Adaptation as a Strategy for Participation : The Chikusai Storyworld in Early Modern Japanese Literature

United States License. This journal is published by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. sJapanese Language and Literature Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Japanese jll.pitt.edu | Vol. 54 | Number 1 | April 2020 | DOI 10.5195/jll.2020.89 ISSN 1536-7827 (print) 2326-4586 (online)

few titles and indiscriminately bunch them together as "imitations" of the 1620s Chikusai. Noda Hisao lists nine titles and qualifies them as mohōsaku 模倣作 of Chikusai, in other words "imitations" that "copy" the source text. He notes that these imitations either deal with doctors, emulating the fact that Chikusai was a quack, or mimic the idea of travelling from Kyoto to Edo. 8 Noma Kōshin and Ichiko Teiji give eight titles, following Noda in labelling them as imitations (mohōsaku), and introducing the collective appellation of Chikusaibon or "Chikusai books" for this group of texts. 9 Ichiko Teiji, Maeda Kingorō, Asano Satoshi, and Watanabe Morikuni do not go much beyond rehearsing the same information. 10 The only variation is in the choice of Chikusai mono (Chikusai things) over Chikusaibon, with no real explanation as to why the wording needs amendment. Fukuda Yasunori moves away from the idea of mohōsaku and talks about aryū sakuhin , which we can translate as "epigones." The underlying message remains more or less the same: the twelve titles that Fukuda lists are framed as something that are at best "similar to" the source text Chikusai-the first meaning of aryūand at worst, copies lacking in originality-the second meaning of the same word. As his predecessors, Fukuda does not delve into any further analysis of this corpus of texts. 11 The most recent reference material that mentions Chikusai confirms that almost nothing has changed in 2019: "Chikusai gave birth to subsequent texts (kōzokusaku 後続作)." 12 Some of them are described as "sequels" (gojitsudan 後日談) that "imitate" (mohō) textual features of Chikusai. Some others are seen as "modelling after" (nazoraeru なぞらえる) it or having "aspects in common" (kyōtsūten 共通 点) with it. In sum, when discussing the early modern cultural legacy of Chikusai, Japanese scholarship so far has portrayed the image of a specific source or urtext-the Chikusai of the 1620s-as having led to the publication of a number of look-alikes that slavishly copy an original text, teleologically putting emphasis on the passive reception of a single source.
To date, the limited English scholarship on the subject has uncritically endorsed the same approach. Edward Putzar mentions in passing the rise of "numerous imitations" and pins them down to the "century following its [Chikusai's] publication" (i. e., the eighteenth century). 13 Laurence Bresler is even more strident when writing: The popularity Chikusai enjoyed as soon as it was published gave rise to a large group of imitations in the same vein which are today known collectively as "Chikusai Books" (Chikusaibon). Most are unoriginal attempts to cash in on the market created by Chikusai. 14 What we are left with is a lamentable state of affairs. Whilst being alerted to Chikusai's cultural power in inspiring a number of early modern texts, these texts are dismissed as mere "imitations" and, as such, as something derivative and secondary, worthy of no or little scholarly attention. 15 This has resulted in the dearth of in-depth research about the rich intertextual rhizome of texts connected to Chikusai that early modern readers enjoyed for almost three centuries and that this article intends to explore. Recent developments in literary theory enable us to study the same materials as creative revisionings and to reflect on the intellectual implications of this approach.
What are these theoretical developments? Working on twentieth-and twenty-first-century cultural products like The Matrix, Henry Jenkins has inaugurated the idea of "transmedia storytelling," which he defines as follows: Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story. 16 This describes a deliberate, top-down design to make media converge around shared narrative contents and to create a coherent, integral storyworld. Jenkins's research is firmly anchored in the contemporary entertainment industry and its franchise model of business, but he admits ancient roots to this phenomenon, going back to the stories of Jesus as told in the Middle Ages or to the Odyssey. 17 This observation remains a kernel of an idea, though, as Jenkins has yet to pursue this line of inquiry further. More recently he has acknowledged the existence of a bottom-up form of transmedia storytelling: "The concept of multiplicity paves the way for us to think about fan fiction and other forms of grassroots expression as part of the same transmedia logic-unauthorized extensions of the "mother ship" which may nevertheless enhance fan engagement and expand our understanding of the original." 18 This remark has the potential to stretch Jenkins's definition of transmedia storytelling but fails to go beyond the idea of fan-fiction, thus precluding any application to cases where fans are not part of the equation. As a result, Jenkins's ruminations on transmedia storytelling seem hardly germane to anything that is temporally and culturally removed from the here and now. Yet, the concept of transmedia storytelling has prompted reflections in two fields-that of adaptation studies and that of narratology-and we can fruitfully apply such reflections to the study of early modern Japan.
A story is told again in a different medium or genre. The pleasure of the text comes from repetition with variation. Recognition of the story and changes to that same story work in tandem to provide readers with a fulfilling reading experience. This is the core of adaptations, as generally understood. Linda Hutcheon-the pioneer of adaptation studies-has worked over the years to debunk the stigma often attached to adaptations as derivative and secondary products. In doing so, Hutcheon has noted the positive contribution that transmedia storytelling can give to our understanding of adaptations: The "success" of an adaptation today, in the age of transmedia, can no longer be determined in relation to its proximity to any single "original," for none may even exist. Perhaps it is time to look instead to such things as popularity, persistence, or even the diversity and extent of dissemination for criteria of success. 19 More than ever before, we are reminded of adaptation as "a transcoding process that encompasses recreations, remakes, remediations, revisions, parodies, reinventions, reinterpretations, expansions, and extensions." 20 In light of this, Hutcheon extends the very definition of adaptation: "adaptation is how stories evolve and mutate to fit new times and different places." 21 Jenkins's work has equally inspired Marie-Laure Ryan, leading scholar in the field of narratology, and has led her to examine two concepts that complement transmedia storytelling. The first is "transfictionality," which refers to "the migration of fictional entities across different texts, but these texts may belong to the same medium, usually written narrative fiction." 22 Ryan explains that texts like Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe-which I have mentioned at the outset-and their many adaptations are apt examples of this technique. She also explains the three operations involved in transfictionality. Extension "extends the scope of the original storyworld by adding more existents to it, by turning secondary characters into heroes of the story they experience, by having characters visit new regions of the storyworld, and by prolonging the time covered by the original story though [sic] prequels and sequels." Modification implies "a counterfactual sequence of events by giving a different destiny to the characters, one that in effect answers the question What if?" Transposition locates the story in a new temporal and spatial setting. 23 In line with Hutcheon's assessment of the nature of adaptations, the study of transfictionality asks us to think in terms of variation, change, and mutation, rather than repetition, retelling, and fidelity. The second concept is what Ryan calls the "snowball effect." 24 Inspired by the idea of bottom-up form of transmedia storytelling, Ryan pushes the grassroots model beyond fan fictions and explains that in the snowball effect "certain stories enjoy so much popularity, or become culturally so prominent, that they spontaneously generate a variety of either same-medium retellings or crossmedia illustrations and adaptations." 25 The examples she offers are The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, which I have also mentioned at the beginning. Although one might object as to how the snowball effect differs from transfictionality, both concepts ask us to think about the cultural power of stories that engage readers so much as to inspire the growth and spread of new stories that are similar and yet inherently different. Stories sprout "branches in many directions, like a rhizome" and storyworlds grow organically. 26 Appreciation of these rhizomatic storyworlds comes only when we embrace the "aesthetic of proliferation," as Ryan calls it. Differently from Jenkins's definition of transmedia storytelling, the aesthetic of proliferation admits textual snowballing that is bottom-up, multi-authored, and often transmedia or cross-genres. Ryan notes that this remains the norm today even in transmedia storytelling, with top-down design of the The Matrix still being the exception, thus challenging Jenkins on this.
