With irrepressible humor and play, these anarchic poems celebrate life, despite all that would crush aliveness. Hybrid in form and set in New England, West Texas, and a landlocked province of China, among other places, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency refuses neat ...
In contrast, the Buddhist monk-painters of the late Goryeo and early Joseon depicted natural features in their landscape paintings, accompanied by poems, as encrypted codes precisely corresponding to the characters of their studio names, or ho 號 (Ch. hao). Yuan’s Shiwu Qinggong 石屋淸珙 (...
A poem by the celebrated poet Sutoku-in from the series Hyakunin isshu no uchi, “One Hundred Poems for One Hundred Poets” which was compiled in 1235 by Fujiwara Teiki (1162-1241). Shows the exiled Emperor Sutoku (1119-64) standing on a rocky outcrop above turbulent rapids. His wrath...
Japanese Ghosts & Demons New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1985 [Note: The first error in The Anime Companion [vol.1] is that I forgot to include this title in the list of sources. Gomen]Adelstein, Jake Last Yakuza: Life and Death in the Japanese Underworld Melbourne: Scribe, 2023Adels...
All Japanese schoolchildren study the deeply empathetic nature poems of Misuzu Kaneko; her poetry was nearly lost due to her short, tragic life. Think of her as the Japanese Pablo Neruda and/or Emily Dickinson. This beautiful picture book chronicles her life and showcases her poetry. It’s ...
The exchange of poems between onshin and danka reaffirmed their contract, as well as the exchange of saké cups. In one village, he noted, "This village is particularly pious, and even the women attended the...
— evidence of this is found in the Manyoshu anthology which carries about 130 Tanabata poems. The Manyoshu or “Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves” was compiled sometime after 759 AD during the Nara period 710-794 AD (but the bulk of the collection represents the period between AD 600 ...
In the year 905 CE, we get one of the oldest known written mentions of the Hashihime, in a poem from the 14th scroll of the Kokin Wakashū (古今和歌集; Collection of Poems of Ancient and Modern Times). This is especially notable because it mentions not just any Hashihime, but the Has...
The first major anthology was the Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves (Man'yo¯ shu¯ ), compiled in about 760. It contains 4,516 poems. The poems are fresh, sometimes simple and straightforward, but often sophisticated. They reveal a deep sensitivity to nature and strong human relationships...