Download or read book Hitomaro Poet as God written by Anne Commons and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-05-31 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses the reception and eventual deification of the seventh-century poet Kakinomoto no Hitomaro. The result is a new perspective on a major literary figure through his placement within the broader context of Japanese poetic culture.

Download or read book The Canonization of Hitomaro written by Anne Elisabeth Commons and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Premodern Japan written by Mikiso Hane and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japanese historian Louis Perez brings Mikiso Hane's rich and beloved account of early Japanese history up-to-date in this thoroughly revised Second Edition of Premodern Japan. The text traces the key developments of Japanese history in the premodern period, including the establishment of the imperial dynasty, early influences from China and Korea, the rise of the samurai class and the establishment of feudalism, the culture and society of the long Tokugawa period, the rise of Confucianism and Shinto nationalism, and finally, the end of Tokugawa rule. While the text provides many political developments through the early modern period, it also integrates the social, cultural, and intellectual aspects of Japanese history as well. Perez's updates to the text provide a comprehensive overview of the major social, political, and religious trends in premodern Japan as well as offering the most current scholarship.

Download or read book Inscribed Objects and the Development of Literature in Early Japan written by Joshua Frydman and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-06-26 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The introduction of writing enables new forms of literature, but these can be invisible in works that survive as manuscripts. Through looking at inscriptions of poetry on garbage and as graffiti, we can glimpse how literature spread along with writing. This study uses these lesser-studied sources, including inscriptions on pottery, architecture, and especially wooden tablets known as mokkan, to uncover how poetry, and literature more broadly, was used, shared and thrown away in early Japan. Through looking at these disposable and informal sources, we explore the development of early Japanese literature, and even propose parallels to similar developments in other societies across space and time.

Download or read book Waka and Things Waka as Things written by Edward Kamens and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A challenging study offering a new perspective on classical Japanese poems and how they interact with and are part of material culture This generously illustrated volume offers a fresh perspective on classical Japanese poetry (waka), including many poems treated here for the first time in a Western-language publication. Edward Kamens examines these poems both as they relate to material things and as things in and of themselves, exploring their intimate connections to artifacts and works of visual art, sacred and secular alike, and investigating the unique rhetorical messages and powers accessed and activated through these multimedia productions. This book makes a major contribution to Japanese literary and cultural studies.

Download or read book Rewriting Medieval Japanese Women written by Christina Laffin and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2013-01-31 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rewriting Medieval Japanese Women explores the world of thirteenth-century Japan through the life of a prolific noblewoman known as Nun Abutsu (1225–1283). Abutsu crossed gender and genre barriers by writing the first career guide for Japanese noblewomen, the first female-authored poetry treatise, and the first poetic travelogue by a woman—all despite the increasingly limited social mobility for women during the Kamakura era (1185–1336). Capitalizing on her literary talent and political prowess, Abutsu rose from middling origins and single-motherhood to a prestigious marriage and membership in an esteemed literary lineage. Abutsu’s life is well documented in her own letters, diaries, and commentaries, as well as in critiques written by rivals, records of poetry events, and legal documents. Drawing on these and other literary and historiographical sources, including The Tale of Genji, author Christina Laffin demonstrates how medieval women responded to institutional changes that transformed their lives as court attendants, wives, and nuns. Despite increased professionalization of the arts, competition over sources of patronage, and rivaling claims to literary expertise, Abutsu proved her poetic capabilities through her work and often used patriarchal ideals of femininity to lay claim to political and literary authority. Rewriting Medieval Japanese Women effectively challenges notions that literary salons in Japan were a phenomenon limited to the Heian period (794–1185) and that literary writing and scholarship were the domain of men during the Kamakura era. Its analysis of literary works within the context of women’s history makes clear the important role that medieval women and their cultural contributions continued to play in Japanese history.

Download or read book Lovable Losers written by Mikael S. Adolphson and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2015-09-30 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lovable Losers is the first substantial piece of English-language scholarship to examine the actions and the memorization of the Heike (Ise Taira), a family of aristocratic warriors whose resounding defeat at the hands of the Seiwa Genji in 1185 resulted in their iconic status as tragic losers. The Tale of the Heike and the many other works derived from it set in place the depiction of the Heike as failed upstart aristocrats whose spectacular downfall was due to neglect of their warrior heritage and the villainy of the family head, Taira no Kiyomori. Lovable Losers aims to contextualize and deconstruct representations of the Heike not only to show how such representations were created in specific contexts in response to specific needs, but also to demonstrate that the representations themselves came to create and sustain a particular kind of culture. Drawing on the expertise of scholars in a variety of disciplines, this volume explores the Heike in their own time and their depiction as cultural figures in the centuries that followed. Their portrayal in literature and the arts spans more than eight hundred years and a wide range of genres and media, including nō plays, picture scrolls, early modern comic books, novels, and film. In texts from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, the Heike serve as catalysts for miracles and vectors for subtle criticisms of the Tokugawa government. Over time Kiyomori became an emblem of postwar democracy and economic progress; today he is a powerful symbol of modern citizens' dissatisfaction with politics. The Heike’s ambiguous moral standing allowed them to be reimagined, reconstructed, and repurposed by different authors in different contexts, as both heroes and villains. Rather than assuming their failure, Lovable Losers repositions the Heike within the larger phenomenon of the Genpei War and its aftermath, demonstrating how they took advantage of their station as nobles and warriors. The new research it presents seeks to transcend categorization and blur the lines between different approaches to the Heike to give a well-rounded depiction of a family who has played a defining role in Japanese culture in action, in memory, and somewhere in between.