In the field of East Asian studies, Barbara Wall has recently called into question the rigidity of Jenkins's model. 27 Wall argues that The Journey to the West, a famous tale originally from China, is a transmedia story that has occupied a prominent place in Korean cultural history as well across centuries and media. She does so by complementing the idea of transmedia storytelling with that of "dynamic texts," as discussed by Roland Barthes. As noted by Wall, in Chinese studies Wilt L. Idema has done groundbreaking work on similarly dynamic texts. 28 In Japanese studies, Joshua S. Mostow and Gergana Ivanova have convincingly explored how Heianperiod texts found new lives in subsequent centuries by way of reinventions and appropriations. 29 Michael Emmerich has pushed this line of inquiry, by introducing the idea of "replacements." 30 Working on the nineteenth-century Nise Murasaki inaka Genji 偐 紫 田 舎 源 氏 (A fraudulent Murasaki's bumpkin Genji), Emmerich questions the "simplistic notion" that this is a textual adaptation of Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji), talks of it as a "reincarnation" or a "replacement" of the Heian tale, but in the end equates the idea of "popular replacement" with "adaptation, translation expansively defined." 31 What does all this mean for the study of Chikusai and the texts that it generated over three centuries? While Japanese and English-language research to date has dismissed these texts as second-rate imitations of the "original" text, we are now in a position to approach them from a new angle, as an exciting corpus of revisionings that ensured Chikusai's survival and success over time, adapting its story to new cultural environments by virtue of mutation. The present article participates in the ongoing critical discourse by fully engaging with the potential unleashed by the idea that textual proliferation can be unplanned, spontaneous, and moved by a desire to produce more of what readers like.
I would like to add one final methodological remark before I move onto the exploration of Chikusai and the many branches sprouted from it. Namely, I wish to draw attention to the participatory nature of the adaptations snowballed from Chikusai. By "participation" I mean that commercial publishers, in collaboration with authors and illustrators, took an active part in morphing Chikusai into something more than one text. Over the course of three centuries, they played a crucial role in expanding Chikusai into a complex storyworld, at times adding new facets to it and at times recalibrating its very nature. Publishers are not admirers moved by a desire to perpetuate the storyworld they love. Their main drive is financial profit. Regardless of their motive, however, they participate in keeping the storyworld alive, feeding the addiction of their audiences while filling their coffers.

A Cult Narrative and its Storyworld
Attributed to the physician Isoda Dōya 磯田道冶 (1585-1634), Chikusai was first published in moveable type in the Genna era (1615-24). 32 As it is often the case for premodern Japanese texts, Chikusai displays a rich intertextual nature, playing with a number of pre-existing styles and motifs. 33 Yet the storyworld inaugurated by Chikusai was something fresh at the time of its publication. 34 Its popularity is readily evinced from the number of different editions produced throughout the seventeenth century in Kyoto and Edo.
In the Kan'ei era (1624-44) a revised edition was issued anonymously, with the addition of several half-folio illustrations and the insertion of a lengthy story witnessed by Chikusai at the Kurodani temple. In the Kanbun era (1661-73) the text surfaced in Edo where it was issued by the publisher Urokogataya 鱗形屋. 35 New double-page illustrations replaced the old ones, and the text, now in three rather than two volumes, was marketed under three variant titles. 36 In the Enpō era (1673-81) Urokogataya had a new set of blocks cut, and had the popular ukiyo-e artist Hishikawa Moronobu 菱 川 師 宣 (1618-94) produce illustrations. The existence of a 1683 facsimile of this edition, also issued from Urokogataya, attests to Chikusai as a bestseller. 37 It also remained a steady item in booktrade catalogues from 1666-1667 to 1715. 38 The narrative of Chikusai is constructed as a neat chiastic structure, yet very little happens in terms of storyline. The narration begins in media res with Chikusai being described as a poor quack who feels alienated in Kyoto and therefore decides to move east in search of a better life. Accompanied by his servant Niraminosuke, he visits several famous spots in Kyoto, using them as the occasion to compose humorous kyōka poetry (also known as kyōku). The two men then travel along the Nakasendō and the Mino Road, to reach Nagoya. There Chikusai features as the protagonist of nine semi-independent, short narratives that describe his chronic inability to cure illnesses. Despite his attempts to cover up his mistakes through wit, Chikusai emerges as a negative personality within the story; he is subsequently forced to leave Nagoya as well. The men's travels resume along the Tōkaidō until they reach Edo. The text ends with Chikusai unchanged-a poor, exhausted quack-but with a poem that suggests all is not lost: "Encountering / such an upright age / as upright as a tall black bamboo / even a quack / can have hope!" (kuretake no / sugu naru miyo ni / ainureba / yabu kusushi made / tanomoshiki kana). 39 Here is where the story ends, with no conclusion.
