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  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature
  • Cited by 2
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
January 2016
Print publication year:
2015
Online ISBN:
9781139245869
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781139245869
Subjects:
Literature, Area Studies, Asian Literature, Asian Studies
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Literature
Information

Book description

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.

Awards

Honourable Mention, 2017 PROSE Award for Single Volume Reference/Humanities and Social Sciences

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Contents

Page 2 of 4

Contents
  • 19 - Vernacular histories:Eiga monogatari, Ōkagami, Gukanshō
    pp 193-205
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The eighth-century ritsuryo state system, with its system of ranks, ministries, and university, continued to operate throughout the Heian period and provided the framework for a court-based state system, which emerged at the beginning of the tenth century. One of the major characteristics of this court-based state was gradual concentration of power outside the capital in the provincial governors, drawn from middle-rank aristocrats, who were the fathers of women writers of this period. The early Heian period was marked by the continued prominence of Chinese-based literature and culture and the gradual introduction of vernacular cultural forms, particularly the court-based vernacular literature written in kana, a new syllabary, which flourished from the tenth century onward. One of the striking characteristics of the emergence of Japanese vernacular literature was the central role played by women writers who were closely associated with the imperial court in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, such as Murasaki Shikibu, Sei Shonagon.
  • 20 - Heian popular songs:imayōandRyōjin hishō
    pp 206-208
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Sugawara no Michizane ranks among the best-known poets of the Heian period, although he must be among the least often read. Through the Nara period, Michizane's ancestors had served as minor officials at court. The move of the capital to Heian marked a change in the family's fortunes. By the time of Michizane's birth, the Sugawara were known as a family of court scholars. In Michizane's world, scholarship meant a form of Sinology that combined mastery of the Chinese classics with the ability to make practical use of such knowledge. Compositions included both prose and poetry, both official documents and personal expressions. Michizane also wrote waka and associated with some of the major waka poets of his day. Most of Michizane's prose consists of official documents and religious writings, often drafted for others less skilled at composition in Chinese. In Japanese, one rarely wrote of love for one's children. In Chinese, Michizane wrote very affecting poems on that subject.
  • 21 - Introduction to medieval literature
    pp 211-217
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Kokinshu represents the major phase in the evolution of Japanese poetry after the late eighth-century Manyoshu, one whose articulation of self and world would influence Japanese culture for a millennium. Much of the unprecedented nature of Heian waka can be traced back to Uda, whose entourage first developed utaawase and byobu uta, both staples of later court poetry. The authority of the Kokinshu and its poetics was unquestioned in the two imperial anthologies, Gosen wakashu and Shui wakashu, that followed it. Of the anthology's two prefaces, the more commented-on is the Kana Preface and composed by the anthology's chief editor Ki no Tsurayuki. The Mana Preface, which is named after the literary Chinese it was written in by Tsurayuki's scholarly clan-mate Ki no Yoshimochi, was intended for the sovereign. Kinto became the premier arbiter of poetic taste under the patronage of Fujiwara no Michinaga, who encouraged the composition of waka as part of banquets.
  • 22 - Japanese poetic thought, from earliest times to the thirteenth century
    pp 218-229
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In modern parlance, the term monogatari refers to long prose narratives told in the equivalent of the third person, and produced among the nobility from the early tenth century until some time in the Kamakura period. This chapter traces the emergence of this genre up until the appearance of The Tale of Genji in the early eleventh century, which marks its pinnacle. It also discusses the Taketori monogatari or The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, Ise monogatari, and Tsukuri-monogatari. In addition to these tales Heian Japan was aware of the short fiction that circulated in Tang China. In the Tang dynasty, many stories and poems circulated about the meetings of the emperors Mu and Wu with the Queen Mother of the West. In these texts, the emperors approach the queen mother to be taught the secrets of Taoist alchemy and to obtain an elixir of immortality, though they ultimately fail or are refused.
  • 23 - Shinkokin wakashū: The New Anthology of Ancient and Modern Japanese Poetry
    pp 230-237
