KAMISAKA, Kanekatsu 上坂兼勝.

Tsūzoku Taiwan gundan 通俗臺灣軍談 [Vernacular Account of the War in Taiwan].

Woodblock-printed. 15 full-page & 3 double-page woodcut illus. of scenes from the novel. 19.5; 20; 19; 22.5; 18, [1] folding leaves. Five vols., labeled 仁義礼智信. Large 8vo (260 x 180 mm.), orig. semi-stiff wrappers (rubbed) with printed title-slips on upper covers (title-slips quite rubbed), orig. stitching. Kyoto: Medogiya Kanbē, 1723.

First edition of the illustrated narrative of the short-lived 1721 military uprising in Taiwan led by Zhu Yigui 朱一貴 (1690-1722), privately published by Kamisaka Kanekatsu (also known as Kamisaka Kanbē 上坂勘兵衛, Medogiya Kanbē 蓍屋勘兵衛, and Heisui Sanjin 萍水散人) in Kyōto two years later. One of the very few illustrated tsūzoku gundan 通俗軍談 (“vernacular accounts of war”) to depict the contemporary Ming-Qing transition and the only one to depict the 1721 uprising, Vernacular Account of the War in Taiwan remains an invaluable early source for these historical poorly recorded events. A very rare book: we locate only three copies of this first edition in WorldCat, at Stanford, Berkeley, and Harvard.

Vividly illustrated throughout with full-page and double-page woodcuts, the novel begins with the fall of the Ming and the subsequent activities of Koxinga (1624-62) in Taiwan. It gradually introduces the distinguished ancestries and fantastic deeds of its protagonists, including Zhu Yigui, Li Yong 李勇, and Du Junying 杜君英 (1667-1721). Following the rebels through their takeover of the Taiwan Prefectural City and later battles against the Qing admirals Shi Shibiao 施世驃 (1667-1721) and Lan Tingzhen 藍廷珍 (1664-1730), the novel ends with vivid descriptions of popular grief and natural disasters that swept through Taiwan after the protagonists’ defeat.

Japanese literary scholarship has traditionally attributed the appearance of the yomihon, genre of illustrated vernacular fiction (a precursor to the modern Japanese novel) in the 18th century to the influx of Chinese fiction through the Nagasaki port during the late 17th and early 18th centuries, which led to the emergence of the tsūzoku gundan narratives that translated and adapted Chinese historical writing for a Japanese readership. As Professor Tokuda Takeshi explains in his pioneering study, these “reading materials depicting the turmoil of various moments in Chinese history, written in a rigid mixture of Chinese characters and katakana, are commonly called tsūzoku gundan. The word tsūzoku [“vernacular”] at the beginning of their titles signaled that they are translations from Chinese texts, and the word gundan [“account of war”] was habitually affixed at the end”–徳田武, 日本近世小說と中国小說, p. 13.

The publication of the Vernacular Account of the War in Taiwan in 1723 was the culmination of the tsūzoku gundan genre’s decades of development, from unillustrated, literal translations of Chinese histories during the 1690s to increasingly dramatized and illustrated heroic narratives that approached novelistic form. Additionally, the Vernacular Account belongs to a small handful of tsūzoku gundan published after 1705 that depicted contemporary, rather than historical, events related to the Ming-Qing transition. The swift translation of political and military news abroad for consumption by a domestic readership was unprecedented in Japanese publishing.

In his Preface, the author, Kamisaka Kanekatsu explains that the Vernacular Account of the War in Taiwan is his translation of an account of recent events in Taiwan that had arrived through the Nagasaki port. Scholars since Ōta Nanpo 大田南畝 (1749-1823) have identified this source to be the Jingtai shilu 靖台實錄 [Veritable Records of the Pacification of Taiwan] of Huang Yaojiong 黃耀炯, published in the spring of 1722, recounting the rebellion — and its swift suppression by Qing forces — that had taken place a few months prior. The Vernacular Account was published just one year after the Veritable Records, in the summer of 1723. Professor Tokuda’s comparison of the two texts shows that Kamisaka substantially rewrote Huang’s documentary account, creating an illustrated historical novel in 28 chapters, heroizing the rebel Zhu Yigui, dramatizing the military conflicts, and incorporating many fictional and even supernatural elements absent in the source text. “The Vernacular Account takes the historical text Veritable Records as its basis, and although it directly translated certain passages where no fictional elaboration was required, it also greatly expanded and revised portrayals of characters and wars in order to achieve the entertainment quality of the gundan genre.” As it changed the narrative from a triumphant subjugation of frivolous rebels to the tragic downfall of a righteous hero, the Vernacular Account is best understood as a creative rewriting rather than translation of its Chinese-language source text; and as such, it breaks free from the existing conventions of the relatively derivative tsūzoku gundan genre and anticipates more original Japanese yomihon literature to come.

The Preface by Kamisaka (signed Heisui Sanjin) in Vol. 1 is dated to midsummer of kyōhō 8 (1723).

Very good copy, with some (mostly marginal) worming and staining. The original wrappers are somewhat rubbed. The red collector's seal that appears throughout reads 桒野蔵書. The black collector’s seal on the first folio of some volumes is difficult to read.

❧ 徳田武, 日本近世小說と中国小說 (青裳堂書店, 1987), pp. 128-42. 林桂如, “中國講史小說與大坂所刊通俗軍談,” 故宮學術季刊 38 (2021), pp. 201-26. Chui–Joe Tham, “The transnational historiography of a dynastic transition: Writing the Ming-Qing transition in seventeenth-century China, Korea, and Japan,” Modern Asian Studies 57 (2023), pp. 776-807. William Hedberg, “How Do We Have Eighteenth-Century Japanese Fiction? Hermeneutic Mitate, Unreadable Novels, and Tension in Translation,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 37, no. 1 (2025), pp. 53-76.