Exploration of the Seventeenth Century Japanese Authors’ Writing Style Using a Quantitative Approach

Introduction

This study aims to exploration of the seventeenth century Japanese authors’, Saikaku Ihara (c.1642–93), Dansui Hōjō (1663-1711) and Ichirōemon Nishimura (?-c.1696), writing style from a quantitative point of view.
Saikaku was a national author whose novels were published in seventeenth century in Japan. As he gained a national audience, Saikaku was pressured to write on demand and in great volume. At first, he wrote only one or two novels a year, however in the two years from 1687 to 1688 he published twelve books, with a total of sixty-two volumes. Saikaku’s style and approach also changed at this point (Shirane, 2004).
One recent hypothesis has stated that he wrote twenty-four novels, however it remained unclear which works were really written by Saikaku except
Kōshoku Ichidai Otoko (
“The Life of an Amorous Man”; 1682),
Shōen Ōkagami (
“The Great Mirror of Female Beauty”; 1684),
Kōshoku Ichidai Onna (
“The Life of an Amorous Woman”; 1686),
Kōshoku Gonin Onna (
“Love Stories about Five Women”; 1686), while research on his works has proceeded, these fundamental doubts about his authorship remain. Dansui was Saikaku’s student. Mori (1955) has argued that Saikaku’s novels are an apocryphal work mainly written by Dansui except
Kōshoku Ichidai Otoko. Many researchers have raised questions about the authorship of Saikaku's posthumous novels, because these novels were edited and published by Dansui after Saikaku’s death. Ichirōemon was known for imitating the work of Saikaku. However, Ichirōemon was too conscious of Saikaku, and tried to preserve the traditional style of
kana zoushi. Thus, Ichirōemon’s novels were nothing like as good as Saikaku’s　(Nishimura bon shōsetsu kenkyukai　ed., 1985).

Previous studies

In our previous studies, we have analyzed Saikaku and Dansui’s novels, and have clarified the following points by extracting their writing style using principal component analysis and cluster analysis: (1) A comparison of the Saikaku and Dansui’s novels showed ten prominent features: the grammatical categories, words, nouns, particles, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, adnominal adjectives, grammatical categories bigrams and particle bigrams (Uesaka, 2015, 2016); and (2) Using these features, we analyzed Saikaku's four posthumous novels. We found these four posthumous works indicated same features of Saikaku’s novel, therefore we concluded that most part of these four posthumous novels belonged to Saikaku (Uesaka・Murakami, 2015ab, Uesaka, 2016).
In this study, we explored among Saikaku, Dansui and Ichirōemon using a quantitative approach to inspect a relationship of their works.

Data for this study
We used Saikaku’s twenty-four works digitized from
Shinpen Saikaku zenshū (
The Complete Collection of Saikaku (New Edition)), Dansui’s three works digitized from
Hōjō Dansui shū (
The Collection of Hōjō Dansui) and Ichirōemon’s five works digitized from
Nishimura Bon Shōsetsu Zenshū (
The Complete Collection of Nishimura Novels). Since Japanese sentences are not separated by spaces, we used Mecab-0.996 and Unidic for early modern spoken Japanese (share-bon) made by Center for Corpus Development, National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics in this study.

Table1. Title of three authors’ novels
Author Title
Saikaku
Kōshoku ichidai otoko

Saikaku
Shōen ōkagami

Saikaku
Wankyū issei no monogatari

Saikaku
Kōshoku gonin onna

Saikaku
Kōshoku ichidai onna

Saikaku
Saikaku shokoku hanashi

Saikaku
Honchō nijyū hukō

Saikaku
Nanshoku ōkagami

Saikaku
Budō denraiki

Saikaku
Kōsyoku seisuiki

Saikaku
Hutokoro suzuri

Saikaku
Nihon eitaigura

Saikaku
Irozato mitokoro setai

Saikaku
Bukegiri monogatari

Saikaku
Arashi ha mujyō monogatari

Saikaku
Shin kashōki

Saikaku
Honchō nijyūhukou

Saikaku
Seken mumezanyō

Saikaku
Ukiyo eiga ichidaiotoko

Saikaku
Saikaku okimiyage

Saikaku
Saikaku oridome

Saikaku
Saikaku zokuturezure

Saikaku
Yorozu no humihougu

Saikaku
Saikaku nagorinotomo

Dansui
Chuya yōjin ki

Dansui
Budō hariai ōkagami

Dansui
Shikidō ōtuzumi

Ichirōemon
Otogi bikuni

Ichirōemon
Sōgishokoku　monogatari

Ichirōemon
Sayogoromo

Ichirōemon
Shin otogibōko

Ichirōemon
Shinchikusai

Analysis and results

In this study, we compared Saikaku, Dansui, and Ichirōemon by the word, particles, particle bigrams, character unigram, character bigrams and character trigrams using principal component analysis (PCA) to see the differences in each author.
We conducted PCA and each authors depicted independently in the words (see Figure 1), Japanese particles (see Figure 2), Japanese particle bigrams (see Figure 3), character unigram (see Figure 4), character bigrams (see Figure 5) and character trigrams (see Figure 6).

Figure 1. PCA results for the word

Figure 2. PCA results for the particles

Figure 3. PCA results for the particle bigrams

Figure 4. PCA results for the character unigram

Figure 5. PCA results for the character bigrams

Figure 6. PCA results for the character trigrams

Discussion and conclusion

When comparing the words, Japanese particles, Japanese particle bigrams, character unigram, character bigrams and character trigrams using PCA, Saikaku, Dansui and Ichirōemon’s novels made each groups. Moreover, as said in qualitative research, Saikaku and Dansui’s novel shown closer and Ichirōemon shown different characteristics, especially Sayogoromo. We on-going digitize Dansui, Ichirōemon and the other writers text data. In the future analysis, we will add works and the other writers for comparisons the relationship of the seventeenth century Japanese authors works.

Bibliography
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