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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