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Genji monogatari or The Tale of Genji was composed by Murasaki Shikibu around the first decade of the eleventh century. Genji monogatari is divided into two major sections: chapters 1 to 41, which describe the story of Genji and the women in his life, and chapters 42 to 54, which deals with Genji's progeny. The first section is subdivided into: chapters 1 to 33, narrating the rise, fall, and rise again of the young Genji, and chapters 34 to 41, which portray him becoming increasingly introspective and contemplative. The story begins with a love affair between the emperor and Kiritsubo. Captivated by her close resemblance to the late Kiritsubo, Genji's father takes in a new consort, known to as Fujitsubo. The earliest documented evidence of Genji reading is found in the diary of the author herself, which claims that figures like the poet Fujiwara no Kinto, Fujiwara no Michinaga, and the Ichijo Emperor read at least parts of Genji monogatari.
  • 24 - Waka in the medieval period: patterns of practice and patronage
    pp 238-255
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Much longer fiction survives from Imperial Princess Baishi's day, and one of her attendants, is credited with Sagoromo monogatari, dated to sometime between 1069 and 1086. The influence of Genji is discernible on the very first page of Sagoromo, as the eponymous hero alludes to a poem by Genji himself. In the postscript to his copy of the Sarashina nikki, the famous poet Fujiwara no Teika records the attribution of four monogatari to the diary's author, two of which are still extant: Yoru no Nezame and Hamamatsu Chunagon monogatari. The final monogatari extant from the Heian period is Torikaebaya monogatari. Critical consideration of the monogatari genre reached its second peak in 1271 with the completion of the Fuyo wakashu, an imperial anthology-like collection of over two hundred poems drawn exclusively from monogatari, in twenty books. The collection provides evidence that it was in fact in the Kamakura period that most monogatari were produced.
  • 25 - Hyakunin isshuand the popularization of classical poetry
    pp 256-258
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The three most frequently commented texts of the classical literary canon are Kokin wakashu or KKS, Ise monogatari or The Tales of Ise, and Genji monogatari or The Tale of Genji. Imperial waka anthologies for the three centuries after KKS were ignored by commentators until the eighteenth century; the same is true for The Tale of Sagoromo, a narrative fiction the waka of which were considered comparable to those of Genji in late Heian and Kamakura times. One factor must be that KKS and Tales of Ise themselves incorporate distinctive forms of commentary. KKS can be defined in fact as a corpus of cited poems framed by two kinds of editorial comments and two "prefaces". The earliest extant commentaries on The Tales of Ise inclined toward extravagant allegoresis incorporating strains of Esoteric and Tantric Buddhism and Shinto that flourished in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, often intertwined with heterodox KKS commentaries of a similar bent.
  • 26 - Medieval recluse literature: Saigyō, Chōmei, and Kenkō
    pp 259-267
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book represents the rival salon of Empress Teishi. Like many of the other diaries by court women, the Pillow Book can be seen as a memorial to the author's patron, specifically a homage to the Naka no Kanpaku family and a literary prayer to the spirit of the deceased empress Teishi. The roughly three hundred discrete sections of the Pillow Book can be divided into three types such as list, essay, and diary, which sometimes overlap. The Pillow Book is now considered one of the pillars of Heian vernacular court literature, but unlike the Kokinshu, The Tales of Ise, and The Tale of Genji, which had been canonized by the thirteenth century, the Pillow Book was not a required text for waka poets and was neglected in the Heian and medieval periods. But it became popular with the new commoner audience in the Tokugawa period, and it has been read for its style, humor, and interesting lists.
  • 27 - Medieval women’s diaries: fromTamakiwarutoTakemukigaki
    pp 268-279
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter focuses on five major diaries or nikies of the Heian period: Tosa Diary, Kagero Diary, Izumi shikibu Diary, Murasaki shikibu Diary, and Sarashina Diary. The Tosa Diary chronicles a fifty-five-day journey taken by the author Ki no Tsurayuki, his family and entourage back to the capital in 934 after his period of service as provincial governor in Tosa province. Although his official career was not distinguished and he composed the Japanese preface to that anthology, which was the first attempt to write discursively in vernacular Japanese. The major diaries of the Heian period were all reproduced in woodblock editions during the Tokugawa period, making them available to a general audience. These diaries were given an important place in the modern canon of Japanese literature. They were first hailed as early forerunners of the "I-Novel", a form of autobiographical fiction that dominated Japanese literary production in the Meiji and Taisho periods.
  • 28 - Setsuwa (anecdotal) literature:Nihon ryōikitoKokon chomonjū
