The aim of this paper is to reconsider the literature and literacy of pre-modern times through the reading of Buddhist manuals called “sessou.” The religious manuals are important for the study of pre-modern literature because, for example, the tension between narration and writing in them was used for a literary effect in Konjaku-monogatari-shū and other medieval narratives. They also contributed much to the development of illustrated scrolls such as Tengu-no-sōshi, the obsolete yet historically important form of writings. The influence of the “sessou” manuals reached beyond Japan to the whole cultural areas of Chinese writings in East Asia.

In early modern times the dominant form of popular fiction was an illustrated book. In spite of technical difficulty in printing illustrations, a great amount of illustrated books had been published since the seventeenth century with the growth of the book industry, the development of the distribution network, and the expansion of readership. To appreciate them one must have not only the ability to read characters written in cursive or obsolete form but also other more complicated skills, among which the way of interpreting illustrations is most difficult to master. But unfortunately few of us have knowledge and skills enough to read the books written not more than a hundred years ago. What is worse, the academic institutions of Japanese literature are in danger of extinction; sooner or later we may lose the only place where we can learn the way of reading the old illustrated books.

Thanks to the increasing digitalization of books we can read them more conveniently. But due to the same digitalization we are now in danger of losing the “manual” experiences of reading. The essence of reading is not to objectively explicate literary ambiguities but to practically appreciate the uncanny excess of a text that resists any analysis. I think that such experiences are not possible without books as a paper medium.

It has been generally thought that Ueda-Akinari wrote his first work Shodō-kikimimi-seken-zaru in the expectation that it would be performed on the stage of kabuki. More than a mere hackwork, however, it is an experimental text in which the author searched for a unity between kabuki and fiction. Especially he managed to incorporate the theatrical style of Ichikawa-Danjūrō into the text in response to the revival of Genroku kabuki. In this sense, Seken-zaru is not a slipshod job written for money but an important work that prepared for his subsequent career as a major writer.

Jiraiya-gōketsu-monogatari is a fantastic story built around the duel between a monster toad and a monster serpent. This article focuses on the narrative function of the serpent because it plays an important role in the story from the serpentine curse in the first part to the final battle between Jiraiya and Orochimaru in the second part. The monster serpent is a mixture of traditional snake images (maybe a three way stand-off between snake, toad, and slug is most famous). While making use of such popular images, the author successfully made a new type of narrative out of old materials.