Books from Japanese circulating libraries in the British Library

Over the last ten years there has been in Japan a steady growth of interest in the circulating libraries known as kashihonya and in due course this bids fair to make a valuable contribution to the study of the rise of literacy in Japan in the Tokugawa period (1600-1868). Some light may also be shed on other subjects, such as the nature of provincial culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the extent to which it was dependent on the major cities of Edo (Tokyo), Kyoto, and Osaka.