Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons

Pub Date: March 2013

ISBN: 9780231152815

336 Pages

Format: Paperback

List Price: $30.00 £25.00

Pub Date: March 2012

ISBN: 9780231152808

336 Pages

Format: Hardcover

Listing Price: $95.00 £74.00

Pub Date: March 2012

ISBN: 9780231526524

336 Pages

Format: Due east-book

Listing Price: $29.99 £25.00

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Elegant representations of nature and the four seasons populate a wide range of Japanese genres and media—from poetry and screen painting to tea ceremonies, flower arrangements, and annual observances. In Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, Haruo Shirane shows how, when, and why this practice developed and explicates the richly encoded social, religious, and political meanings of this imagery.

Refuting the belief that this tradition reflects Nihon's agrarian origins and supposedly mild climate, Shirane traces the establishment of seasonal topics to the poetry composed by the urban dignity in the eighth century. Later becoming highly codification and influencing visual arts in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the seasonal topics and their cultural associations evolved and spread to other genres, eventually settling in the pop culture of the early on modern menstruum. Contrasted with the elegant images of nature derived from court poetry was the agrarian view of nature based on rural life. The 2 landscapes began to intersect in the medieval period, creating a circuitous, layered web of competing associations. Shirane discusses a wide array of representations of nature and the four seasons in many genres, originating in both the urban and rural perspective: textual (poetry, chronicles, tales), cultivated (gardens, flower arrangement), material (kimonos, screens), performative (noh, festivals), and gastronomic (tea ceremony, food rituals). He reveals how this kind of "secondary nature," which flourished in Japan's urban architecture and gardens, fostered and idealized a sense of harmony with the natural world just at the moment it was disappearing.

Illuminating the deeper pregnant behind Japanese aesthetics and artifacts, Shirane clarifies the use of natural images and seasonal topics and the changes in their cultural associations and function beyond history, genre, and community over more than a millennium. In this fascinating book, the iv seasons are revealed to exist as much a cultural construction as a reflection of the physical world.

Japan and the Civilization of the Four Seasons provides a compelling account of how Japan has appropriated, interpreted, and valued nature over the centuries. Haruo Shirane's wide-ranging report tracks the culture of nature in Japan and particularly the key part of waka in constructing a vision of nature that influenced all the arts. In its breadth, depth, and accessibility, his book is of cracking value not only to scholars and students of Japan but too to anyone interested in the intersections of art and nature. Andrew Thou. Watsky, Princeton University
A bout de force. Haruo Shirane synthesizes the long and complicated encoding of flora, fauna, toponyms, and almanac events of the Japanese landscape and calendar, untangling their synchronic connections and their historical development from the eighth to the nineteenth centuries, from the pocket-sized cuckoo (hototogisu) as a harbinger of summer in the Kokinshu to the lovemaking of cats as a topic for comic haikai verse in the Edo period. Shirane's book is essential for anyone interested in virtually any genre of the traditional Japanese arts: verse, costume, painting, noh theater, architecture, tea ceremony, bloom arranging—or fifty-fifty Japanese sweets (wagashi)! Joshua Mostow, University of British Columbia
'Sensitivity to nature' is one of those commonplaces near Japanese tradition that, considering of its all-also-easy association with cultural nationalism, tends to fix many people'due south teeth on border. This engaging and impressive study provides a welcome antidote. Drawing from literary, visual, historical, and religious sources, Haruo Shirane cuts through the clichés to uncover multiple, evolving, and sometimes surprising dimensions of the Japanese relationship with nature from early on times to the present. Kate Wildman Nakai, professor emerita, Sophia University
A comprehensive view of the subject, replete with fascinating detail, and total scholarly apparatus. David Burleigh, Japan Times
As attainable as it is erudite, this volume will appeal to those with interest in whatsoever attribute of the arts...Highly recommended. Selection
A vital contribution to our understanding of the literature, art, and daily practices of Japan over the centuries. Elizabeth Oyler, Monumenta Nipponica
Japan and the Civilization of the Four Seasons… enables us, for the first fourth dimension in English, to gain a comprehensive, systematic, and authoritatively scholarly view on how very pervasive this seasons culture is and has been since the Nara and Heian periods. Nihon Review
Shirane is a reliable guide and reading this book will enrich one's agreement of almost whatever Japanese artifact. Journal of Japanese Studies

Listing of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Historical Periods, Romanization, Names, Titles, and Illustrations
Introduction: Secondary Nature, Climate, and Landscape
1. Poetic Topics and the Making of the Iv Seasons
two. Visual Culture, Classical Verse, and Linked Poetry
3. Interiorization, Flowers, and Social Ritual
4. Rural Landscape, Social Difference, and Conflict
5. Trans-Seasonality, Talismans, and Landscape
half dozen. Annual Observances, Famous Places, and Entertainment
7. Seasonal Pyramid, Parody, and Botany
Conclusion: History, Genre, and Social Community
Appendix: Seasonal Topics in Key Texts
Notes
Bibliography of Recommended Readings in English
Selected Bibliography of Secondary and Primary Sources in Japanese
Alphabetize of Seasonal and Trans-Seasonal Words and Topics
Index of Authors, Titles, and Key Terms

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Winner, 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Championship

Winner, 2019 Yamagata Banto Prize

Nearly the Writer

Haruo Shirane is Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture at Columbia University. He is the writer and editor of numerous books on Japanese literature, including, about recently, The Demon at Agi Bridge and Other Japanese Tales; Envisioning The Tale of Genji: Media, Gender, and Cultural Production; Traditional Japanese Literature: An Anthology, Beginnings to 1600; Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900; Classical Japanese: A Grammar; and Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Retention, and the Poetry of Basho.