As I have argued elsewhere, Chikusai is constructed as an apparently unitary fiction, yet narrated in such a way that easily fragments into a multiplicity of potentially self-sufficient narratives. 40 The reader, moved by what eighteenth century English literature scholar Eve Tavor Bannet describes as "purposive curiosity," would focus on how Chikusai's story develops, skipping all the bits of narrative that are irrelevant. 41 The insubstantial nature of the plot, however, suggests that this mode of reading might not be the most rewarding one. A different reader, one moved by what Bannet describes as "digressive curiosity," would tarry wherever the plot falters and savor the digression. When seen in this light, one is reminded of what Umberto Eco has identified as a prerequisite for a "cult object:" "one must be able to unhinge it, to break it or take it apart…a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visionary icebergs." 42 Chikusai is endowed with the "glorious incoherence" celebrated by Eco as a sine qua non condition for a cult movie (or a cult narrative in our case). As seen so far, Chikusai hardly pitches a plot, but it certainly pitches a character. Chikusai is a two-dimensional character, who is denied any psychological transformation. No superhero, he can perhaps be seen as a tragi-comic anti-hero. He is poor, unskillful (as a doctor), unlucky, but redeemed to a certain extent through wit, his poems, and his ability to play with language. He is less a person than a symbol, a representation of failure tempered by wit. This is precisely the type of character that Marie-Laure Ryan defines as "memorable" and able to "inspire one story after another." 43 The central Nagoya section is itself constructed as a collection of short, discrete stories that follow a repeated pattern: Chikusai is summoned by a patient, tries a cure, usually fails, and covers up by using his wit. The interest lies in the repetition of a pattern played out in different ways as well as in the humorous nature of the stories, some of which are inspired by contemporary jestbooks, mainly Seisuishō 醒睡笑 (Laughs to banish sleep; Kan'ei era edition, 1624-44). Once this kind of character has been set, the stories that can be told are virtually endless. As Ryan notes, "the storyworld gets bigger and bigger, but it does not really change in meaningful ways." 44 In the next sections, I will discuss how this is true to some degree. I will show how in fact the Chikusai storyworld grows, but also changes.
Chikusai equally pitches a world or a storyworld. What is the storyworld of Chikusai made of? 45 There are two core protagonists (or "existents" as narratologists call them): Chikusai and Niraminosuke, master and servant, catalyst and foil. Chikusai's personality is defined by poverty, unskillfulness, and wit; Niraminosuke is marked by subservience. These are the static components. The dynamic components of this world are in essence travel and medicine. Call them tropes or motifs, they are the two only meaningful actions that engage the pair. One could also add stylistic components, comprising the michiyukibun 道行文 style applied when recounting the journey from one point to another, the endemic presence of humorous kyōka poems, and the extensive use of linguistic humor in the prose narration. 46 The charm of a storyworld is that each of its components can have a life of its own-disjointed from the storyline or plot-supporting multiple characters and multiple stories across multiple genres or media. This is even more so because the storyworld of Chikusai is constructed like a block of Swiss cheese, to borrow Ryan's apt image: full of holes. 47 Who is Chikusai? Do we know anything about his life other than he is a poor quack? Does he have a family? What happens after he settles down in Edo? Is his future truly tanomoshi, "full of hope?" Will he continue his profession? Will his fortunes change? Do we get a secondgeneration Chikusai at any point? There is no evidence for claiming that the collective authorship of Chikusai (including Isoda Dōya but also the anonymous editors who worked on the subsequent editions well after Isoda's death) or its publishers purposefully designed Chikusai as a narrative full of gaps to be filled by someone else. But the fact is that these gaps existed and others were willing and able to fill them.

The Snowball Effect
As early as the Kanbun era (1661-73), the story of Chikusai as it was recounted in its many editions had become so popular that it generated a variety of retellings, in a fashion similar to the snowball effect discussed by Ryan. Publishers saw an opportunity to commercially exploit Chikusai's success by issuing adaptations. This astute business decision, in turn, led to the appropriation, expansion, and modification of the Chikusai storyworld. Since no copyright was in place and intellectual property was not an issue, all this could be achieved without guilt or fear of legal repercussions. Publishers may have well had a desire to claim some sort of ownership on their works and even created booksellers guilds in 1722 to enforce some sort of control, but the reality was that appropriating existing stories was a common practice, something at times praised as good writing. 48 As Table 1 (Appendix) shows, works inspired by Chikusai span two centuries and were published in Kyoto, Edo, and Osaka. 49 The majority belong to the same medium, namely verbal narratives published as woodblock-printed books with or without illustrations. The shift from one medium to another takes place only at the very end of the Edo period, with the story appearing in the form of nishiki-e 錦 絵 (brocade prints, or polychrome woodblock prints). The move from one genre to another was more common. The issue of genre is problematic when it comes to early modern Japanese literature, but for the purpose of this article I will identify two types as fully-fledged genres: hanashibon 噺本 (or 咄本; jestbooks) and kusazōshi 草 双 紙 (picturebooks) that include the subcategory of kibyōshi 黄 表 紙 (yellow-cover picturebooks). Both hanashibon and kusazōshi, in fact, were associated with a set of conventions that writers were asked to follow and that readers expected to recognize. Hanashibon were collections of short stories revolving around humor, mainly in the form of puns, and were conceived as a form of storytelling performance. Kusazōshi were multimodal texts where the verbal and the visual collaborated to deliver a story within a relatively short space (ten or fifteen folios). 50 They would normally require a happy ending, partly due to the fact that they were issued to be read at New Year. They were also characterized by linguistic humor, often at the expense of a coherent plot. 51 While Table 1 lists works inspired by Chikusai chronologically, the following pages organize the same works around the ways in which they expand and transform the Chikusai storyworld.

