Product Description: A court lady of the Heian era, an early modern philologist, a novelist of the Meiji period, and a physicist at Tokyo University. What do they have in common, besides being Japanese? They all wrote zuihitsu―a uniquely Japanese literary genre encompassing features of the nonfiction or personal essay and miscellaneous musings...read more

Product Description: While the rise of the charmingly simple, brilliantly evocative haiku is often associated with the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho, the form had already flourished for more than four hundred years before Basho even began to write...read more

Product Description: As direct descendants of the great courtier-poets Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114-1204) and his son Teika (1162-1244), the heirs of the noble Reizei house can claim an unbroken literary lineage that spans over eight hundred years. During all that time, their primary goal has been to sustain the poetic enterprise, or michi (way), of the house and to safeguard its literary assets...read more

Product Description: The medieval Buddhist poet-monk Tonna (1289–1372) was regarded as the leading poet of his day and a prominent scholar and critic. Despite his commoner status, he was assigned the task of acting as compiler for an imperial anthology of poetry and counted a number of prominent courtiers among his students and patrons...read more

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Product Description: This volume presents translations of over 200 poems by Shotetsu, who is generally considered to be the last great poet of the "uta" form. Includes an introduction, a glossary of important names and places and a list of sources of the poems.

The only collection in English of these works, Waiting for the Wind presents over four hundred poems by thirty-six poets of Japan's late medieval age (1250 --- 1500). The poems are all in the uta form (the thirty-one syllable lyric) that was the major genre of court poetry throughout the classical period in Japan. Waiting for the Wind introduces this much neglected, yet very significant period through works of poets beginning with the courtier Fujiwara No Teika, continuing through the Monk Tonna, and ending with Shotetsu. Most of the works are presented in English for the first time. In his historical introduction Steven Carter describes the period, especially the celebrated literary dispute lasting 250 years between the families of two sons of a court poet, which began over an inheritance and had a lasting impact upon the poetry of the period. Each poet in the collection is introduced by a short biographical sketch that places him or her in historical context and offers a short critical evaluation.

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