Sino-Japanese Reflections offers ten richly detailed case studies that examine various forms of cultural and literary interaction between Japanese and Chinese intellectuals from the late Ming to the early twentieth century. The authors consider efforts by early modern scholars on each side of the Yellow Sea to understand the language and culture of the other, to draw upon received texts and forms, and to contribute to shared literary practices. Whereas literary and cultural flow within the Sinosphere is sometimes imagined to be an entirely unidirectional process of textual dissemination from China to the periphery, the contributions to this volume reveal a more complex picture: highlighting how literary and cultural engagement was always an opportunity for creative adaptation and negotiation. Examining materials such as Chinese translations of Japanese vernacular poetry, Japanese engagements with Chinese supernatural stories, adaptations of Japanese historical tales into vernacular Chinese, Sinitic poetry composed in Japan, and Japanese Sinology, the volume brings together recent work by literary scholars and intellectual historians of multiple generations, all of whom have a strong comparative interest in Sino-Japanese studies.

Plucking Chrysanthemums is a critical study of the life and works of Narushima Ryuhoku (1837-1884): Confucian scholar, world traveler, pioneering journalist, and irrepressible satirist. A major figure on the nineteenth-century Japanese cultural scene, Ryuhoku wrote works that were deeply rooted in classical Sinitic literary traditions. Sinitic poetry and prose enjoyed a central and prestigious place in Japan for nearly all of its history, and the act of composing it continued to offer modern Japanese literary figures the chance to incorporate themselves into a written tradition that transcended national borders. Adopting Ryuhoku's multifarious invocations of Six Dynasties poet Tao Yuanming as an organizing motif, Matthew Fraleigh traces the disparate ways in which Ryuhoku drew upon the Sinitic textual heritage over the course of his career. The classical figure of this famed Chinese poet and the Sinitic tradition as a whole constituted a referential repository to be shaped, shifted, and variously spun to meet the emerging circumstances of the writer as well as his expressive aims. Plucking Chrysanthemums is the first book-length study of Ryuhoku in a Western language and also one of the first Western-language monographs to examine Sinitic poetry and prose (kanshibun) composition in modern Japan.

This book features complete annotated translations of Narushima Ryuhoku's two most widely read and influential texts, both of which showcase the innovative and experimental use of Chinese-language discourse taking place in Japan during the nineteenth century. Focused on one of the capital city's celebrated geisha districts, the satirical New Chronicles of Yanagibashi serves as both a documentary record of changing customs during the tumultuous 1850s-70s and an amusingly nuanced social critique. Banned multiple times, the work nevertheless became a favorite of the Meiji reading public. This text is paired with Diary of a Journey to the West, Ryuhoku's travelogue from his world tour of 1872-1873.