Against the backdrop of the movement to reform the written language in Meiji Japan, literary critics took on the task of establishing the proper form of the novel. One notable effort in that realm was Tsubouchi Shōyō's famed Shōsetsu shinzui ("the essence of the novel") which, inspired by the West and premised on an evolutionary notion of the novel, set forth an eclectic mold of the "true" novel. In doing so, Shōyō's progressive schema appropriated and placed the low-brow ninjōbon of the early nineteenth century such as Shunshoku umegoyomi in a transitory phase en route to modernity. Subsequent literary criticism in Japan often unfolded along the line of assessing it in basically the same paradigm of modernism. Even for those who frown upon its "feudal" traits, all the same, ninjōbon looms unmistakably as the routine subject of inquiry in constructing a native lineage of modernity. Such literary discourse in Japan, in the end, partakes of the enduring preoccupation with modernity and conceptions thereof.