Product Description: This book offers an in-depth investigation into the writings of one of modern Japan's most gifted poet-scholars, Nishiwaki Junzaburo (1894-1982), who has been compared to T. S. Eliot, R. M. Rilke, and Paul Valéry. Exploring both his poetry and theoretical writings, Hosea Hirata describes how Nishiwaki, who wrote his first poems in English and French, shaped a highly influential poetic modernism in Japan while elevating the artistic status of translation...read more

Professor Levy explores the ritual origins of Japanese verse, the impact of Chinese and Korean literary influence on the seventh-century Court, and the rhetorical deification of the imperial family as the condition under which Hitomaro would begin his career as a Court poet.Originally published in 1984.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Description: In Reading Japanese Haikai Poetry Herbert Jonsson makes an inquiry into the multitude ways in which Japanese linked haikai poetry has been read and understood. A number of poems composed by the eighteenth-century master Yosa Buson are analyzed in great detail...read more

Book by Mostow, Joshua S.

Product Description: Winner of the 2013 FIELD Poetry Prize, Bern Mulvey’s Deep Snow Country is centered in the subject of Japan and the earthquake, tsunami, and reactor meltdown of 2011, but its voice is never that of the tourist or the travel guide. As an American poet who lives and works in Japan, Mulvey is positioned to respond not only to current events, but to all the rich history of interactions and meanings involving two very different cultures and languages...read more

In the past hundred years, haiku has gone far beyond its Japanese origins to become a worldwide phenomenon—with the classic poetic form growing and evolving as it has adapted to the needs of the whole range of languages and cultures that have embraced it. This proliferation of the joy of haiku is cause for celebration—but it can also compel us to go back to the beginning: to look at haiku’s development during the centuries before it was known outside Japan. This in-depth study of haiku history begins with the great early masters of the form—like Basho, Buson, and Issa—and goes all the way to twentieth-century greats, like Santoka. It also focuses on an important aspect of traditional haiku that is less known in the West: haiku art. All the great haiku masters created paintings (called haiga) or calligraphy in connection with their poems, and the words and images were intended to be enjoyed together, enhancing each other, and each adding its own dimension to the reader’s and viewer’s understanding. Here one of the leading haiku scholars of the West takes us on a tour of haiku poetry’s evolution, providing along the way a wealth of examples of the poetry and the art inspired by it.

Product Description: Yoshinori Henguchi's explosive poetry and gritty photography build on the surrealism of Haruki Murakami and his contemporaries to create a new aesthetic for a young generation of Japanese artists. Henguchi explores what he calls man's "foolish will" to define himself on a canvas of "infinities and nothingness...read more

Brimming with insights, and featuring sparkling new translations of 50 of the most superb haikus ever written, this opulent collection captures the spirit of the form and opens up its beauty to a whole new audience. Haiku emerged within a great flowering of Japanese arts a thousand years ago, including calligraphy and ink painting, and haiku blended with them to create poetry that is as close to the visual image as language can come. These gloriously illustrated pages trace haiku’s most profound, thought-provoking, and imaginative themes, including: Zen Buddhism; the life of the poet; the Japanese court; the cities of Kyoto, Osaka and Tokyo, where the style flourished; the beauty of the landscape; the status of women; and the ever-fascinating samurai.

Poems by the fourteenth century Zen Master deal with nature, wandering, wealth and poverty, solitude, friendship, and mortality

A prefatory section on Japanese prosody provides an illustrative background for this poetic collection