    pp 280-286
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In the early Heian Academy, talented scholars were sometimes able to rise to posts on the Council of State itself, but the hegemony of the Fujiwara Regents' House effectively ended literati political influence. During the mid to late Heian period, the collection Godansho contains many anecdotes illustrating the friction between hereditary scholars and unaffiliated students, as in this conversation about Sugawara no Fumitoki, scion of the Sugawara lineage, and Minamoto no Shitago, a less prestigious student from the same Letters curriculum. Another burst of glory for the traditional scholarly families was Oe no Masafusa, a child prodigy who tutored and advised three emperors, and was the first of his lineage to sit on the Council in over a century. Near the end of his life, Masafusa's student Fujiwara no Sanekane, began keeping a record of his conversations with his teacher, Godansho, an important influence on later setsuwa literature.
  • 29 - The rise of medieval warrior tales:Hōgen monogatariandHeiji monogatari
    pp 287-294
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The degree to which Bai Juyi's poetry outshone that of his Tang contemporaries in the Japanese constellation of the poetic universe is quite remarkable and is not merely a reflection of the contemporary Chinese canon. The incorporation of Bai's poetry, and by extension other literary texts from China, into the Heian literary world view is reflected by Wakan roeishu, edited by Fujiwara no Kinto. Wakan roeishu is an anthology of poetry in Chinese or Sino-Japanese and Japanese organized in thematic rubrics. Compiler Fujiwara no Kinto juxtaposed waka with over eighth hundred couplets by Japanese and Chinese kanshi poets. Wakan roeishu is divided into two books, or volumes. The first book covers the four seasons, in gradual procession from early spring to the end of winter and the end of the year. The second book is a miscellaneous arrangement of often intriguing categories, from monkeys and recluses to courtesans and the color white.
  • 30 - The Tales of the Heike
    pp 295-305
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Fujiwara no Akihira compiles Honcho monzui or Literary Essence of Our Court is a repository of model pieces featuring genres that an educated Heian man needed to master in order to participate in court life, perform duties within the court bureaucracy. Canvassing about two centuries of Sino-Japanese literature from the Saga through the GoIchijo courts, he selected 427 pieces by seventy authors for a vast panorama in fourteen volumes, arranged by thirty-nine genres, with a special focus on the Engi, Tenryaku, and Kanko eras, high points for courtly kanshibun. Though it was the first anthology to feature a vast panorama of Sino- Japanese genres, Literary Essence took cues from previous collections. Inspired by the central importance of the Wenxuan, the sixth-century Chinese anthology of ornamental prose and poetry that was a major textbook for students in the "History and Literature track" at the Heian Academy, Akihira may have tried to create a Wenxuan for Japan.
  • 31 - The late medieval warrior tales: fromSoga monogataritoTaiheiki
    pp 306-310
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Historical writing in Japan was infused with new life and meaning with the appearance of two significant works casting the life and times of Fujiwara no Michinaga against a backdrop of dynastic history: Eiga monogatari and Okagami. Eiga monogatari is a history, yet it is written in kana and from what everyone think of as a feminine perspective. Like Eiga monogatari, Okagami is framed as a dynastic history written in kana, but the two differ markedly in form and narrative voice. Next, Gukansho was, written by Tendai Abbot Jien in 1220, penned just before the Jokyu uprising shook relations between the court and the fledgling Kamakura shogunate in 1221. Gukansho is presented as a history, divided into seven chapters. The first two trace the reigns from Jinmu through GoHorikawa, including lists of the ministers and Tendai abbots who presided during each reign. The chronology is followed by four chapters of narrative analysis of this history.
  • 32 - Literature of medieval Zen temples: Gozan (Five Mountains) and Ikkyū Sōjun
    pp 311-316
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The term imayo denotes a wide rubric of popular song, which could even include regular waka, and a specific type of song, only ten of which are extant in Ryojin hisho. In the narrow sense, imayo proper knows a limited set of prosodic possibilities, often in the form of a quatrain, that follow an alternation of eight and four syllables. The three main genres that survive in Ryojin hisho are Buddhist song, deity song quatrains, and deity song couplets. In fact, within the two extant categories of "deity songs", many lyrics deal with the topic of love and yearning. Whatever the theme of an imayo, the majority of songs take their cues from the lives of the Heian lower classes. The second half of the twelfth century saw the rise of a new type of female performer, the shirabyoshi. The term at first denoted only a type of song; later it came to refer also to its singers.
  • 34 - Noh drama
    pp 328-339
  • View abstract