Download or read book No Moonlight in My Cup written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-01-21 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No Moonlight in My Cup provides translations and commentaries for more than two hundred Sinitic poems (kanshi 漢詩) from the Nara and Heian courts (710-1185) together with a detailed introduction to this important but relatively little-studied literary genre.

Download or read book Recent Scholarship on Japan written by Richard Donovan and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-12-02 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology presents a survey of recent scholarship on Japanese literature—classical, postwar, and contemporary—and Japan studies from both established and up-and-coming academics based in the West and East. This collection of cutting-edge scholarship offers a snapshot of the current state of Japan studies in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The first section of the book considers the Heian period and its literature from the perspective of female authors and their works. The second part explores postwar prose and poetry, as well as the writing of contemporary author Haruki Murakami, relating them all to issues present in Japan’s wider society. Finally, the third section puts Japan and its writings within the global context, comparing them with other historical, cultural and linguistic milieus, and considering the role of translation in representing Japanese literature to the world.

Download or read book Enigma of the Emperors written by Ben-Ami Shillony and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-10-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important new and original study on the institution of the Japanese emperors focuses on the enigma of the institution itself, namely, the extraordinary continuity of the Japanese dynasty, which is unknown anywhere else in the world, yet which is now at risk on account of more recent laws of succession.

Download or read book Buddhism and the Transformation of Old Age in Medieval Japan written by Edward R. Drott and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars have long remarked on the frequency with which Japanese myths portrayed gods (kami) as old men or okina. Many of these “sacred elders” came to be featured in premodern theater, most prominently in Noh. In the closing decades of the twentieth-century, as the number of Japan’s senior citizens climbed steadily, the sacred elder of premodern myth became a subject of renewed interest and was seen by some as evidence that the elderly in Japan had once been accorded a level of respect unknown in recent times. In Buddhism and the Transformation of Old Age in Medieval Japan, Edward Drott charts the shifting sets of meanings ascribed to old age in medieval Japan, tracing the processes by which the aged body was transformed into a symbol of otherworldly power and the cultural, political, and religious circumstances that inspired its reimagination. Drott examines how the aged body was used to conceptualize forms of difference and to convey religious meanings in a variety of texts: official chronicles, literary works, Buddhist legends and didactic tales. In early Japan, old age was most commonly seen as a mark of negative distinction, one that represented the ugliness, barrenness, and pollution against which the imperial court sought to define itself. From the late-Heian period, however, certain Buddhist authors seized upon the aged body as a symbolic medium though which to challenge traditional dichotomies between center and margin, high and low, and purity and defilement, crafting narratives that associated aged saints and avatars with the cults, lineages, sacred sites, or religious practices these authors sought to promote. Contributing to a burgeoning literature on religion and the body, Buddhism and the Transformation of Old Age in Medieval Japan applies approaches developed in gender studies to “denaturalize” old age as a matter of representation, identity, and performance. By tracking the ideological uses of old age in premodern Japan, this work breaks new ground, revealing the role of religion in the construction of generational categories and the ways in which religious ideas and practices can serve not only to naturalize, but also challenge “common sense” about the body.

Download or read book Traversing the Frontier written by H. Mack Horton and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 661 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the sixth month of 736, a Japanese diplomatic mission set out for the kingdom of Silla, on the Korean peninsula. The envoys undertook the mission during a period of strained relations with the country of their destination, met with adverse winds and disease during the voyage, and returned empty-handed. The futile journey proved fruitful in one respect: its literary representation—a collection of 145 Japanese poems and their Sino-Japanese (kanbun) headnotes and footnotes—made its way into the eighth-century poetic anthology Man’yōshū, becoming the longest poetic sequence in the collection and one of the earliest Japanese literary travel narratives. Featuring deft translations and incisive analysis, this study investigates the poetics and thematics of the Silla sequence, uncovering what is known about the actual historical event and the assumptions and concerns that guided its re-creation as a literary artifact and then helped shape its reception among contemporary readers. H. Mack Horton provides an opportunity for literary archaeology of some of the most exciting dialectics in early Japanese literary history."

