The Tokagowa family ruled Japan in public peace and worldly
isolation for over 250 years, from 1600 to 1867. During this whole
time, Japanese writers inhabited a "world within walls," and Donald
Keene, Professor of Japanese at Columbia, has written an
encyclopedic history of their achievements - the first of three
volumes on Japanese literature. With a sharp eye on the fate of
literary forms and with abundant examples, Keene shows that,
although isolated, Japanese writers were not timid and succeeded in
shaking or exhausting most of their artistic traditions well before
the cultural revolution that began in 1867. He traces Haikai poetry
from its origins in humorous plebian verse to its classic but inert
perfection, and waku poetry from a graceful, naturalistic form to a
mode of private self-expression. He follows fiction from the witty
proto-realism of the great novelist Saikaku to the whimsical,
popular tales composed by almost every writer by 1850. And he
describes the popular drama, which supplanted the aristocratic No
theatre, as it develops into a vivid and affecting portrayal of
social life which provoked government suppression in 1866. Readers
unfamiliar with Japanese literature may find their comprehension
taxed by the mountainous detail, but the handy glossary can help
them arrive at the threshold of modern Japan prepared to enter its
very different, unwalled world, which Keene will open in volume II.
With masterly erudition and discernment, he has written here what
is certain to be the standard guide to the literature of Tokagowa
Japan. (Kirkus Reviews)
The Tokugawa family held the shogunate from 1603 to 1867, ruling
Japan and keeping the island nation isolated from the rest of the
world for more than 250 years. Donald Keene looks within the
"walls" of isolation and meticulously chronicles the period's vast
literary output, providing both lay readers and scholars with the
definitive history of premodern Japanese literature.
"World Within Walls" spans the age in which Japanese literature
began to reach a popular audience -- as opposed to the elite
aristocratic readers to whom it had previously been confined. Keene
comprehensively treats each of the new, popular genres that arose,
including haiku, Kabuki, and the witty, urbane prose of the newly
ascendant merchant class.
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