A court lady of the Heian era, an early modern philologist, a
Meiji-period novelist, and a physicist at Tokyo University. What do
they have in common, besides being Japanese? They all wrote
zuihitsu -- a uniquely Japanese literary genre encompassing
features of the nonfiction or personal essay and miscellaneous
musings. For sheer range of subject matter and breadth of
perspective, the zuihitsu is unrivaled in the Japanese literary
tradition, which may explain why few examples have been translated
into English. Springing from a variety of social, artistic,
political, and professional discourses, zuihitsu is an undeniably
important literary form practiced by all types of people who reveal
much about themselves, their identities, and the times in which
they lived. Zuihitsu also contain a good deal of humor, which is
often underrepresented in translations of serious Japanese
writing.This anthology presents a representative selection of more
than one hundred zuihitsu from a range of historical periods
written by close to fifty authors -- from well-known figures, such
as Matsuo Basho, Natsume Soseki, and Koda Aya, to such writers as
Tachibana Nankei and Dekune Tatsuro, whose names appear here for
the first time in English.Writers speak on the experience of coming
down with a cold, the aesthetics of tea, the physiology and
psychology of laughter, the demands of old age, standards of
morality, childrearing, the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923,
sleeplessness, undergoing surgery, and training a parrot to say
thank you. Varying in length from paragraphs to pages, these works
also provide moving descriptions of snowy landscapes, foggy London,
Ueno Park's famous cherry blossoms, and the appeal of rainy vistas,
and relate the joys and troubles of everyone from desperate samurai
to filial children and ailing cats.
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