Download or read book Teika written by Paul S. Atkins and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241) was born into an illustrious lineage of poets just as Japan’s ancien régime was ceding authority to a new political order dominated by military power. Overcoming personal and political setbacks, Teika and his allies championed a new style of poetry that managed to innovate conceptually and linguistically within the narrow confines of the waka tradition and the limits of its thirty-one syllable form. Backed by powerful patrons, Teika emerged finally as the supreme arbiter of poetry in his time, serving as co-compiler of the eighth imperial anthology of waka, Shin Kokinshū (ca. 1210) and as solo compiler of the ninth. This first book-length study of Teika in English covers the most important and intriguing aspects of Teika’s achievements and career, seeking the reasons behind Teika’s fame and offering distinctive arguments about his oeuvre. A documentary biography sets the stage with valuable context about his fascinating life and times, followed by an exploration of his “Bodhidharma style,” as Teika’s critics pejoratively termed the new style of poetry. His beliefs about poetry are systematically elaborated through a thorough overview of his writing about waka. Teika’s understanding of classical Chinese history, literature, and language is the focus of a separate chapter that examines the selective use of kana, the Japanese phonetic syllabary, in Teika’s diary, which was written mainly in kanbun, a Japanese version of classical Chinese. The final chapter surveys the reception history of Teika’s biography and literary works, from his own time into the modern period. Sometimes venerated as demigod of poetry, other times denigrated as an arrogant, inscrutable poet, Teika seldom inspired lukewarm reactions in his readers. Courtier, waka poet, compiler, copyist, editor, diarist, and critic, Teika is recognized today as one of the most influential poets in the history of Japanese literature. His oeuvre includes over four thousand waka poems, his diary, Meigetsuki, which he kept for over fifty years, and a fictional tale set in Tang-dynasty China. Over fifteen years in the making, Teika is essential reading for anyone interested in Japanese poetry, the history of Japan, and traditional Japanese culture.

Download or read book Shinto the Way of the Gods written by W. G. Aston and published by BEYOND BOOKS HUB. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Materials for the Study of Shinto; Personification; Deification of Men; Functions of Gods; Myth; The Mythical Narrative; Nature-Deities; Man-Deities; The Priesthood; Worship; Morals, Law, and Purity; Ceremonial; Magic, Divination, Inspiration; and, Decay of Shinto. As compared with the great religions of the world, Shinto, the old Kami cult of Japan, is decidedly rudimentary in its character. Its polytheism, the want of a Supreme Deity, the comparative absence of images and of a moral code, its feeble personifications and hesitating grasp of the conception of spirit, the practical non-recognition of a future state, and the general absence of a deep, earnest faith--all stamp it as perhaps the least developed of religions which have an adequate literary record. Still, it is not a primitive cult. It had an organized priesthood and an elaborate ritual. The general civilization of the Japanese when Shinto assumed the form in which we know it had left the primitive stage far behind. They were already an agricultural nation, a circumstance by which Shinto has been deeply influenced. They had a settled government, and possessed the arts of brewing, making pottery, building ships and bridges, and working in metals. It is not among such surroundings that we can expect to find a primitive form of religion. The present treatise has two objects. It is intended, primarily and chiefly, as a repertory of the more significant facts of Shinto for the use of scientific students of religion. It also comprises an outline theory of the origin and earlier stages of the development of religion, prepared with special reference to the Shinto evidence. The subject is treated from a positive, not from a negative or agnostic standpoint, Religion being regarded as a normal function, not [Pg vi]a disease, of humanity. This element of the work owes much to the continental scholars Réville, Goblet D'Alviella, and Pfleiderer. In anthropological matters, I have been much indebted to Dr. Tylor's 'Primitive Culture' and Mr. J. G. Frazer's 'Golden Bough.' I should not omit to express my obligations to my friend Mr. J. Troup for assistance with the proofs and for a number of useful corrections and suggestions.

Download or read book Shinto the Way of the Gods written by William George Aston and published by . This book was released on 1905 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Meanings of Antiquity written by Matthieu Felt and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-07-18 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meanings of Antiquity is the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, recorded in the eighth-century texts Kojiki and Nihon shoki, changed in meaning and significance between 800 and 1800 CE. Generations of Japanese scholars and students have turned to these two texts and their creation myths to understand what it means to be Japanese and where Japan fits into the world order. As the shape and scale of the world explained by these myths changed, these myths evolved in turn. Over the course of the millennium covered in this study, Japan transforms from the center of a proud empire to a millet seed at the edge of the Buddhist world, from the last vestige of China's glorious Zhou Dynasty to an archipelago on a spherical globe. Analyzing historical records, poetry, fiction, religious writings, military epics, political treatises, and textual commentary, Matthieu Felt identifies the geographical, cosmological, epistemological, and semiotic changes that led to new adaptations of Japanese myths. Felt demonstrates that the meanings of Japanese antiquity and of Japan's most ancient texts were--and are--a work in progress, a collective effort of writers and thinkers over the past 1,300 years.

Download or read book Man y sh and the Imperial Imagination in Early Japan written by Torquil Duthie and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-01-09 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Man’yōshū and the Imperial Imagination in Early Japan, Torquil Duthie examines the literary representation of the late seventh-century Yamato court as a realm of "all under heaven.” Through close readings of the early volumes of the poetic anthology Man’yōshū (c. eighth century) and the last volumes of the official history Nihon shoki (c. 720), Duthie shows how competing political interests and different styles of representation produced not a unified ideology, but rather a “bundle” of disparate imperial imaginaries collected around the figure of the imperial sovereign. Central to this process was the creation of a tradition of vernacular poetry in which Yamato courtiers could participate and recognize themselves as the cultured officials of the new imperial realm.