Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Water Margin" in English language version.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)To be accurate, the world of The Water Margin does not hate the female sex as a whole. There are individual good women commended in the book; on the other hand, traits commonly held to be feminine shortcomings, such as pusillanimity, narrow-mindedness and naivete, have not been singled out for stricture. What is detested here is lascivious thought and behaviour. Women slain in the book have either committed adultery, or aided and abetted it. Slain too are the male offenders, e.g., Hsi-men Ch'ing and P'ei Ju-hai; when heroes like Li K'uei meet a pair of adulterous "dog and bitch", they put both to the sword without discrimination. This is actually fairer, and more respectful, to the fair sex than what often happens in the tales of Chaucer or Boccaccio and other medieval fabliaux, where the adulteress customarily gets away unscathed. However, owing to the distaste for carnality, women in the novel seldom combine beauty and virtue in their persons.
Remarkably, it [Water Margin] also remained for a long time largely incomprehensible to its readers. For centuries, classical Chinese united the intellectual elites of East Asia, much as Latin did in Europe. But the kind of popular fiction that entered Japan from the 17th century was written in the vernacular [Chinese], a tongue that only a tiny minority of Japanese interpreters in the port city of Nagasaki understood. For most others, it might as well have been Greek. Understanding this type of fiction required a serious commitment, and a variety of reference guides and dictionaries were published in Japan to facilitate its reading.
(一)藏于上海图书馆，乃明正德、嘉靖年间所刻 ...
During the Edo period (1603-1868), when early modern Japanese fiction was developed, its greatest influence came from Chinese vernacular fiction.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link) The 70-chapter Jackson translation, which includes Shi Nai'an's foreword (1.5 pages) and prologue (nine pages), is estimated at about 365,000 words.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)