Blood, Tears, and Samurai LoveA Tragic Tale from Eighteenth-Century Japan
About the Project
This joint Leiden-Yale digital research project is centered on a unique early eighteenth-century Japanese manuscript acquired by Yale's Beinecke Library in 2017 (working title: Shudō tsuya monogatari 衆道通夜物語). Set in 1713 in northwestern Japan, the anonymous work describes a samurai same-sex love affair and its tragic consequences. As such, it provides a rare example of an early modern "true-record book" (jitsuroku-bon)—a book of rumors surrounding actual events and scandals, illicitly circulating in handwritten manuscript form—on the subject of male same-sex love.
This website seeks to unlock the manuscript for students, scholars, educators, and the general public by providing a fully annotated and translated digital edition of the original, alongside short introductory essays on the text and pedagogical resources to enable this primary source to be used in the classroom.
Watch a brief introductory video of Haruko Nakamura, Librarian for Japanese Studies at Yale University Library, telling the story of this manuscript and how it was deciphered.
We gratefully acknowledge the generous support provided by Japan Past & Present, the Dutch Research Council (NWO), and the Yale Council for East Asian Studies, without which this project would not have been possible.
Special thanks are also due to the Yonezawa City Uesugi Museum, the Yonezawa City Library, and the Isaac Alfred Ailion Foundation for their support.