japanese literature

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Book Subject Tag: Edo period

  • The budding tree : six stories of love in Edo

    In the latter half of the Edo period, the warrior caste was finding itself pushed out of the top echelons of Japanese society & repeated famines swept the countryside. Against this backdrop, a small number of women built themselves independent lives. The stories in this book recount the conditions in which these women lived.

  • Narrow road to the interior

  • Narrow road to the interior and other writings

    The most complete single-volume collection of the writings of one of the great luminaries of Asian literature. Basho (1644-1694) – who elevated the haiku to an art form of utter simplicity and intense spiritual beauty – is best known in the West as the author of Narrow Road to the Interior, a travel diary of…

  • Basho’s Narrow road : spring & autumn passages : two works

    Matsuo Basho (1644-94) is considered Japan’s greatest haiku poet. Narrow Road to the Interior (Oku no Hosomichi) is his masterpiece. Ostensibly a chronological account of the poet’s five-month journey in 1689 into the deep country north and west of the old capital, Edo, the work is in fact artful and carefully sculpted, rich in literary…