The Invention of Authorship in Early Modern Japan

Through a careful reappraisal of the fiction of the oft-overlooked writer Miyako no Nishiki (b. 1675), this article seeks insight into the ways commercial writers conceptualized authorship at the turn of the eighteenth century, following the groundbreaking success of the writer Ihara Saikaku (1642–93). I show that Miyako no Nishiki’s fiction, though not written as a treatise, nonetheless presents a coherent and sophisticated theorization of commercial authorship, addressing the navigation of diverse readerships, creative experimentation under commercial pressure, the ethics of plagiarism, and the gap between the author as a physical person and as a figure of discourse.