Nichibunken Evening Seminar

This presentation is centred on my upcoming book project on Tōkaidōchū Hizakurige, tentatively titled "Hizakurige and Joy," (膝栗毛と喜び) and is intendedas an opportunity to test the project's core claims and invite feedback on its emerging shape. 

The central argument is that Tōkaidōchū Hizakurige works through an economy of feelings — by which I mean a systematic rhythm of discomfort and pleasure, darkness and levity, that is more grotesque, more extreme, and stranger than existing scholarship has recognised. Where previous approaches have tended to focus on the intertextual apparatus surrounding Hizakurige, or to treat its humor as self-evident, this book takes the text's affective texture as its primary object of analysis. Drawing on close reading supported by a methodology I call the "beatmap" — a tool for scoring the affective rhythm of episodes beat by beat — the aim is to make Hizakurige's economy of feelings visible as a pattern rather than merely an impression, and to show how the text establishes norms of feeling that it then systematically deforms. An exciting recent discovery has been the early writings of Umehara Takeshi, in which, in the context of a broader discussion of laughter that includes direct engagement with Hizakurige, he develops a strikingly similar set of intuitions about emotion, humor, and literary affect — including graphical plotting of affective moments.. I am currently working through this material and expect it to inform the book's theoretical core in ways I will explore in the talk.