Ryūtei Tanehiko (柳亭種彦) (author 1783 – 1842)

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Biography:

Karl Florenz said (in a Google translation) in Geschichte der Japanischen Litteratur, 1906, pages 510 ff.: "The most outstanding author of Gōkan-mono, the light entertainment works that grew into novel-like volumes, is considered to be Ryūtei Tanehiko (1783—1842), a vassal (Hatamato) of the Tokugawa court, whose real name was Takaya Hikoshirō. He was a man of many talents and learning, and wrote several historically and literary-historically useful collections, such as Kwankon Shiryō, "Leaves of Antiquarian Contents" (2 vols., 1826), and Yōsha-bako, "Box for Everything". He was not to be underestimated as a kyōka and haikai poet. He was an expert in painting, which he had studied ex professo in his younger years, and was said to have been quite skilled in acting: a type of samurai of the Edo Shogunate, who towards the end of the Tokugawa period were increasingly alienated from their original profession and strict military discipline. At first he wrote a few yellow volumes, then romantic historical novellas, For example, the knight stories Asama-gatake Omokage Zōshi (1808) with the sequel Ōshü Shūjaki Monogatari, "The Persistent Love of the Prostitute Ōkū" (1812), both based on an older Jōruri drama, and Moji-tesuri Mukashi-ningyō, "Ancient Puppet Show Behind the Floor-Railing" (1812); furthermore the sentimental love story En-musubi Gekka no Kiku, "The Mediation of Love by a Branch Flower"."

"He also dabbled in quasi-dramatic works, namely in narratives with predominantly spoken dialogue, which were called shōhonjitate, "stage drama-like," because of their similarity to the stage drama. Even the illustrations in them looked as if they had been drawn from theater performances; the characters wore the masks of well-known actors of the time. Although the shōhon]itate were Tanehiko's specialty and no such books were published after his death, they were not entirely his invention. For Kyōden's Oroku-gushi Kiso Adauchi, a revenge story published in 1807, the painter Toyokuni had already depicted the characters in contemporary actor portraits, and Tanehiko had He apparently adopted this style. He wrote eight shōhonjitate, mostly single-volume books of six books each, including adaptations of the folk tales of Osome and Hisamatsu (cf. Bakin's Shōsen Jōshi) and Izaemon and the Courtesan Yūgiri."