ABSTRACT
The second half of the Tokugawa period saw the rise of a type of illustrated fiction characterized by a thorough interpenetration of text and image. Manga emerged under the stimulus of Western comics entering Japan in the Meiji period, and they emerged in a milieu of reform, innovation, and modernization that could hardly have been less interested in the last gasps of the native comics tradition. Kusazoshi exited stage-left while Western comics (soon to become manga in Japan) entered stage-right. But while we cannot say that the grass booklets grew into the mighty tree of manga, we can say that they prepared the ground for it, because if nothing else they had created a public that, for a century or more, had been accustomed to reading pictures and words in tandem, that is, reading in a comics mode.
