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excellent chapters that focus on visual and other forms of material culture in East Asia, many more themes remain to be investigated.
One visually oriented, comparative perspective that we might well have included in this book is an analysis of the travels and transformations of the popular Chinese primer known as Ershisi xiao 二十四孝 (The twenty-four paragons of filial piety); Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese versions of this widely circulated text reflect sometimes radically different illustrative techniques as well as significantly different representations of gender and social class.56 Another comparative perspective might have been an examination of the way that a Ming-dynasty account of foreign lands and peoples, known as the Luochong lu 臝蟲錄 (Record of naked creatures), was radically remade in early Tokugawa Japan into a popular pictorial and narrative genre of the day: the so-called Nara picture books (Nara ehon 奈良繪本) with illustrations “rendered delicately in vivid and elegant colors.” In one such album, titled Ikoku monogatari 異國物語 (Tale of foreign countries), the pictures and descriptions of Japan in the original Chinese work have been replaced with a new vision of “Great Japan” (Dai Nihon koku 大日本國).57
Summaries and Preliminary Conclusions
We should note at the outset that within the three thematically titled sections of this book, the contents of one chapter are often related to the contents of others in ways that are too complex to identify in this introduction. The following summaries should, however, indicate certain points of both conflict and affinity.
The first part of this book consists of four chapters, each on a specific text that was transmitted from China to one or more East Asian countries, and each piece arranged chronologically according to the time when the text was originally written. Each case study explores the background of the work, the motives behind its creation, the process(es) by which it was transmitted to other parts of the Sinosphere, and how the work was