Kyokutei Bakin’s Hakkenden is one of the monuments of Japanese literature. A multigenerational samurai saga that plays out across the landscape of east- ern Japan in the late medieval period, it combines aspects of what readers today will recognize as the historical romance and the fantasy novel, and what readers at the time would have recognized as Japanese contemporary popular fiction and Chinese vernacular stories. It was one of the most popu- lar and influential books of the nineteenth century, inspiring everyone from playwrights to print designers to pornographers, from moralists to popular rights activists to literary modernizers. It can be seen both as the culmination of the long tradition of premodern Japanese narrative and as the jumping-off point for the modern Japanese novel. Its fantastic story and characters have been reborn again and again in modern and contemporary film, television, fiction, and comics. It is, by any measure, a classic.