Poaching Chikusai's Wit
The first component of the Chikusai storyworld that is chosen and magnified is Chikusai's wit. The jestbook Chikusai banashi (Chikusai's stories, 1672) is exemplary in showing how this aspect of Chikusai's personality was singled-out and used to transform him into something new. 52 In the Northern part of Kyoto there is the quack called Chikusai, an eccentric skinny monk, whose learning surpasses everyone else's and who is proficient in the Way of Medicine. Because he likes being facetious [kokoro no odoketareba], he spends his life making merry [kokoro wo ukarakashi] and has got the reputation of a jester [hyōkin] who just drifts along [uki ni uitaru]. Buzzing around, even though without wings, he cheers people's hearts, making us forget our sorrows and misery. This monk is unparalleled in his ability to entertain. 53 The opening of Chikusai banashi asks us to view in Chikusai someone whose raison d'être is to prompt laughter. The same introduction continues promising a collection of "funny stories" (okashiki monogatari) that will provide amusement during the nights one spends alone. 54 Chikusai banashi is structured as a collection of ninety-four short sections divided into three volumes. The only common denominator is the presence of Chikusai in all of them. Other than that, the episodes are independent from each other, as was typical for any jestbook at the time. Despite the fact that the name Chikusai comes coupled with the word quack in the quotation above, the episodes dealing with medicine constitute a tiny fraction. 55 His cures are often depicted as excessive-for example treating the macrocephaly of a young boy by making the head come off or treating the fear of thunder in another patient by making him unable to hear and see. 56 But the majority of his treatments revolve around a clever pun.
Being witty or simply silly, playing with words or indulging in smutty humor, the new Chikusai is nothing but the golden thread that tenuously unifies a cornucopia of humorous sketches. It happens to be Chikusai because the publisher decided to cash in on the growing popularity of this fictional character. But it could have easily been someone else. A couple of sections from the first volume showcase well how linguistic divertissement is at the heart of the reading experience.
Chikusai was on his way to a patient when his loincloth started to unravel. As a result, it began to trail behind him. A passing dope [bakamono] trod on it. Whereupon the loincloth parted company with its owner. The dope then proceeded to pick it up. Because it looked as if it had not been washed in the last century, he held it out at arms' length, while grimacing. He shouted: "Hey, monk! Your underwear has fallen off." Chikusai stopped, looked behind at the underwear, and exclaimed: "That can't be mine! It's so smelly!" Unlike the smell of his underwear, the dope's reaction really got up his nose. So, then what Chikusai did was to look down his nose at the dope and say: "Underwear? Don't care!" And off he went. 57 The humor released by the scatological nature of the episode combines with the wit generated by the wordplay around the sound fundoshi. On the one hand, fundoshi means "loincloth," which in a way is the real protagonist of the story. The passage closes with the expression hana o fundo shite, which contains the sound fundoshi. This sentence is by no means straightforward, as three different meanings are at play. First, fundo-suru (憤怒する) signifies "to be enraged." Second, fundo (糞土) indicates something "filthy." Third, funto (ふんと, normally in hiragana only) in association with "nose" refers to the action of "sniffing in contempt." The use of phonetic hiragana in the text activates all these meanings. My translation above has tried to capture the essence of the wordplay, but I wish to stress that it is precisely for the linguistic challenges involved in translating this kind of story that texts like Chikusai banashi have seldom been studied in English-language scholarship, let alone been effectively translated.
Wordplays and puns do not always imply the multilayered nature seen in the previous passage. Another section can be instructive.
Chikusai's name before becoming a doctor was Yamamoto Matazaemon. Once a nobleman summoned him and inquired about his first name and family name. Chikusai had forgotten the latter and, under pressure for an answer, had a look around. He saw a pond in the garden and a frog jumping into the water, making a splash. So he answered: "My name is Splash Matazaemon." "What an unusual surname," replied the nobleman. "Which characters do you use to write it down?" he asked. And Chikusai replied: "I use three characters: 'frog', 'enter', and 'water'." 58 The comedic nature of this passage hinges on two elements. On the one hand, we sneer at Chikusai's mindlessness in forgetting his own surname. On the other hand, we take pleasure in the unexpected association between the adverb tonburi (splash), which would normally be rendered in phonetic script only, and the idea that it might be written with the three characters for "frog" (蛙), "enter" (入), and "water" (水), whereby it would make a "splash." In the second half of the third volume, Chikusai's identity undergoes a further change, from being the protagonist of to becoming the narrator of humorous stories. For example, in the thirteenth section Chikusai becomes the voice that offers readers a number of riddles and their answers. An unnamed man notes that Chikusai "is very skilled at those riddles that are all the rage in Kyoto," and asks Chikusai to entertain him and his guests with some. At that point, the narrative stops to leave space to about four folios of just riddles. 59 When perusing this section, we are not engaging with any narrative. We are, rather, busy making sense of 104 riddles. In the next section, Chikusai's voice continues to be employed to perform a tongue twister (known in early modern Japan as haya monogatari) that depicts the battle between illnesses and medications. 60 As promised in the introduction, by the end of the text Chikusai is reconfigured into a successful entertainer, who performs for his intradiegetic audience (i. e., the audience within the story) as well as for th e extradiegetic readers (i. e., the readers of the book). In its entirety, this collection of humorous stories successfully domesticates the storyworld of Chikusai to fit the rules of the hanashibon genre. What would happen if we looked at Chikusai only for his wit? Chikusai banashi effectively explores this alternative journey in the Chikusai storyworld, offering a powerful modification of the figure Chikusai. He is not an unskillful doctor anymore. He is a resourceful quack and, above all, a pseudo-comedian whose main activity is to entertain his audience. The magnitude of the modification at play is such that in the third volume Chikusai is reconfigured into a proficient performer. The nature of our reading experience also changes. When confronted with this new Chikusai/Chikusai, we are first and foremost asked to make sense of the multilayered humor that imbues every section. What is more, the second half of the third volume becomes a show staged by Chikusai's voice. All of a sudden, a printed book becomes the vehicle for what is a vocal performance that we enjoy as if we were part of Chikusai's intradiegetic audience.
