Morishima Chūryō

Who They Were

Morishima Chūryō (森島中良, もりしま ちゅうりょう) was an Edo period writer and physician who worked in two worlds at once. Under a stack of pen names he produced popular fiction, comic poetry and plays; under his own name he wrote about Western learning at a time when that knowledge was arriving in Japan through a single narrow channel. He lived from 1756 to 29 December 1810, born and buried in Tsukiji, the riverside district of Edo where the shogunate's foreign-affairs machinery was concentrated.

He was the younger brother of Katsuragawa Hoshū, a physician to the shogun and one of the leading scholars of rangaku (蘭学, らんがく, "Dutch learning" — the study of European science and medicine via Dutch texts). That family connection placed Chūryō at the centre of the small, tightly connected circle of Edo intellectuals who were trying to read Europe.

He is best remembered as the principal literary heir of Hiraga Gennai, the eccentric polymath whose style and persona he deliberately took up. Chūryō wrote in almost every genre of gesaku (戯作, げさく, "playful writing" — the commercial popular fiction of the late Edo period), and he also served the Shirakawa Domain as a retainer.

Life and Career

Chūryō was born in 1756, in the sixth year of the Hōreki era (宝暦, ほうれき). His birthplace was Tsukiji, and Tsukiji was also where he died, on 29 December 1810.

Early in his career he collaborated with Hiraga Gennai on several plays. Gennai was a generation older, a botanist, inventor, painter and author who embodied the ideal of the broadly curious Edo intellectual. Chūryō's apprenticeship under him shaped both his comic voice and his habit of moving between serious and popular writing.

After Gennai's death, Chūryō became the main continuer of his literary manner. He wrote across the spectrum of gesaku genres — the term covers everything from illustrated popular fiction to witty occasional pieces — and he also composed kyōka (狂歌, きょうか, "mad verse" — comic waka poetry), publishing it under the pen name Taketsue no Sugaru.

Alongside the fiction, he produced a number of works in rangaku. This was not a sideline for a dilettante: his brother Katsuragawa Hoshū was a shogunal physician and a leading rangaku scholar, and the Katsuragawa household was a clearing house for translated European medical and scientific texts. Chūryō's Western-studies writing belongs to that same milieu.

He held a position with the Shirakawa Domain, and worked as a physician as well as an author. He died at the end of 1810, aged 54 by Western reckoning.

Why They Matter

Chūryō sits at the intersection of two currents that define late Edo intellectual life. The first is gesaku, the commercially published, often satirical fiction that made authors into recognizable public figures in the cities. The second is rangaku, the slow, painstaking importation of European knowledge through Dutch, which by the early nineteenth century had become the most dynamic area of Japanese scholarship.

Very few people worked credibly in both. Chūryō did, and his double career shows how porous the boundary was: the same man who wrote comic verse and popular fiction also wrote about Western learning, and the same family that supplied the shogun with a physician supplied Edo's readership with a popular author.

His role as Hiraga Gennai's literary successor also matters. Gennai left no school in any formal sense, but Chūryō's adoption of his persona — down to the pen names — kept a distinctive, irreverent style alive in print into the nineteenth century.

The Name in Japanese

The name is written 森島中良.

• 森島 — read Morishima. 森 (mori) means "forest"; 島 (shima) means "island". Together they form the surname.
• 中良 — read Chūryō. 中 (chū) means "middle" or "centre"; 良 (ryō) means "good" or "fine". Together they form the given name.

The kana reading is もりしま ちゅうりょう, and the romaji is Morishima Chūryō. Note that the long vowel in Chūryō is a genuine long ū, not a doubled syllable — the name has four morae in Japanese: mo-ri-shi-ma plus chu-u-ryo-u.

The pen names are worth knowing, because Chūryō published under several and readers will meet them in catalogues. Manzōtei was one. Shinra Manzō — often rendered by convention as Shinra Banshō — was another. The most pointed was Tenjiku Rōjin (天竺老人, てんじくろうじん, "old man from India"), an allusion to Tenjiku Rōnin (天竺浪人, てんじくろうにん, "masterless samurai from India"), the pen name used by Hiraga Gennai. In Edo usage Tenjiku — literally India — could stand for anywhere far away and exotic, so the joke carried a whiff of the foreign. By echoing Gennai's name and softening rōnin to rōjin, Chūryō signalled both his debt to his mentor and his own claim to the older man's territory.

For kyōka he used the name Taketsue no Sugaru.

Legacy

Chūryō's reputation rests on two things. First, he is the standard example of a gesaku author who was also a serious rangaku writer — useful to anyone trying to understand how European ideas actually circulated in Edo, which was through families, patronage networks and men with several careers. Second, he is the clearest case of literary inheritance from Hiraga Gennai, whose style he carried forward under names designed to make the connection unmistakable.

His brother Katsuragawa Hoshū is the more famous figure in the history of Japanese science. Chūryō's own Western-studies writing is read alongside that of the Katsuragawa circle rather than in isolation. But his popular fiction and comic poetry stand on their own, and his pen names — Manzōtei, Shinra Manzō, Tenjiku Rōjin, Taketsue no Sugaru — remain the surest way to identify his work in Edo-period bibliographies, where a single author may appear under half a dozen identities.