Edo-period Japan was a golden age for commercial fiction. But how to understand the politics of this literature remains contested, in part because many of its defining characteristics—formulaicness, reuse of narratives, stock characters, linguistic play, and heavy allusion to literary canon—can seem to hold social and political realities at arm’s length. Writing Violence: The Politics of Form in Early Modern Japanese Literature offers a new approach to understanding the relationship between the challenging formal features of early modern fiction and the world beyond its pages.