Few works of Japanese literature are better-known than Chikamatsu Monazaemon’s 近松門左衛 門 (1653-1724) Kokusen’ya kassen 国性爺合戦 (The Battles of Coxinga, 1715) and Takeda Izumo’s 竹田 出雲 (1691-1756) Kana dehon Chūshingura 仮名手本忠臣蔵 (A Treasury of Loyal Retainers, 1748). Both works center on the heroic exploits of Japanese (or half-Japanese) warriors, and the plays’ celebration of honor, duty, and self-sacrifice have made them ideal vehicles for various discourses of nationhood, identity, and literary representation in the Meiji and post-Meiji eras. This essay focuses on two little- known Chinese-language translations of the play by the Japanese translator Shū Bunjiemon 周文次右衛門 (d. 1825). Shū was an official translator at the Nagasaki customhouse and a sixth-generation descendant of Chinese immigrants from Quanzhou. Shū drafted a partial translation of Kokusen’ya kassen and a full translation of Chūshingura that recast the Japanese-language plays in the style of late imperial Chinese prose fiction works such as Sanguo zhi yanyi 三國志演義 (Romance of the Three Kingdoms) and Shuihu zhuan 水滸傳 (The Water Margin). Both translations remained in manuscript form, and the lack of a preface or any paratextual commentary by Shū makes speculation about their intended purpose difficult. In my study, I argue that the internal features of the Chūshingura translation suggest that Shū desired to circulate the text among Chinese readers---an entirely plausible scenario considering both Shū’s profession as a translator and documented interest in Japanese-language texts among Chinese travelers to Nagasaki. In 1815, Shū’s translation of Chūshingura was republished with a clearly spurious introduction by a “Chinese” author who claimed to have discovered Shū’s text in a market and retranslated it to share it with his Chinese countrymen. Although the “Chinese” retranslator’s account is nothing more than authorial fancy, the quixotic project evinces an interest in the comparative dimensions of cross-cultural textual circulation that prefigures later discussions of literary representation. In discussing Shū’s corpus and the later retranslations, I connect the works to a largely overlooked history of cultural and literary encounter and bidirectional exchange in Shū’s native Nagasaki---a history occluded by inaccurate conceptions of Japan as a “closed country” (sakoku 鎖国) during the Edo period (1603-1868).