Scattered randomly in the text are also fresh pieces of information about the Chikusai storyworld, which keeps expanding. His wife, referred to generically as o-baba (old missus), appears extensively in the first volume and is often used by the narrator to poke fun at Chikusai. We also hear that they had a child, but we do not hear anything more about him. 61 We read that before taking the tonsure (something shared at the time by both monks and physicians) he "studied a little bit of the Great Learning and learned the Way of Medicine alongside." 62 This detail ties in with another important change in the figure of Chikusai: he is not unskillful anymore. With the exception of a brief remark, nothing in the text suggests that Chikusai is an unfashionable doctor or a detested charlatan. 63 His treatments, albeit few in number, normally end positively, no matter how extreme his remedies are. We are progressively moving away from patients being dissatisfied or even angry at Chikusai's professional inaptitude as a doctor. We are also leaving behind the negative depiction of Chikusai's miseries as a result of his failures. What we are left with is an improved image of Chikusai. His inadequacies as a physician are papered over to bring to the fore his talent in making people merry. We laugh less at him and more with him, in a storyworld that starts being filled with auspiciousness. 64

Redeeming Sons
As seen in the previous section, Chikusai banashi granted Chikusai the birth of a son but the anonymous author chose not to develop any narrative around him. The 1687 Shin Chikusai 新竹斎 (The new Chikusai) and the 1695 Bokusai banashi isha hyōban 木斎咄医者評判 (Bokusai's stories and physicians' critiques; hereafter Bokusai banashi), on the other hand, are entirely focused on expanding Chikusai's story in time and are packaged as sequels that stage the adventures of his sons. 65 Shin Chikusai features Junsai, whose name retains the second character of Chikusai (sai 斎) but changes chiku or "bamboo" (竹) into jun or "a bamboo sprout" (筍). Bokusai banashi presents Bokusai, whose name substitutes "bamboo" with "tree" (boku 木). Junsai and Bokusai are not brothers. They are the products of two distinct creative processes. Yet they both promise a change of fortunes in the Chikusai storyworld. Shin Chikusai lays out clear expectations at the outset: The crown jewel of the Capital is its eastern part, but it is in a thicket of the shady west that we find the doctor [kusushi] Junsai, born among the warblers as the offspring of Chikusai. The fame [meiyo] obtained by his treatments is unrivalled in the whole of Japan. 66 In Bokusai banashi we need to wait until Chikusai's son Chikusaburō 竹 三郎 starts his studies with Master Hakoku and takes the tonsure, changing his name into Bokusai, to read about his resolution to redress his father's fate: My father Chikusai was an unskillful doctor, doomed to poverty. I intend to put in place a drastic change and to become a competent physician. It is like patching together things that are incompatible, like a bamboo and a tree. 67 Both texts fulfil the hope of redemption, ushering the optimism ignited by Chikusai banashi into new directions. As the two passages quoted above promise, Bokusai and Junsai succeed where their father failed by way of performing as capable healers.
The seven stories narrating Bokusai's therapies follow a pattern that is almost the opposite of how the central part of Chikusai was conceived. If in Chikusai initial success gradually turns into ever increasing failure, now fledgling attempts become wondrous performances. We start with Bokusai having trouble in taking the pulse on two different occasions. First, he mistakes a man for a woman and suggests pregnancy. 68 Then he confuses the hand of a male patient with that of his wife who was sitting behind him. 69 In both cases, Bokusai finds a clever way to justify his mistake. 70 While the humorous side of Bokusai's treatments is never fully jettisoned, it is their miraculous nature that is progressively highlighted. The final episode well illustrates the extraordinary nature of Bokusai's accomplishments. He is summoned to Mogami (present-day Yamagata prefecture) by the wealthy Terui Tarōemon. This man is deeply afflicted by the physical defect of his daughter, who has no female genitals. Bokusai quotes a famous episode in which the physician Hidenari performed surgery to solve a similar case. Bokusai nonchalantly uses a razor to cut the skin of the girl. Despite the extensive bleeding and with some aftercare, the girl heals completely and is given in marriage to Bokusai as a trophy for his medical prowess. The narrator reminds us that, at this point, Bokusai's ambition is fully realized: "Indeed he [Bokusai] was the opposite of his father Chikusai, like a tree is different from bamboo, and became extremely popular." 71 Shin Chikusai also chronicles success. In volume one, Junsai treats a number of patients and the outcome of his treatments are generally positive. For example, when visiting the son of a sake brewer in Kameyama, Junsai uses an incantation that the parents believe cured their little one. 72 Or when treating a wealthy councilor suffering from impotence, Junsai's pills end up solving the problem. 73 In both episodes, Junsai gains financial reward and is freed from the poverty that defined Chikusai.
While rehabilitating the second generation Chikusai as a successful quack, both Bokusai and Junsai are also portrayed as accomplished performers.
Bokusai acts as a knowledgeable voice that expounds on a variety of medical themes in the non-narrative parts that punctuate Bokusai banashi. 74 Such didactic interest might have been inspired by the 1685 Chikusai ryōji no hyōban 竹斎療治之評判 (A critique of Chikusai's treatments) that I have discussed at length elsewhere. 75 The author of this text-a certain Enpyōshi 圓瓢子 about whom nothing is known to dateused Chikusai as a pretext for elucidating his own views regarding medicine, claiming that Chikusai had in fact been conceived as a vernacular counterpart to the Chinese medical treatise Xuanqijiu zhenglun 軒岐救正論 (Jp. Kenkikyū seiron). 76 Bokusai banashi shares the same desire to provide readers with reliable medical knowledge, and Bokusai acts as the lecturer who instructs his intradiegetic audience as well as the readers. 77 While Bokusai performs to instruct, Junsai does so to amuse. The text draws the reader's attention to Junsai's gift with the language early on, in the very first volume. When describing the treatment of the aforementioned councilor, the text glosses over what medications Junsai administered but lingers at length on an exchange of clever poems. The patient praises Junsai for being "a great talker" (kuchi no karui mono). 78 I contend that Junsai's career as an amusing talker owes much to Chikusai banashi. 