Manga from the Floating World is the first full-length study in English of the kibyoshi, a genre of woodblock-printed comicbook widely read in late-eighteenth-century Japan. By combining analysis of the socioeconomic and historical milieus in which the genre was produced and consumed with three annotated translations of works by major author-artist Santo Kyoden (1761-1816) that closely reproduce the experience of encountering the originals, Adam Kern offers a sustained close reading of the vibrant popular imagination of the mid-Edo period. The kibyoshi, Kern argues, became an influential form...