The Townsman as Text: Reading Tokugawa Merchant Literature

In 17th-century Japan, the rapid urbanization of Tokugawa society and the formation of a market economy led to the rise of a new social class of merchants and artisans: the “townsman” (chōnin). The emergence of the townsman was catalyzed by the rise of a commercial woodblock printing industry, which aided in the articulation, circulation, and standardization of norms of townsman identity. And just as the self-formation of the townsman class was built on textual practice, merchant literature came to reflect on the textual nature of townsman identity. In this book talk, I follow one of the threads of The Textual Townsman, examining how literary works by Ihara Saikaku and Ejima Kiseki treat townsman self-formation as an act of signification: the exemplary merchant was the one who became a pure signifier, generating name and property alchemically through performative acts of entrepreneurial self-representation.

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About the speaker: 

Thomas Gaubatz is an interdisciplinary scholar of early modern Japanese literature, woodblock print culture, and urban history. His research explores the nature of the early modern city as a social and media space, representations of the city in literature, Tokugawa popular fiction as a form of urban culture, and the roles played by woodblock print culture in giving shape to new ideas of community and identity. His first book, The Textual Townsman: Writing Urban Identity in Early Modern Japan (Columbia University Press, 2025), is a study of the formation of a merchant class, and a literature of urban identity, between the late 17th and early 18th century. He received his PhD in Japanese literature from Columbia University in 2016, and his BS in Mathematics from Stanford University in 2006.