Language: Japanese

Offers a comprehensive approach to making sense of traditional Japanese poetry of all genres and periods.

A concise introduction to the literature of Japan that traces its origins in the seventh century and explores a literary legacy—and its cultural contexts—marked by the intersection of aristocratic elegance and warrior austerity.

For both specialist and beginner here is a single volume that contains the general and specific information necessary to an understanding of Japanese literature from its beginnings to 1868.

Born into the samurai class, Bashō rejected that world after the death of his master and became a wandering poet and teacher. During his travels across Japan, he became a lay Zen monk and studied history and classical poetry. His poems contained a mystical quality and expressed universal themes through simple images from the natural world.

This collection offers a concise yet remarkably rich introduction to the fiction, poetry, drama, and essays of Japan's literature from 1868–present.

Often called the world's earliest novel, The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu, is a poetic evocation of aristocratic life in eleventh-century Japan, a period of brilliant cultural efflorescence. In romanticized but essentially truthful fashion, The Tale of the Heike describes the late twelfth-century political intrigues and battlefield clashes that led to the eclipse of the Kyoto court and the establishment of a military government by the rival Minamotho (Genji) clan.

Includes Japanese plays in transliteration and their English translation.

This collection of tanka created an immediate sensation in Japan as it introduced into this venerable art form the modern note of a rich variety of subject matter, including sordid sexuality and chaste love, psychiatric scrutiny, and the complicated mental processes of a mind reaching into those layers of nature and human nature that hardly seemed possible in thirty-one syllables.

Contains key examples of both high and low styles of poetry, drama, prose fiction, and essays. For this abridged edition, Shirane retains substantial excerpts from such masterworks as The Tale of Genji, The Tales of the Heike, The Pillow Book, the Man'yoshu, and the Kokinshu.