Il gesaku dal punto di vista della lettura

Gesaku, or popular fiction of the Edo period, constitutes a representative part of Tokugawa culture. Driven by the flourishing print culture, popular fiction gained an increasing number of readers and promoted its own set of reading practices: an extemporaneous or fixed–term relationship between books and readers, who are not involved in the process of spreading texts through copying nor implementing them through marginal notes. Rather, this relaxed and oral reading urges the reader to participate in the performance of the text, so as to realize its significance. Diegetic strategies chosen by authors are not only stylistically indebted to theatrical and recitative expression, but they also share the same narrative modes inasmuch as the reader himself is intended to be the performer of the text.