79 This is in itself significant, as it suggests that by the 1680s what inspired new adaptations of the Chikusai storyworld was not the text Chikusai itself-as argued by the scant scholarship on the subject to date-but rather subsequent adaptations. This tallies with what Hutcheon has noted about adaptations in general and Ivanova about the circulation of Makura no sōshi (The pillow book): in time adaptations end up substituting the source text that inspired them in the first place and they themselves turn into source texts that generate further adaptations. 80 At the same time, though, Shin Chikusai explores novel ways to construct Junsai's persona as a funny storyteller. Firstly, Junsai brands himself as a zany spectacle, by displaying a human-size doll that accentuates his own distorted human shape ( fig. 1, Appendix). In doing so, he rebrands himself as a sort of freak show that attracts curiosity and an audience. Once in front of his public, Junsai narrates tales of sensational cures that he allegedly performed in Kyoto, packed with wit. We hear, for example, that a man had his legs eaten off by a wolf but Junsai gave him back his mobility by attaching two branches of a plum-blossom tree in lieu of his lower limbs. The man recovers and leaves his work as a farmer to become a courier in the western provinces. 81 This story makes sense when Junsai reminds us of a famous poem by Sugawara no Michizane 菅原道真 (845-903): kochi fukaba / nioi okoseyo / ume no hana / aruji nashi tote / haru o wasuruna, "When the east wind blows, / send me your fragrance, / plum blossoms: / although your master is gone, / do not forget the spring." 82 Michizane's poem allegedly had the power to make the plum-blossom tree fly to reunite with its master. Junsai plays on this anecdote to claim that the branches of plum-blossom trees can turn into legs that can fly. Because the word hikyaku 飛脚, which literary means "flying legs," is also the word for "courier," the protagonist not only regains mobility but decides to take up this job. Here, Junsai's performance as a wondrous healer is doubled by his performativity as a storyteller whose words produce the phenomena they recount. It is in the fifth volume that Junsai's new persona as an artist who entertains by virtue of his linguistic virtuosity is magnified. He becomes known as a liar, that is true, but because of his resourcefulness (saikaku) people keep wanting more of his art. 83 Deception becomes an enticing show. The final volume takes the form of a jestbook that offers a parade of linguistic amusements unrelated to the plot: riddles, visual riddles (hanjimono), puns, and humorous dialogues exchanged with people who try to challenge Junsai's wit. 84 Similarly to what I have noted for Chikusai banashi, Shin Chikusai asks readers, back in the seventeenth century as now, to make sense of the humor elicited by these passages. For example, among the visual riddles ( fig. 2, Appendix) we find the picture of a cart pulled by an ox on top of which is a big fan. The caption reads "A big fan on a cart." 85 We can try to solve the puzzle ourselves. After all, previously in the text the narrator had introduced some riddles but left them unsolved on purpose, "so that they become a pastime for the little ones." 86 Alternatively, we can turn the page and find the answer, which, if adjusted to sound humorous in English, would sound like "It's a cold wind that blows no good; you wouldn't want it any more that you'd want a bull in a China shop." 87 Altogether, Shin Chikusai transforms the Chikusai storyworld into a sort of toy that we can play with outside the constraints of the book. As much as Junsai is praised as a "medicine for the spirit" (ki no kusuri), Shin Chikusai is designed to lift the spirit of its readers/audience. 88 In all this Junsai thrives: At the beginning Junsai was the most unskilled doctor in the three worlds, but thanks to the strangeness of his appearance and the humor of his stories, he was invited to several rich households as somebody to be entertaining [naburimono]. He was busy telling nonsense [adaguchi], without a single moment of rest… He became rich and prosperous, with many people at his service. 89 Bokusai banashi and Shin Chikusai extend in time the Chikusai storyworld to the second generation and in the process, they infuse it with hope as the trope of the quack is radically transformed. We move further away from the image of a dreadful and impoverished charlatan, heading towards that of a wondrous healer who enjoys social kudos and financial reward. Stretching the trajectory started by Chikusai banashi, both texts are also reconceptualized from stories about a healer to stories performed by him. Staging didactic lectures on medicine or comic interludes, they extend the Chikusai storyworld beyond medicine into the world of vocal performances.

Healing Incurable Diseases
From the 1670s the Chikusai storyworld had been reshaped into something that had the potential to fire the imagination of publishers, authors, and illustrators based in Edo and engrossed in the production of kusazōshi (picturebooks). It is in the 1750s that they start contributing to the Chikusai storyworld.
In 1756 Urokogataya, who had already issued two editions of Chikusai back in the seventeenth-century, published Tōsei isha / Chikusai-rō saji kagen 当世医者／竹斎老匙加減 (Doctors of today: Old Chikusai and his potions), but unfortunately no copies seem to have survived. 90 He subsequently released two picturebooks: Chikusai ちくさい (Chikusai; hereafter "the picturebook Chikusai") and Chikusai Junsai / Nidai no homare isha 竹斎筍斎／忰褒医 (Chikusai Junsai: The glory of a second-generation doctor; hereafter Nidai) around the 1770s. 91 Both of these works present a pastiche of motifs and/or passages from a number of sources. The picturebook Chikusai uses Nippon eitaigura 日本永代蔵 (The eternal storehouse of Japan; 1688) written by Ihara Saikaku 井原西鶴 (1642-93), and I would suggest that it also draws inspiration from Bokusai banashi. 92 Nidai, as the title aptly suggests, uses Shin Chikusai as a starting point and splices sections from it together with others from Saikaku oritome 西鶴織留 (Some final words of advice; published posthumously in 1694). 93 Once again, new adaptations are inspired by previous adaptations, not by the 1620s Chikusai.
When viewed as part of the extended Chikusai storyworld, the greatest merit of both texts has been to further enhance accessibility and participation thanks to the very nature of the genre they belong to. Being early kusazōshi, these works offer short snippets of simplified text written only in kana, which are inserted in the blank spaces of illustrations that translate the narration into images. The Chikusai storyworld welcomed anyone with limited literacy-be it children or adults, males or females.
