This paper introduces the corpus of Japanese Jesuit saints’ lives from the perspective of geography, both physical and literary-historical. In my book manuscript, I address issues such as the selection and ordering of hagiographies in each of the two sixteenth-century collections; their rhetorical form and content as they compare with contemporaneous Japanese literature like setsuwa narrative, otogiz?shi, the k?waka ballad, early puppet theatre, and sekky? bushi; as well as the evidence for ongoing oral and written reception which we find from their reappearance in anti-Christian literature and documents confiscated from hidden Christians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Here, however, we will content ourselves with a close reading of the opening story in both extant collections, the Life of St. Peter, in comparison with the Portuguese collection which I have identified as the main source for the Japanese.
