Medicine, fiction, and metaphor: the medical body, health, and disease in late eighteenth-century Japanese graphic narratives

Koch, A.C

doi:doi:10.1353/mni.2025.a984605

With a focus on Jippensha Ikku’s Hara no uchi yōjō shuron (The Essentials of Healthy Living Inside the Abdomen; 1799), this article explores the role of metaphors in the portrayal of the medical body, health, and disease in late Edoperiod “yellow-cover” (kibyōshi) fiction and popular prints and how the use of metaphor in these works fit within the broader intellectual currents of the times. The study shows how such graphic narratives built on the rich tradition of metaphorical ways of thinking about the body that had been inherent in Sino-Japanese medicine virtually since its inception. I examine how the influx of medical themes and their metaphorical heritage in late-Edo fiction took place against the backdrop of a marked increase in the circulation of medical knowledge for lay audiences in the Edo period—a process in which fiction itself played a part. In this context, I discuss two distinct yet interlinked lines of metaphorical thinking that enjoyed popularity in late-Edo...Show moreWith a focus on Jippensha Ikku’s Hara no uchi yōjō shuron (The Essentials of Healthy Living Inside the Abdomen; 1799), this article explores the role of metaphors in the portrayal of the medical body, health, and disease in late Edoperiod “yellow-cover” (kibyōshi) fiction and popular prints and how the use of metaphor in these works fit within the broader intellectual currents of the times. The study shows how such graphic narratives built on the rich tradition of metaphorical ways of thinking about the body that had been inherent in Sino-Japanese medicine virtually since its inception. I examine how the influx of medical themes and their metaphorical heritage in late-Edo fiction took place against the backdrop of a marked increase in the circulation of medical knowledge for lay audiences in the Edo period—a process in which fiction itself played a part. In this context, I discuss two distinct yet interlinked lines of metaphorical thinking that enjoyed popularity in late-Edo fiction and popular prints, as well as in contemporary educational and health-related texts—namely, the tropes of health in relation to societal harmony on the one hand and moral education on the other. Ultimately, my contention is that when writers of fiction came to use images of the medical body, health, and disease for the purposes of entertainment, they often rendered absurd the medical, political, and moral orthodoxies of their day, presenting visions of “ailing” social and moral bodies quite at odds with the views that educators, scholars, and the authorities had been seeking to promote.
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Medicine, fiction, and metaphor: the medical body, health, and disease in late eighteenth-century Japanese graphic narratives