Read more
Rather than resist the vast social and cultural changes sweeping Japan in the nineteenth century, the poet Masaoka Shiki (1867--1902) incorporated new Western influences into his country's native haiku and tanka verse. By reinvigorating these traditional forms, Shiki freed them from outdated conventions and made them more responsive to newer trends in artistic expression. Altogether, his reforms made the haiku Japan's most influential modern cultural export. Based on extensive readings of Shiki's own writings and accounts of the poet by his contemporaries and family, Donald Keene charts Shiki's distinctive (and often contradictory) experiments with haiku and tanka, a dynamic process that made the survival of these traditional genres possible in a globalizing world. Keene privileges random incidents and encounters in his impressionistic portrait of this tragically young life, moments that elicited significant shifts and discoveries in Shiki's work. The push and pull of a profoundly changing society is vividly felt in Keene's narrative, which also includes sharp observations of other recognizable characters, such as the famous novelist and critic Natsume Soseki.
As he often does in his celebrated work, Keene reflects on his own personal relationship with Shiki's work as well, sharing nuanced, deeply felt observations of its power.
List of contents
Introduction1. The Early Years2. Student Days3. The Song of the Hototogisu4. Shiki the Novelist5. Cathay and the Way Thither6. Sketches from Life7. Hototogisu8. Shiki and the Tanka9. Shintaishi and Kanshi10. Random Essays (Zuihitsu), 111. Random Essays, 212. The Last DaysNotesBibliographyIndex
About the author
Donald Keene is Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University. He is the author of more than thirty books, including So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers; Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan; Frog in the Well: Portraits of Japan by Watanabe Kazan, 1793-1841; and Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, as well as a definitive multivolume history of Japanese literature.