    Summary

    During the early medieval period the samurai were drawn to aristocratic and court culture of the capital, as the Heike had been. The prominent samurai waka poet was Minamoto no Sanetomo, who took an interest in Manyoshu-style poetry. One of the main characteristics of medieval literature is that much of it was produced by groups rather than by individuals, in military chronicles like The Tales of the Heike and the Taiheiki. Aristocratic literature in the medieval period was characterized by strong nostalgia for the Heian past and an emphasis on preserving court traditions. Two literary figures of the late Muromachi period were Shotetsu and the renga master Sogi, of uncertain origins, who wrote influential treatises on renga and numerous commentaries on the classics. Setsuwa literature were collected from as early as the Nara period and appeared in the late Heian period in the massive Konjaku monogatari shu. Buddhist writings in the Heian period were always written in Literary Sinitic.
  • 35 - Noh drama theory from Zeami to Zenchiku
    pp 340-346
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Dating from the late Nara period, Fujiwara no Hamanari's Kakyo hyoshiki is regarded as the oldest extant karonsho. Written in kanbun, it is heavily indebted to Chinese poetic theory, particularly that of the Six Dynasties period. The Kokin wakashu was the first anthology of Japanese poetry to be compiled by imperial commission. The next major karon text after Tsurayuki's Kokinshu preface is the Shinsen zuino of Fujiwara no Kinto, the leading waka poet of his age and a noted polymath whose talents extended to poetry in kanbun and court music. The poet Minamoto no Toshiyori is thought to have completed his lengthy treatise Toshiyori zuino about a century after Kinto was at the height of his influence. The Rokujo house flourished for almost a century, and its members produced a number of poetic treatises, the best known of which are the Ogisho and Fukurozoshi. Shunzei's son Teika occupies a uniquely influential position in the history of classical Japanese literature.
  • 36 - Kyōgen: comic plays that turn medieval society upside down
    pp 347-354
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The Shinkokin wakashu or Shinkokinshu, commissioned by Retired Emperor GoToba and compiled by a team including Fujiwara no Teika under the close supervision of GoToba, is the eighth imperial collection of waka and the most influential in the medieval period. Teika's poem does not end on a noun, nor does it have a strong syntactical break. These next two qualities may be observed in the second Spring chapter of Shinkokinshu. Shinkokinshu is a pillar of medieval Japanese aesthetics, and it was the important poetic text of medieval Japan. The official agency had lay dormant since the mid tenth century, when it had served as an administrative base for the compilers of Gosen wakashu, the second imperial waka anthology. The anthology not only influenced later waka poets, it also became an important resource for noh playwrights, renga and haikai poets. Evaluation of Shinkokinshu by readers from the early modern period to the present has been largely positive.
  • 37 - Late medieval popular fiction and narrated genres: otogizōshi, kōwakamai, sekkyō, and ko-jōruri
    pp 355-370
  • View abstract

