Tamenaga Shunsui

(1790 - 1843)

Not much is known about the first half of Tamenaga Shunsui’s life other than that he managed a bookstore, which operated as a lending library, and wrote his first work of fiction in 1819. He later went on to become one of the leading writers of ninjōbon, books of sentiment or romance that often told of love between a man and a woman deferred but then realized. As an author and a publisher, Shunsui was affected by edicts issued in the early 1840s concerning the proper style and content of books: he was placed in manacles for his “obscene novelettes.”