During the eighteenth century, the Fūgetsudō was one of the most commercially successful booksellers in Nagoya and the Tōkai region at large, in no small part because of its nodal position between important publishing houses in Kyoto and local cultural elites. While its most lucrative trade appears to have been in high-market scholarly works, the firm long prided itself on its inventory of haikai poetry collections, which reputedly drew Matsuo Bashō himself to visit the shop in Jōkyō 4 (1687) and made the Fūgetsudō into a cultural epicenter for local Bashō-school poets for over a century thereafter.

This paper examines how the Fūgetsudō’s market position as a purveyor of haisho played a key role in its development from a retailer and financier of jointly published books in its early days to an independent publisher by the early Kansei period (1789-1801). A collection of over ninety letters addressed to a wealthy merchant family of Bashō-school poets in Narumi between Meiwa 8 (1771) and 9 (1772) attests to how actively the Fūgetsudō sought to cultivate a customer base, particularly among the local network of haikai poets. Moreover, close collaboration with its parent firm in Kyoto, along with smaller, dedicated publishers of poetry like Tachibanaya Jihee and Maruya Zenroku, can be seen to have leveraged the Fūgetsudō technologically, towards becoming the premiere venue in Nagoya for publishing poets like Yokoi Yayū (1702-1783) and Katō Kyōtai (1732-1792). In many ways, the history of the Fūgetsudō was one of books, buyers, and the Bashō school.