37 - Late medieval popular fiction and narrated genres: otogizōshi, kōwakamai, sekkyō, and ko-jōruri

Summary

The late medieval period was characterized by a remarkable florescence of the literary, visual, and performing arts. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw the rise of a vast new genre of anonymous short fiction or otogizoshi. Both kowakamai and sekkyo, two independent oral genres with roots in early medieval preaching and storytelling, came to possess a recognizable repertoire of tales in the late medieval period. But in their transcribed and illustrated forms these stories are sometimes categorized as otogizoshi, and are thus included in major modern compendiums of all three narrative genres. There is likewise an overlap among sekkyo, kowakamai, otogizoshi, and the seventeenth-century ko-joruri puppet theater, the early plays of which tended to be based on earlier kowakamai, sekkyo, and other katari-mono compositions. By around the late seventeenth century, kowakamai was waning in the shadow of noh; likewise, sekkyo came to be influenced by joruri until it finally disappeared in the early eighteenth century as an independent theatrical form.