In practice, this meant that some topics were demarcated as off-limits for general publication in print.  First and foremost, information about the shogunal government, its officials, regional lords (daimyo) and samurai retainers was not to be circulated without permission and was liable to potential punishment. Some of the earliest recorded cases of censorship in the seventeenth century, in fact, allegedly targeted a publication that had reprinted a letter by the first Tokugawa shogun, Ieyasu, and a somewhat revealing manuscript by a member of a shogunal inspection tour of the domains. At times overlapping with this first category were publications that shogunal edicts disdainfully dubbed rumors (fūsetsu, uwasagoto), hearsay (fusetsu), strange events (mezurashiki mono), empty words (kyosetsu, kyogen), baseless (mukon) assertions and the like, such as reports and gossip about love suicides, revenge killings and various scandals that attracted popular interest. Books about sex, whether factual or not, were likewise suppressed as injurious to public morals, particularly after 1722—albeit to little avail, judging by the substantial amount of erotica that continued to be produced.

This is not to say that news and hearsay did not circulate in early modern Japan. The existence of our manuscript is already proof to the contrary, and reports on recent events spread in a variety of other forms. Yomiuri (lit. "reader-sellers") peddlers of cheaply produced broadsheets (kawaraban) hawked the streets of cities, reciting juicy titbits from the mishmash of notable current events contained in their ephemeral publications. These ranged from the Osaka military campaigns (1614–1615), revenge killings and love suicides to fires and earthquakes, sightings of mermaids and monsters, impromptu sex changes, children born with two heads, the display of exotic animals such as elephants and camels, shogunal hunting trips and the threatening arrival of Perry's black ships (1853–54) in the nineteenth century.

Storytellers (kōshakushi) performing on street corners, in makeshift shelters and private houses likewise turned current events and street gossip into engaging narratives for the masses. On occasion, their stories were recorded in cheap pamphlets that were sold or handed out as raffle prizes at their performances or circulated via lending libraries. Baba Bunkō, the most daring and subversive of early modern raconteurs, who was ultimately put to death for airing his views on a high-profile shogunal court case, allegedly sold booklets of this ill-fated account for a mere 300 coppers.

In addition to these somewhat ephemeral forms of "news media" that proliferated despite the government's best efforts at containment, there was another powerful alternative that became a go-to for furtive subject matters in the early modern period manuscript. Strictly speaking, such texts were illegal and government regulations soon specifically outlawed handwritten texts on undesirable subjects. The catalog of banned books issued by the Kyoto booksellers' guild in the 1770s (Kinsho mokuroku, 1771) contains no fewer than 122 such manuscripts, which make up the bulk of texts on the list, and warns its members against handling such works. Because censorship was largely left to the self-regulating publishers' guilds responsible for printed publications, however, it was not difficult for manuscripts to evade such control mechanisms. Copied by hand, they instead often circulated alongside printed books via ambulant lending libraries (kashihon'ya). As Peter Kornicki has previously pointed out, the scribal world of manuscripts therefore had complementary functions vis-à-vis print culture in Edo-period Japan and provided a haven for works unsuited for print.

Such works covered events of general interest that could not appear in print due to censorship, such as intrigue and power struggles in powerful warrior houses (o-ie sōdō), tragic revenge and passionate love stories, tales of gallant bandits and heroes of peasant uprisings, and sex scandals that rocked the highest echelons of society, such as the Enmeiin Affair (1803). Usually produced for public consumption rather than mere private enjoyment, some of these handwritten texts enjoyed a wide circulation as a staple of lending libraries, copied and recopied by readers, often accreting further details and embellishments along the way.

Our manuscript clearly bears all the hallmarks of such scandalous texts—love affairs, jealousy, revenge, murder and the downfall of a (not so prominent) warrior house. Its author, as was typical of such "true-record" manuscripts, remains anonymous and its circulation obscure. The book displays no tell-tale signs of handling by a lending library and bears no owner seals that might provide clues to its provenance prior to its arrival at Yale's Beinecke Library in 2017. Its lack of a title further complicates the task of ascertaining the existence of other copies, as does the fact that "true-record" manuscripts frequently circulated under a number of different titles.

No matching work is listed in the most extensive, pioneering bibliography of premodern literature on "male love" (nanshoku) compiled by Iwata Jun'ichi or in the Union Catalogue Database of Premodern Japanese Texts. For all we currently know, the Yale copy may be unique and if the text ever circulated, it most likely did so within the local community where the events unfolded.