David Lurie

The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature

Part I. The Ancient Period (Beginnings to 794) Part II. The Heian Period (794-1185) Part III. The Medieval Period (1185-1600) Part IV. The Edo Period (1600-1867) Part V. The Modern Period (1868 to Present).

Kyōgen: comic plays that turn medieval society upside down

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. Teikas 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.

Medieval recluse literature: Saigyō, Chōmei, and Kenkō

Sei Shonagons 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 authors 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.

Of Allochthons and Alibis: Otherworldly Ideologies in Seventh- and Eighth-Century Japan

The seventh and eighth centuries—roughly, the Asuka and Nara periods—were a particularly fertile and dynamic moment in the history of Japan, with concepts and organizational frameworks created during these centuries shaping later political and institutional developments. Foremost among these new inventions are the name Nihon (Nippon) itself and the title tennō, both of which were created in the late seventh century as part of a complex ideological project set in motion by Emperor Tenmu 天武 (r. 672–686) and his consort and successor Jitō 持統 (r. 686–697).1 With a strong but nonexclusive focus on Tenmu, Herman Ooms has written a book about the transformation of Japanese rulership in this period, emphasizing religious and ideological components of power that do not fit easily into the traditional tripartite framework of “Shinto,” “Buddhism,” and “Confucianism.” Imperial Politics and Symbolics examines territory surveyed in earlier Anglophone studies by Gary Ebersole and Joan Piggott. It also joins a number of other recent monographs that consider the nexus of religion and temporal power in early Japan, including studies by John Bentley, David Bialock, Michael Como, and Donald McCallum—a cluster of works that suggests a renewed sense of the importance of this period for our general understanding of the political, institutional, intellectual, and cultural history of premodern Japan.2 Put simply, Ooms’s concern in this book is the role played in early Japanese political ideology by “manipulators of supernatural symbolics” (p. 209), most prominently