from the earlier kanazoshi style to the later jitsuroku style, and show the importance of the latter as a genre in which news of current events and other prohibited information circulated in manuscript form under the bakufu's censorship radar. The analysis reveals that a crucial element in the success of this circulation was the phenomenon of the commercial lending library.; The third chapter analyzes the representation of the so-called Kirishitan (Christians) in the tales as a discursive strategy that worked to allay the anxiety brought on by a new, more comprehensive understanding of Japan's place in the world and by the ever growing, unsettling presence of Western ships offshore. In the tales, the threatening Kirishitan demons and would-be conquerors are subjugated not only through their expulsion by Hideyoshi, but also in their representation as an exoticized but thoroughly domesticated "other."; The fourth chapter examines the imagined geographies of the tales to show how they ignore new information about the world and instead remap Japan at the center of the traditional, sacred "three realms" cosmology, with the land of the Kirishitan representing the barbaric peoples outside that realm. |
