Il tatuaggio nella letteratura del tardo periodo Edo

Tattoo in late Edo-period popular literature
Even before Hokusai’s (1760-1849) and Kuniyoshi’s (1797-1861) flamboyant patterns on the Suikoden (Chinese: Shuihu zhuan, Water Margin, 14th century) heroes’ bodies, popular literature from the second half of the 18th century vividly testifies to the practice of tattooing for aesthetic or identitary purposes. Among the figures often connected to the practice of dermatography, there appeared the otokodate ‘the chivalrous young men’ and the female entertainers or prostitutes (often of low- or middle-rank prostitutes), who used tattoos as a means to swear eternal love to a customer. Sometimes tattoos support the characterisation of protagonists, unveiling their true role in the story, which may vary from story to story and according to where in Edo the plot is set. In other texts, tattos may become the central mechanism pushing the story forward, like in Geisha yobukodori (Geisha, the lamenting cuckoo, 1777). This paper seeks to analyse the significance of tattoos in the milieu of Edo pleasure quarters, by taking into exam some of its popular fictionalisations. The objective is twofold: on the one hand, it aims to make a survey of those stories in which tattoos function as a meaningful narrative mechanism is conducted; on the other hand, it uses the results of such survey to formulate some more general considerations about the intertextual relations among texts in Edo literature.