This book uses the haikai verse and paintings of the brilliant, innovative artist Yosa Buson (1716-1783) as a focal point from which to explore how Japanese writers competed for artistic authority in a time when popular responses to economic, technological, and social changes were creating the beginnings of a modern literature. The first part of the book discusses Buson's role in the Bash? Revival movement, situating his haikai in the context of the social networks that writers of his time both relied on and resisted. The second part explores Buson's "hokku," linked verse, and "haiga" (haikai painting). The book concludes with a discussion of Buson's reception in the modern period, and includes translations of his principal works.

The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature provides, for the first time, a history of Japanese literature with comprehensive coverage of the premodern and modern eras in a single volume. The book is arranged topically in a series of short, accessible chapters for easy access and reference, giving insight into both canonical texts and many lesser known, popular genres, from centuries-old folk literature to the detective fiction of modern times. The various period introductions provide an overview of recurrent issues that span many decades, if not centuries. The book also places Japanese literature in a wider East Asian tradition of Sinitic writing and provides comprehensive coverage of women's literature as well as new popular literary forms, including manga (comic books). An extensive bibliography of works in English enables readers to continue to explore this rich tradition through translations and secondary reading.

Although haiku is well known throughout the world, few outside Japan are familiar with its precursor, haikai (comic linked verse). Fewer still are aware of the role played by the Chinese Daoist classics in turning haikai into a respected literary art form. Bashō and the Dao examines the haikai poets’ adaptation of Daoist classics, particularly the Zhuangzi, in the seventeenth century and the eventual transformation of haikai from frivolous verse to high poetry. The author analyzes haikai’s encounter with the Zhuangzi through its intertextual relations with the works of Bashō and other major haikai poets, and also the nature and characteristics of haikai that sustained the Zhuangzi’s relevance to haikai poetic construction. She demonstrates how the haikai poets’ interest in this Daoist work was rooted in the intersection of deconstructing and reconstructing the classical Japanese poetic tradition. Well versed in both Chinese and Japanese scholarship, Qiu explores the significance of Daoist ideas in Bashō’s and others’ conceptions of haikai. Her method involves an extensive hermeneutic reading of haikai texts, an in-depth analysis of the connection between Chinese and Japanese poetic terminology, and a comparison of Daoist traits in both traditions. The result is a penetrating study of key ideas that have been instrumental in defining and rediscovering the poetic essence of haikai verse. Bashō and the Dao adds to an increasingly vibrant area of academic inquiry—the complex literary and cultural relations between Japan and China in the early modern era. Researchers and students of East Asian literature, philosophy, and cultural criticism will find this book a valuable contribution to cross-cultural literary studies and comparative aesthetics.

This collection of thirty-nine haiku from Yosa Buson showcases the mastery, delicacy, and mystery of one of Japan's greatest and most deeply admired poets. With this publication, Pulitzer Prize winner Franz Wright offers readers a new avenue into one of poetry's essential voices.

This book explores how two early modern and two modern Japanese writers – Yosa Buson (1716–83), Ema Saikō (1787–1861), Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), and Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) – experimented with the poetic artifice afforded by the East Asian literati (bunjin) tradition, a repertoire of Chinese and Japanese poetry and painting. Their experiments generated a poetics of irony that transformed the lineaments of lyric expression in literati culture and advanced the emergence of modern prose poetry in Japanese literature. Through rigorous close readings, this study changes our understanding of the relationship between lyric form and the representation of self, sense, and feeling in Japanese poetic writing from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century. The book aims to reach a broad audience, including specialists in East Asian Studies, Anglophone literary studies, and Comparative Literature.

"A wonderful introduction the Japanese tradition of jisei, this volume is crammed with exquisite, spontaneous verse and pithy, often hilarious, descriptions of the eccentric and committed monastics who wrote the poems." --Tricycle: The Buddhist Review Although the consciousness of death is, in most cultures, very much a part of life, this is perhaps nowhere more true than in Japan, where the approach of death has given rise to a centuries-old tradition of writing jisei, or the "death poem." Such a poem is often written in the very last moments of the poet's life. Hundreds of Japanese death poems, many with a commentary describing the circumstances of the poet's death, have been translated into English here, the vast majority of them for the first time. Yoel Hoffmann explores the attitudes and customs surrounding death in historical and present-day Japan and gives examples of how these have been reflected in the nation's literature in general. The development of writing jisei is then examined--from the longing poems of the early nobility and the more "masculine" verses of the samurai to the satirical death poems of later centuries. Zen Buddhist ideas about death are also described as a preface to the collection of Chinese death poems by Zen monks that are also included. Finally, the last section contains three hundred twenty haiku, some of which have never been assembled before, in English translation and romanized in Japanese.

In Reading Japanese Haikai Poetry Herbert Jonsson makes an inquiry into the multitude ways in which Japanese linked haikai poetry has been read and understood. A number of poems composed by the eighteenth-century master Yosa Buson are analyzed in great detail. Although closely related to the popular haiku, haikai is often regarded as difficult for non-specialists, but this study offers the reader a wealth of explanations, displaying the varied perspectives available. The first part of the book consists of a thorough investigation of how these poems have been interpreted in the Japanese commentary tradition. The second concluding part offers an innovative study of the poetics of scent (nioizuke), essential for understanding the creative force of this poetry.

The Tokugawa family held the shogunate from 1603 to 1867, ruling Japan and keeping the island nation isolated from the rest of the world for more than 250 years. Donald Keene looks within the "walls" of isolation and meticulously chronicles the period's vast literary output, providing both lay readers and scholars with the definitive history of premodern Japanese literature. World Within Walls spans the age in which Japanese literature began to reach a popular audience--as opposed to the elite aristocratic readers to whom it had previously been confined. Keene comprehensively treats each of the new, popular genres that arose, including haiku, Kabuki, and the witty, urbane prose of the newly ascendant merchant class.

"Beautiful.... The reproductions are very fine, and the text is truly illuminating.... Among the few authoritative works on the subject." --Japan Times With an essay by Fumiko Y. Yamamoto

The first complete bilingual translation of the Buson Kushu--a collection of haiku that is an essential volume of Asian literature