Peony Lantern Tales

Jōo’s research in primary sources in Chinese and Japanese across multiple genres, as well as secondary sources in English, Chinese, and Japanese, is impeccable. The concept of the Sinosphere has been useful in studies of modern and contemporary literature that seek to overcome the conceptual limits of imagining discrete national literatures; her book is a potent demonstration of what the Sinosphere could mean in the fifteenth–nineteenth centuries. Raina Huntington, University of Wisconsin-Madison

In this pathbreaking volume, Jōo draws on materials in archives in both China and Japan to present us with a kaleidoscope of historical moments, cultural and linguistic spaces, and literary and performative genres. It is a rare scholar who can so comfortably mobilize solid training in Classical Chinese, Classical Japanese, modern Chinese, and modern Japanese, bringing vividly to life the journey of a single work across the Sinosphere, and the rich particularity of its absorption into local contexts. Her book shows us, in the most brilliant way, just how much we have to gain from approaches that take as their point of departure the vast, variable landscape of the Sinosphere. Satoko Shimazaki, UCLA