Dreaming One’s Way to Good Health: A Translation of Jippensha Ikku’s Hara no Uchi Yōjō ShuronAngelika Koch

Abstract

This article presents a fully annotated English translation of Jippensha Ikku’s “yellow-cover book” (kibyōshi) Hara no uchi yōjō shuron, one of a number of late-Edo works of popular fiction and prints that used the inner workings of the human body as their subject matter. A close reading of the work shows how it relies heavily on Sino-Japanese medical concepts—particularly those propounded in Kaibara Ekiken’s Confucian-inflected health cultivation text Yōjōkun—and how it draws on the moral teachings of Shingaku (“Mind-Learning”); thus the present article reveals the flow of knowledge between medical, moral, and literary discourses. It demonstrates, moreover, the interest that Hara no uchi yōjō shuron holds not only for literary scholars as an example of popular fiction’s turn toward more serious subject matter in the wake of the Kansei Reforms but also for scholars of medical history as a text that incorporates notions of health cultivation and the medical body that were current in Ikku’s day.