    Summary

    During the Shinkokinshu era, Japanese court poetry, waka or uta emerged as a discrete literary field, with its own genres and sub-genres, along with a sense of history and ideological purpose. As the Shinkokinshu period came to an end, the Mikohidari house of Fujiwara no Teika was preeminent partly because it could claim long traditions of practice as well as scholarship in a world in which nothing was important than affiliation with the legitimizing authority of ancient traditions. Poetry in the late Kamakura period remained a kind of performance art, aired if not composed in communal gatherings where such understated scenes served as models of decorum, and subtle gradation of expression. Tameie's, Teika's son, chief ambition was to gain for his descendants a secure place in the poetic culture of the imperial court. One sign of the healthy situation of poetry in the mid fifteenth century was planning for a new imperial anthology, sponsored by the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa.
  • 38 - Introduction to early modern Japanese literature
    pp 373-381
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Hyakunin isshu, a collection of one hundred poems by one hundred poets who lived from the seventh century to the thirteen century, was compiled by Fujiwara no Teika. It contains forty-three love poems, nearly half of the collection and an extremely high percentage compared to that in imperial waka anthologies. In the Edo period the Hyakunin isshu came to represent the entire tradition of Heian court poetry, and it saw a sudden increase in readership, particularly due to the new print culture, which enabled people from all classes to educate themselves. The Hyakunin isshu has taken many forms. During the Pacific War a collection called Aikoku hyakunin isshu or The Patriotic Hyakunin isshu appeared, praising the emperor and encouraging loyalty to the nation and the throne. Today Hyakunin isshu is one of the most familiar pieces of classical literature in Japan and without a doubt will reappear in the future in many new forms.
  • 39 - Publishing and the book in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
    pp 382-395
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Recluse literature, and the related label "thatched hut literature" are terms coined in the twentieth century to describe works in a variety of genres, such as waka, setsuwa, and zuihitsu, by a broad array of authors of the medieval period. Saigyo, Kamo no Chomei, and Yoshida Kenko exemplify the recluse ideal while problematizing the idea and practice of isolation. By the end of the Heian period, the trope of reclusion in waka was dominated by nuns, many of whom had been imperial women at court. Chomei's language reflects the trend in recluse literature to conflate the poetic diction of the four seasons with the language and concepts of Buddhism making nature not only the great mirror of human emotion but also a manifestation of the Buddhist Dharma. Kenko came from a Shinto family of priests and diviners. Medieval recluse literature chronicles the numerous forces that pulled hermits and travelers both toward and away from the poles of the sacred.
  • 40 - A forest of books: seventeenth-century Kamigata commercial prose
    pp 396-402
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Among the many literary diaries of the medieval period, eight stand out as works by women: Tamakiwaru, Kenreimonin Ukyo no Daibu shu, Ben no Naishi nikki, Utatane, Izayoi nikki, Nakatsukasa Naishi nikki, Towazugatari, and Takemukigaki. Poetry also played a prominent role in women's works as a mode of a communication, a narrative strategy, and way of binding the author's life with those of other famous figures, whether historical or fictional. Poetic inspiration was one of the many motivations for medieval travel and the development of travel diaries was closely linked to the establishment of set literary routes and sites a writer was expected to visit. Medieval diaries by women have traditionally been represented as lesser examples of the court literature that flourished during the Heian era. The brief summaries that follow show the diversity of female-authored works from the Kamakura and Northern and Southern Court periods and highlight some of the many reasons these works deserve greater study.
  • 41 - The rise of haikai: Matsuo Bashō, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi Issa
    pp 403-414
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The first extant setsuwa collection is the aforementioned Nihon ryoiki, a Buddhist collection edited and compiled in the early Heian period. Godansho is a setsuwa collection that records stories narrated by Oe no Masafusa, one of the leading scholars and poets of the time. The systematic attempt to provide knowledge of the past, particularly of the aristocratic past, is evident in Kokon chomonju, which was edited around 1254 by Tachibana Narisue, a low-ranking aristocrat and literatus who received the secret transmission on playing the lute. Since one of the objectives of setsuwa collections such as the late Heian period Konjaku monogatari shu, edited by Gento, was to provide an encyclopedic worldview, centered on India, China, and Japan, these collections included stories from these three countries. The Kara monogatari, a late-Heian period setsuwa anthology perhaps edited by Fujiwara Shigenori, is a collection of poem-tale style adaptations from Chinese texts.
