일본 근세소설 속의 상인상의 형성과 전개 - 사이카쿠(西鶴)와 그 이후의 우키요조시(浮世草子)를 중심으로 -

Abstract

In this paper, it was confirmed how merchants were described in ukiyo-zôshi published from the beginning to the middle of the Edoperiod. First, the features of merchants drawn by Saikaku as well as the background of the creation of economic novels were examined, mainly by analyzing Saikaku’s Nippon eitaigura (1688), the first full-scale economic novel in Japanese literature. Saikaku’snovels,whilemainlyusingconventionalmoralsformerchants,suchas“economy”, “honesty”, “judgement” and “ingenuity” as a business scheme, either depict exaggerated situations of merchants who apply themselves to those rules faith fully or make caricatures of those who deviate from them. In addition, it was confirmed that there are ukiyo-zôshi written by other authors under the influence of Saikaku. Not only did they follow the characteristics of Saikaku’s novels, but they also adopted new ideas to their novels in various ways. Among them, the genre of the fraud novel, called terenmono, which depicted the negative side of “money” to excite a human “desire” arose. Economic novels of the first half of the Edo period place an indubitable lesson, while arousing interest by expressions of exaggeration and vanity. In other words, a feature of economic novels of that time is that they combine fiction with morals.