Regarding the contents, both texts firmly anchor the changes made to the Chikusai storyworld in the second half of the seventeenth century. The picturebook Chikusai is conceived as a tale of financial redemption. Chikusai starts out from utter indigence-he has no money to dye his clothes or to buy rice for the new year's rice cakes-but manages to turn around his fortunes. 94 He first decides to worship the God of Poverty and then concocts a medication that heals people's financial woes. 95 This, in turn, allows him to gain popularity and wealth. Chikusai's opulence is celebrated in the illustrations. The last double-page spread displays a cornucopia of gifts presented to him by grateful patients: sea bream, gold coins, fine fabrics, and barrels of the renowned Tsuru no ike sake are paraded in a space that is designed to impress the viewer. 96 Nidai is less adventurous because of its adherence to Shin Chikusai. The episode where Junsai cures the mild depression of O-Run, the daughter of a certain Kichimonjiya Sahei in Kyoto, stands out as a newly designed adventure of our wondrous physician. This time Junsai lifts the girl's spirits by providing entertainment with a fashionable man named Hamashichi, who is paid to flirt with the girl and ends up marrying her. 97 One scene in the picturebook Chikusai deserves particular attention in order to appreciate how the Chikusai storyworld is being steered in new directions. Chikusai is portrayed in his surgery sitting in front of a ledger and lecturing, as Bokusai did before him. This new Chikusai is quite different from Bokusai in that his lectures do not revolve around dispensing medical knowledge but are a means to publicize his medications. His servant Niraminosuke appears in the image busy preparing medicines, suggesting that they might be available for purchase. The dialogues that accompany the people sitting in front of Chikusai are intriguing. A man with an oddly shaped head is sitting at the back and asks: "Is there a way to turn this hump into horns?" As horns are a sign of jealousy or virility, the man apparently wants to turn his unattractive lump into a sign of masculinity. The woman on his left, drawn with a slightly wider face than usual, says: "When the swelling on my face is fixed, I can myself become a beauty." The old woman playing with a young child asks Chikusai to rejuvenate her: "If you give me a medication to become young, I intend to marry once more." What is clear is that for the first time our protagonist is being asked to cure incurable diseases, or nanbyō 難病. By the 1770s Urokogataya's picturebooks have elevated Chikusai to a legendary physician able to fix all sorts of conditions, no matter how extreme. The new Chikusai is at a considerable remove from Chikusai as he was conceived at the beginning of the seventeenth century, because his story has been re-conceptualized into a fantasy of professional success, social elevation, and economic reward. This fits comfortably with the readers' expectations towards early kusazōshi, as good reads for the beginning of the New Year and as texts that allow readers to dream of a better life. This then paves the way for yet further developments in the later kibyōshi (yellow-cover book) genre, a good example being Chikusairō takara no yamabuki iro 竹斎老宝山吹色 (Old Chikusai and his yellow treasures; hereafter Chikusai-rō) of 1794. 99 Conceived by Tsukiji Zenkō 築地善交 (1754-1810, also known as Morishima Chūryō 森島中良), illustrated by Kitao Shigemasa 北尾重政 (1739-1820), and issued by Tsuruya Kiemon 鶴屋喜右衛門, this yellowcover book offers a successful recipe combining a number of ingenious ingredients. First, it adopts the motif developed in the picturebook Chikusai of a physician who can cure all sorts of ailments, from a simple cold and phlegm, to more challenging conditions such as paralysis. 100 Second, it retrieves the wit that permeated late seventeenth-century adaptations by describing the cures being successful not so much because Chikusai has mastered medical science but because he is very sagacious. Third, it reintroduces a penchant for puns, of the kind seen in Chikusai banashi and Shin Chikusai. In doing so, the beauty of the reading experience provided by Chikusai-rō lies in the pleasure of solving verbal puzzles and fully grasping the linguistic humor at play. All this is spiced with the addition of objects associated with Dutch Studies (rangaku), including the telescope and the electric generator (erekiteru or elektericieit), which owes much to Morishima Chūryō's well-known involvement with rangaku. 101 The two double-page spreads that deal with two women who wish to reduce the size of their buttocks are instructive (figs. 3, 4, Appendix). Ridiculed for their bottoms that stick out (tanatchiri) as big as pumpkins (kabocha-shiri), the two women are welcomed by Niraminosuke. He reassures the ladies that "this is something very easy to fix" and asks them to eat plenty of potatoes and butternut squash, accompanied by tea. The result is depicted in an earthy manner: The more they ate the more they laughed; the more they laughed the more they ate. And they felt so heavy! They couldn't do anything but stare at the wall. After a little while, their bellies began to make strange noises and they squeezed their buttocks together as strongly as possible in order to avoid farting. 102 It is at this point that Chikusai makes an appearance and starts the "cure," which consists in placing the two women in a room in front of an audience made of leading kabuki actors ( fig. 4, Appendix). The narrator mentions Ichikawa Komazō III (1764-1835) and Ichikawa Monnosuke II's son, Ichikawa Omezō I (1769-1833), as among the spectators. The storyline, such as it is, is full of smutty humor, at times bordering on nonsense: the women cannot possibly break wind in front of their idols and keep their buttocks so compressed that they appear tiny, at which moment Chikusai fixes their reduced size by binding them with a bamboo rope. 103 What was supposed to be a medical treatment turns into a carnivalesque spectacle, a farcical show carried out in front of professional performers. The nub of the scene, however, is in the dialogues and their riddles. On the right Chikusai says: Shiritaga shiritaga suta-suta suta-suta (The bamboo ropes on the waist! The bamboo ropes on the waist! Up! Up!). These words makes sense only if the reader understands the reference to a suta suta bōzu, a mendicant monk covered with nothing but bamboo ropes with sacred straw festoons around his waist, chanting "suta-suta" and promising good luck to anyone who gives him alms. 104 The text-both in its visual and verbal components-prompts a connection between two things that are unrelated: the woman standing within the picture, on the one hand, and a mendicant monk whose image is conjured up outside the printed page, in the readers' imagination. Such unexpected juxtaposition works as a form of mitate. 105 The next dialogue on the left asks the reader to engage with a different riddle: Kinshō wa kotsubu demo nomarezu (Kinshō: even a small grain can't be swallowed). The reference is to the kabuki actor Matsumoto Kōshirō V (1764-1838), whose stage name was Kinshō and who is the first actor on the right in the illustration. His name is evoked as part of a sentence that parodies the saying sanshō wa kotsubo naredemo karashi (Japanese pepper: even a small grain is hot). The proverb has no particular function within the story. What we are asked to enjoy is the twist from sanshō to kinshō and the connection of the latter with the actor sitting among the intradiegetic audience. Solving this puzzle is the point in question. As the close reading of this episode shows, Chikusai-rō transforms Chikusai's story into a multimodal text designed as a clever, amusing game. Once again the Chikusai storyworld is domesticated to fit the genre logic, in this case of a kibyōshi as defined by Uda Toshihiko: "literature of wit" (kichi no bungaku 機知の文学). 106 The question of whether Chikusai rō took inspiration from Chikusai rō saji kagen will have to wait until the latter is re-discovered, if ever. What is certain is that a number of kibyōshi applied similar textual strategies, by depicting Chikusai absorbed in his tonchi ryōji 頓知療治 or witty (and miraculous) treatments (see Table 1 and Chart 1, Appendix). What is more, both the picturebook Chikusai, in particular the section examined above, and Chikusai rō enjoyed considerable popularity until the end of the Edo period, and inspired two nishiki-e issued around that time. The anonymous, undated diptych Kogarashi Chikusai / Nanbyō ryōji こがらし竹斎／難病療治 (Withering gusts Chikusai / Curing Intractable Diseases, fig. 5, Appendix) evokes in its title Matsuo Bashō's poem mentioned in the introduction as well as the idea of incurable diseases. More specifically, the composition of the image re-enacts Urokogataya's picturebook Chikusai. The triptych Kitaina meii / Nanbyō ryōji きたいな めい医／難病療治 (Extraordinary famous doctors / Curing intractable diseases, fig. 6, Appendix), signed by the renowned Utagawa Kuniyoshi 歌川国芳 (1797-1861) and issued probably around 1849, offers something similar. For the first time we are presented with Chikusai's daughter, Kogarashi, who is introduced as a famous physician (meii) herself. She is confronted with a number of odd conditions that owe much to Chikusairō among the other kibyōshi mentioned in Table 1 (Appendix). 107 This triptych even inspired a sexually-explicit revisioning in the series of twelve printed known under the collective title of Kōgō no meii / Nannyo no ryōji 交合の名医／男女の療治 (The famous doctor of intercourse / The cure for men and women) attributed to Utagawa Kuniyoshi. 108 These nishiki-e use a different medium to enhance the visual tropes that began being associated with Chikusai in the Edo-based eighteenth-century kusazōshi. They make sense only if we have engaged with the Chikusai storyworld as it was shaped two centuries after the 1620s Chikusai was published.

