2019 Volume 101 Pages 16-31
During the Edo period, the word shōroku referred to the act of writing down sentences the reader wanted to commit to memory. Readers did this not only to remember literary expressions, but also to stimulate their own literary imaginations, using the concept of consciousness (ki) as a medium. In this paper, I use Yoshida Kou's Shōsetsu Bunpan (1889) as a starting point for an examination of the cultural background of shōroku, focusing on the relationship between memory and imagination before the Meiji era. I also show how pre-Meiji discourse on memory and imagination was deconstructed as psychology was introduced during the Meiji era.
