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 Japan's
agrarian origins and supposedly mild climate, Shirane traces the
establishment of seasonal topics to the poetry composed by the
urban nobility in the eighth century. After becoming highly
codified 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
popular culture of the early modern period. Contrasted with the
elegant images of nature derived from court poetry was the agrarian
view of nature based on rural life. The two landscapes began to
intersect in the medieval period, creating a complex, 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 meaning behind Japanese aesthetics and
artifacts, Shirane clarifies the use of natural images and seasonal
topics and the changes in their cultural associations and function
across history, genre, and community over more than a millennium.
In this fascinating book, the four seasons are revealed to be as
much a cultural construction as a reflection of the physical
world.
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