SOURCE: Keene, Donald. “Fiction: Ueda Akinari (1734-1809).” In World Within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Pre-Modern Era, 1600-1867, pp. 371-95. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976.

In the following excerpt, Keene praises Akinari's talent as a fiction writer and maintains that his stories are still widely read today, unlike the works of most of his contemporaries.

During the hundred years after Saikaku's death only one writer of fiction appeared whose works are still widely read today, Ueda Akinari. He is a difficult writer to classify because his literary production extends into many genres and styles. For most people he is known only as the author of Ugetsu Monogatari (Tales of Rain and the Moon), a brilliant collection of stories, mainly dealing with ghosts and other supernatural phenomena. Akinari undoubtedly considered this work to be of small consequence; his commentaries on the Japanese classics and studies of antiquity, the...