Conclusions
In the first half of the seventeenth century, one text, Chikusai, made its appearance in the world of commercial, popular prose. Pitching a twodimensional tragi-comic anti-hero and a storyworld full of holes, Chikusai soon turned out to be a publishing hit and a cult narrative. Not only was it re-issued in both Kyoto and Edo for almost one century, it also sparked a snowball effect, with an impressive number of adaptations being released until the second half of the nineteenth century. We are not dealing with imitations that passively rehearsed the 1620s Chikusai, as scholarship has claimed to date, but with creative reinventions that kept expanding and modifying the Chikusai storyworld.
The mutations at play are mighty. First, Chikusai underwent a major transformation from a wretched poor quack into a wondrous healer. In the process, he was also subjected to a more radical reconceptualization: as the ability to entertain intradiegetic and extradiegetic audiences with his wit slowly supersedes his pseudo-medical prowess, Chikusai gradually turned into a full-scale performer. His identity shifted from that of a quack to that of a jester. This metamorphosis went hand in hand with a variation in the type of stories in which he was featured. When transplanted into hanashibon (jestbooks) and kusazōshi picturebooks, Chikusai was not so much the protagonist of a narrative that readers perused to find out what happens next. Rather, he acted like a foil for linguistic play, humor, and wit to star as the real focus of the reading experience. Riddles, puns, jokes: savoring them is where the pleasure of the text most lay.
To lead this powerful reconfiguration of the Chikusai storyworld were early modern publishers, who worked in tandem with authors and illustrators of their own choice. They creatively appropriated the storyworld to make it fit genre conventions and more broadly the fashions of the publishing industry. There was no concerted top-down design; after all publishers worked years and miles apart from each other. It was a grassroots movement, not of fans but of savvy businessmen whose desire was to participate in the construction of an ever-changing Chikusai storyworld in order to cash in on its enduring popularity. Financial profit was their ultimate goal. The case study of the Chikusai storyworld alerts us to an economic dimension to the aesthetic of proliferation that, it seems to me, Ryan fails to discuss in her theoretical treatment of the subject. 109 This also complements work done on Japanese literature. Ivanova, for instance, has convincingly argued how a number of factors played a key role in continuously transforming Makura no sōshi: gender, cultural identity, school curricula, and translations. The present study brings into the picture an additional but equally central element, namely the logic of the publishing market.
What we are left with is a complex rhizome of texts, where each sprout is not germinating from the common underground stem (the 1620s Chikusai) but from the adventitious roots that have developed along the way (the many adaptations, as seen in Chart 1, Appendix). There is no coherence in this ensemble of texts. Contradictions, repetitions, and confusion are an intrinsic feature of this rhizomatic universe. We might be puzzled, for example, by the co-existence of Junsai and Bokusai as two distinct sons of Chikusai, who have been conceived independently and never join up. That suddenly a daughter surfaces in 1850s nishiki-e prints is even more baffling. We might wish for a more coordinated entertainment experience. Yet, this is no transmedia storytelling as theorized by Henry Jenkins. It is a wonderfully incoherent body of adaptations that celebrate invention, playfulness, plurality, and diversity (Chart 2, Appendix). Readers can approach this body in a number of ways. They can peruse each text as a standalone entity, with no concern for the adaptational stance at play. They can savor the repetition with difference that takes place between a text and its immediate source-text. They can enjoy how the 1620s story of Chikusai keeps being transformed text after text. They can read each text as a different facet of the same storyworld, as if they were rabbit holes or dispersed entry points to the same storyworld. The way in which the Chikusai storyworld is constructed invites all these modes of reading. Why should this matter at all to us in the twenty-first century, beyond offering a contribution to the study of adaptations in a global context? First, as Nakano Mitsutoshi has aptly noted, when working on early modern materials we are asked to study Edo-period literature from within, on its own terms, with a view to recover an often-lost early modern aesthetic. 110 Early modern readers cared for Chikusai for almost three centuries precisely because commercial publishers kept him alive by constantly morphing his story. The present article has retrieved the aesthetic of proliferation that made this possible and has shown how Chikusai was given a place of pride in the canon of early modern popular literature. Second, the close reading of selected primary sources has shown synergies that ask us to rethink some of the dichotomies that inhabit our histories of early modern Japanese literature. We tend to view the seventeenth and the eighteenth century as intrinsically different. We consider hanashibon and kusazōshi as genres with very little in common. We view Kamigata (Kyoto/Osaka) literature as neatly separate from Edo literature. The analysis of Chikusai banashi (hanashibon, 1672, Kyoto or Edo), Shin Chikusai (no specific genre, 1687, Kyoto), and Chikusai-rō (kusazōshi, 1694, Edo), among others, has brought to light textual strategies that appear striking in their resemblance.
What if we were to actively explore continuities rather than discontinuities in our study of early modern Japanese literature? This methodological question is prompted by engagement with the Chikusai storyworld. Third, and finally, the study of the Chikusai storyworld asks us to rethink what we view as a "text." Chikusai is not so much one text as much as a beautifully discordant ensemble of ever-changing variants.