Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600-1900 (Translations from the Asian Classics) Paperback – September 1, 2004

Excellent book, very informative. The content is very versatile, easy to use and to cite. The translated passages make the abundand lexical information feel less dry. It was a pleasure to read.

Thanks, it was the correct one for my class, although some pages are taped and broken, it works fine for me.

Book was in great condition when I got it

this book took you into the culture of Japanese culture and made you feel like you were there.

Got this book for a class, but I ended up reading it in my free time as well. Very interesting read.

One wonderful anthology!

I purchased this book for one particular story, hohiron, treatises on farting. It was possibly the dryest translation of the at story I have ever read. Some of the other stories are a little better done, but only "OK" translation. This is however a good source for early modern Japanese literature and a great introduction to it.

Haruo Shirane has given us a new and at once deeper and broader look at "early modern" Japanese literature than was previously possible. This is the first attempt at a gathering of the riches available in English translation--with many new translations made for this volume--since Donald Keene's landmark *Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century* published half a century ago (1955, to be precise). Whereas Keene's volume attempted to sketch well over a millennium in less than 450 pages, Shirane's spends more than 1000 larger pages on just three centuries: about a quarter of the time period represented in Keene's work covered in about three times the space.The core and plan of Shirane's anthology revolves around the speedy and often jumpy evolution of literally dozens of genres of popular literature amidst a continuing reverence for and attempts to adapt the fundamentals of classical Heian, medieval Japanese, and Chinese culture to the new plebeian situation of Tokugawa Japan. The scores of complex and detailed introductions and sometimes minute examples (often two or three of one-page or less) initially seem like the work of too many designers and far more colors than a single tapestry could support. (At 108 rather smaller pages devoted to the same period, and containing reference to only a handful of genres, Keene's earlier anthology barely scratches the Tokugawa surface.)Understandably, Keene's treatment of Tokugawa literature was brief, and concentrated on more accessible genres that needed less background information for at least a beginning appreciation. Shirane's work, of necessity, gives almost equal weight to background and translations. Without the background so supplied, how could the student with a limited knowledge of world literatures begin to approach a range that includes such genres as: stories from the pleasure quarters of Edo, the poetics of Japan's unique linked poetry, a puppet theater that rivals Shakespeare for depth but is steeped in Japanese and Chinese folklore and thinly veiled contemporary events rather than great moments of history, Japan's own versions of Confucian wisdom, competing poetries of leisured literati and barely literate carters and shop clerks, the beginnings of several types of genre fiction, a resurgence of poetry in older Japanese and Sino-Japanese genres, and a new modern type of oral literature for the masses, not to mention the still only somewhat familiar haiku and less familiar haikai prose with their own radical shifts in content and style from one generation to the next?Make no mistake: Shirane's *Early Modern Japanese Literature* has pages and pages that offer enjoyable reading, but it is still a textbook, designed for those who wish to appreciate and learn something about not only specific works and their authors, but where each fits in the overall tapestry of Japanese and world literature. The book's extraordinary range and depth give the astute reader a better opportunity for that than any group of a half-dozen or more books I can think of. Taking advantage of the next two generations of scholars building on Keene's first attempts at a path through unexplored territory, Shirane has built a network of highways and byways that will take the reader into unsuspected corners of a new and burgeoning country.