  • 42 - Ihara Saikaku and Ejima Kiseki: the literature of urban townspeople
    pp 415-423
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In general, war tales describe historical warfare and the lives of warriors and the people close to them. The main characters are heroic and often take on the hyperbolic dimensions. The earliest of the medieval war tales are the group describing the causes and effects of the Genpei War: Hogen monogatari, Heiji monogatari, and Heike monogatari. Together with Jokyuki, these tales concerning the formative years of the Kamakura period were sometimes considered as a four-part set that together narrates the consolidation of power under the Kamakura shogunate. Scholars often pair Hogen monogatari and Heiji monogatari because of their connected storylines, characters, and shared compositional and reception histories. Both tales consist of three chapters, and both seem to have been written after the Genpei War, as they open with statements pointing toward a shared endpoint and anticipate the events of the 1170s and 1180s as the destination of their narratives.
  • 43 - Representing theater: text and performance in kabuki and bunraku
    pp 424-436
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The Heike monogatari or The Tales of the Heike is a long medieval narrative, extant in multiple variants, about the rise and fall of Taira Kiyomori and the Heike warrior house in the course of the twelfth century. The first half of the Heike narrate the rapid rise and consolidation of Kiyomori's power, alternating praise with censure. The second half of the Heike narrates the defeat of the Heike by the Genji forces, first led by Kiso no Yoshinaka, who drives the Heike into flight and exile from the capital; and then by Minamoto no Yoshitsune, who defeats them in two battles. As the Heike variants circulated throughout the fourteenth and into the fifteenth centuries, copied and recopied by multiple hands, the story continued to propagate and gain ever larger audiences across all classes of Japanese society, reaching a peak of popularity in the golden age of Heike performance in the fifteenth century.
  • 44 - Puppet theater: from early jōruri to the golden age
    pp 437-446
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In the late medieval period, or the Muromachi period, a body of works developed that focused, not only on war and battles, but instead on the lives of specific warriors associated with the Genpei period. The two most representative are Soga monogatari and Gikeiki, two long war tales about events related to Minamoto Yoritomo's establishment of the Kamakura shogunate. Soga monogatari is episodic and demonstrates a clearly Buddhist editorial hand. The final major medieval war tale, arguably as important for medieval and early modern readers and audiences as Heike, is Taiheiki, which narrates the tumultuous events and aftermath of the Kenmu Restoration of 1333-6. Written in mixed Chinese-Japanese style, the forty chapters of Taiheiki trace events from 1318 to 1367, a period that witnessed the division of the royal line and simultaneous existence of Northern and Southern imperial courts, as well as the overthrow of the Kamakura shogunate, an event closely tied to the royal schism.
  • 45 - From the beginnings of kabuki to the playwrights Nanboku and Mokuami
    pp 447-456
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Gozan Bungaku encompasses a vast corpus of texts in literary Chinese produced by Zen monks during the Kamakura and Muromachi periods. Gozan or "Five Mountains" designates the top five ranks of the Rinzai Zen monastic system and also stands for the system as a whole, which at its height included hundreds of temples and sub-temples throughout Japan. The poetry produced by Gozan monks is usually considered to have the literary interest. Sesson Yubai may be taken as representative of the early-period of Gozan poetry. The peak of Gozan poetry is represented by Gido Shushin and Zekkai Chushin. Both wrote in regulated verse forms and had their poetry praised by Chinese readers. The famous Zen monk of the medieval era, Ikkyu Sojun was not a Gozan monk. As an adolescent, he chose study with monks of the Daitoku-ji lineage. Daitoku-ji Temple had been demoted from Gozan status by the Ashikaga bakufu for political reasons and it opted out of the system.
  • 46 - Early to mid-Edo kanshi
    pp 457-464
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The one figure centrally involved in championing renga or "linked verse" as a courtly genre was Tonna's student Nijo Yoshimoto. During 1345-1372 Yoshimoto produced four major treatises aimed at drawing attention to renga as a literary art, providing it with a historical narrative that connected it to the earliest times, and analyzing it in aesthetic terms taken from similar works in the waka tradition. In 1392 the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu arranged a rapprochement that ended the era of the divided courts and inaugurated a period of relative peace and prosperity for both the court nobility and the military aristocracy. Sogi, a Zen monk who, more than any commoner poet before, seems to have made an explicit decision to make a career for himself as a renga master. Given his emphasis on maintaining the proper atmosphere in a renga gathering, it is no surprise that Sogi is regarded as the first renga master to realize the full potential of the hyakuin.

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