I don't think I've ever seen you comment on misemono before - any thoughts on them? I finished The Carnival of Edo: Misemono Spectacles From Contemporary Accounts to gain some context after seeing them mentioned in the Lafcadio Hearn account of the Kudan, so they've been on my mind. I like the mock-duelists that shill resurrection elixir to their crowd and the guy who painted a Buddha statue onto the telescope.
I completely missed this question, I’m sorry - it must’ve spent like half a year in the depths of my ask box. Apologies! Anyway, It’s kind of funny how rarely they seem to come up in historical fiction about the Edo period despite being one of the most widespread forms of entertainment in it, isn’t it? I think my favorite category of misemono displays are the tennen kibutsu ones, ie. unusual animals (see Daniel J. Wyatt, Creatures of Myth and Modernity: Meiji-Era Representations of Shōjō (Orangutans) as Exotic Animals, p. 73 for an overview of classification). Special shoutouts to the anti-smallpox cassowary (Creatures…, p. 74) and to the “thousand-year-old-mole” (千年土龍) which was reportedly actually a badger hyped up as a long-lived “king of moles” on the account of vague anatomical similarities (Creatures…, p. 73, footnote 2). It’s kind of funny that the often folklore-based, or entirely made up, advertising for misemono displays could lead to people being disappointed - a frustrated visitor to a show held in Tokyo in 1875 penned a strongly worded letter to Yomiuri Shimbun in which he describes his confusion after seeing an alleged shōjō (ie. an orangutan, though in this case apparently a monkey was displayed as a specimen of the earlier shōjō from the realm of literary fiction), as the animal “didn’t speak as it has been written that it should in the Book of Rites, and it didn’t drink sake as Noh songs say it does” (Creatures…, p. 79). As far as Markus’ article you’ve mentioned goes, the Buddha telescope is definitely my favorite; I must say “a prodigy was a prodigy, irrespective of its commercial exploitation” is a great quote too. A final interesting misemono-adjacent curiosity is that in the 1770s Momiji, the demonic antagonist of the well known legend about Taira no Koremochi, starred in an illustrated book (kibyōshi) entitled Oni no Shikogusa (an annotated English translation, The Demon Girls Comes to Edo, courtesy of Adam Kabat, has been recently published in the collection The River Imp and the Stinky Jewel and Other Tales. Monster Comics from Edo Japan; p. 309-370) in which after many trials and tribulations (including becoming an agent of king Enma) she ends up as a misemono attraction herself. This was apparently a nod to a veritable “superstar” of a contemporary show simply remembered as “the oni girl” (oni musume); many other misemono sensations, like a depiction of the Amida Triad made out of dried fish, are referenced too. As a way to gain insight into the Edo period mentality, both when it comes to misemono and to the often playful and irreverent attitude to earlier literature, it’s a great read all around, I might cover it in more detail some day.
