Recent research has begun to explore the ways in which early-modern missionaries met the challenges of adapting Latin Christian doctrinal works in the Japanese language, but the missions also produced a great volume of narrative literature: gospels, saints’ lives, passion stories. This material allows us to hear Christian legends in the precise form in which Masamune or Tsunenaga would have heard them, and it also teaches us new things about Japanese literature in this poorly-documented period. In particular, the Jesuits’ use of the k?waka ballad as a stylistic model lends new weight to the growing consensus that although that genre declined during the transition to the Tokugawa peace, it occupied a central place on the literary scene of Japan’s age of civil war.
