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Playing with Japanese Words: A Close Reading of Cao Yin’s The Joyous Japanese Songs

Playing with Japanese Words: A Close Reading of Cao Yin’s The Joyous Japanese Songs Taiping leshi 太平乐事 (Joy in the time of peace and prosperity) by Cao Yin 曹寅 (1658–1712), is a drama of uniqueness involving exotic subjects. Act 8, entitled The Joyous Japanese Songs , is about the King of Japan paying tribute to the Chinese emperor, and most parts of it are written in Chinese characters carrying only sounds. Cao Yin called the phonetic characters “Woyu” (the Japanese language). But what does this kind of unprecedented “Woyu” intend to convey and what is the historical background behind these “Woyu”? This paper attempts to interpret this drama based on Japanese scholarship on Chinese-Japanese vocabularies compiled in the Ming dynasty, and on research into Cao Yin’s knowledge about Japan through textual analysis. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Frontiers of Literary Studies in China Brill

Playing with Japanese Words: A Close Reading of Cao Yin’s The Joyous Japanese Songs

Quan, TANG
Frontiers of Literary Studies in China , Volume 5 (3): 432 – Jan 1, 2011
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References (28)

Publisher
Brill
Copyright
Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
ISSN
1673-7318
eISSN
1673-7423
DOI
10.1007/s11702-011-0137-7
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Taiping leshi 太平乐事 (Joy in the time of peace and prosperity) by Cao Yin 曹寅 (1658–1712), is a drama of uniqueness involving exotic subjects. Act 8, entitled The Joyous Japanese Songs , is about the King of Japan paying tribute to the Chinese emperor, and most parts of it are written in Chinese characters carrying only sounds. Cao Yin called the phonetic characters “Woyu” (the Japanese language). But what does this kind of unprecedented “Woyu” intend to convey and what is the historical background behind these “Woyu”? This paper attempts to interpret this drama based on Japanese scholarship on Chinese-Japanese vocabularies compiled in the Ming dynasty, and on research into Cao Yin’s knowledge about Japan through textual analysis.

Journal

Frontiers of Literary Studies in China – Brill

Published: Jan 1, 2011

Keywords: Cao Yin; drama; “Woyu,” Chinese-Japanese vocabularies

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