Hyakunin’shu


Book Description

Hyakunin’shu: Reading the Hundred Poets in Late Edo Japan explores the “popular literary literacy” of the Japanese at the edge of modernity. By reproducing and translating a well-known annotated and illustrated Ansei-era (1854–1859) edition of the Hyakunin isshu—for hundreds of years the most basic and best-known waka primer in the entire Japanese literary canon—Joshua Mostow reveals how commoners of the time made sense of the collection. Thanks to the popularization of the poems in the early modern period and the advent of commercial publishing, the Hyakunin’shu (as it was commonly called) was no longer the exclusive intellectual property of the upper classes but part of a poetic heritage shared by all literate Japanese. Mostow traces the Hyakunin’shu’s history from the first published collections in the early sixteenth century and printed commentaries of formerly esoteric and secret exegesis to later editions that include imagined portraits of the poets and, ultimately, pictures of the “heart”—pictorializations of the meaning of the poems themselves. His study illuminates the importance of “variant One Hundred Poets,” such as the Warrior One Hundred Poets, in popularizing the collection and the work’s strong association with feminine education from the early eighteenth century onward. The National Learning (Kokugaku) movement pursued a philological analysis of the poems, leading to translations of the Hyakunin’shu into contemporary, vernacular, spoken Japanese. The poems eventually served as the basis of a card game that became a staple of New Year festivities. This volume presents some innovations in translating premodern Japanese poetry: in the Introduction, Mostow considers the Hyakunin’shu’s reception during the Edo, when male homoerotic relationships were taken for granted, and makes the case for his translating the love poems in a non-heteronormative way. In addition, the translated poems are lineated to give readers a sense of the original edition’s chirashi-gaki, or “scattered writing,” allowing them to see how each poem’s sematic elements are distributed on the page.




Manga from the Floating World


Book Description

Manga from the Floating World is the first full-length study in English of the kibyôshi, a genre of sophisticated pictorial fiction widely read in late-eighteenth-century Japan. By combining analysis of the socioeconomic and historical milieus in which the genre was produced and consumed with three annotated translations of works by major author-artist Santô Kyôden (1761-1816) that closely reproduce the experience of encountering the originals, Adam Kern offers a sustained close reading of the vibrant popular imagination of the mid-Edo period. The kibyôshi, Kern argues, became an influential form of political satire that seemed poised to transform the uniquely Edoesque brand of urban commoner culture into something more, perhaps even a national culture, until the shogunal government intervened. Based on extensive research using primary sources in their original Edo editions, the volume is copiously illustrated with rare prints from Japanese archival collections. It serves as an introduction not only to the kibyôshi but also to the genre's readers and critics, narratological conventions, modes of visuality, format, and relationship to the modern Japanese comicbook (manga) and to the popular literature and wit of Edo. Filled with graphic puns and caricatures, these entertaining works will appeal to the general reader as well as to the more experienced student of Japanese cultural history.




Manga from the Floating World


Book Description

"The first full-length study in English of the kibyōshi, a genre of woodblock-printed comicbook widely read in late eighteenth-century Japan that became an influential form of political satire. The volume is copiously illustrated with rare prints from Japanese archival collections"--Provided by publisher.




Pictures of the Heart


Book Description

The Hyakunin Isshu, or One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each collection, is a sequence of one hundred Japanese poems in the tanka form, selected by the famous poet and scholar Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241) and arranged, in part, to represent the history of Japanese poetry from the seventh century down to Teika's own day. The anthology is, without doubt, the most popular and widely known collection of poetry in Japan - a distinction it has maintained for hundreds of years. In this study, Joshua Mostow challenges the idea of a final or authoritative reading of the Hyakunin Isshu and presents a refreshing, persuasive case for a reception history of this seminal work. In addition to providing a new translation of this classic text and biographical information on each poet, Mostow examines issues relating to text and image that are central to the Japanese arts from the Heian into the early modern period. By using Edo-period woodblock illustrations as pictorializations of the poems - as "pictures of the heart," or meaning, of the poems - text and image are pieced together in a holistic approach that will stand as a model for further research in the interrelationship between Japanese visual and verbal art.










String of Beads


Book Description

Princess Shikishi, Emperor Goshirakawa's third daughter, who served as saiin, or shrine vestal, in her teens, left a body of poems luminous with tranquil beauty and sadness. In her own lifetime she was counted among the outstanding poets of the age. In this volume, noted translator Hiroaki Sato makes available in one-line form all of the tanka - 400 poems - attributed to Princess Shikishi. Following an introduction that details Shikishi's era and the prosodic techniques of her time, Sato presents a group of poems gleaned from anthologies - among them a sequence of eleven which Shikishi wrote in condolence for the death of the wife of Fujiwara no Shunzei, her mentor - and three important 100-poem sequences. To provide allusive contexts, many of the poems are accompanied by extensive footnotes and endnotes, often with complete episodes from Tale of Ise and other classical texts.




Portraits of Edo and Early Modern Japan


Book Description

This volume presents a series of five portraits of Edo, the central region of urban space today known as Tokyo, from the great fire of 1657 to the devastating earthquake of 1855. This book endeavors to allow Edo, or at least some of the voices that constituted Edo, to do most of the speaking. These voices become audible in the work of five Japanese eye-witness observers, who notated what they saw, heard, felt, tasted, experienced, and remembered. “An Eastern Stirrup,” presents a vivid portrait of the great conflagration of 1657 that nearly wiped out the city. “Tales of Long Long Ago,” details seventeenth-century warrior-class ways as depicted by a particularly conservative samurai. “The River of Time,” describes the city and its flourishing cultural and economic development during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. “The Spider’s Reel” looks back at both the attainments and calamities of Edo in the 1780s. Finally, “Disaster Days,” offers a meticulous account of Edo life among the ruins of the catastrophic 1855 tremor. Read in sequence, these five pieces offer a unique “insider’s perspective” on the city of Edo and early modern Japan.




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