Author: Hosai Ozaki
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press, Inc.
ISBN: 1880656051
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
Haiku and occasional essays from an eccentric personality.

Author: Matsuo Basho
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press, Inc.
ISBN: 1611725275
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
A stimulating exploration of the haiku masterpiece. 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 and Zen allusion and filled with great insights and vital rhythms. In Basho's Narrow Road: Spring and Autumn Passages, poet and translator Hiroaki Sato presents the complete work in English and examines the threads of history, geography, philosophy, and literature that are woven into Basho's exposition. He details in particular the extent to which Basho relied on the community of writers with whom he traveled and joined in linked verse (renga) poetry sessions, an example of which, A Farewell Gift to Sora, is included in this volume. In explaining how and why Basho made the literary choices he did, Sato shows how the poet was able to transform his passing observations into words that resonate across time and culture.

Author: Santoka Taneda
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231500637
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 121

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Book Description
In April 1926, the Japanese poet Taneda Santoka (1882–1940) set off on the first of many walking trips, journeys in which he tramped thousands of miles through the Japanese countryside. These journeys were part of his religious training as a Buddhist monk as well as literary inspiration for his memorable and often painfully moving poems. The works he wrote during this time comprise a record of his quest for spiritual enlightenment. Although Santoka was master of conventional-style haiku, which he wrote in his youth, the vast majority of his works, and those for which he is most admired, are in free-verse form. He also left a number of diaries in which he frequently recorded the circumstances that had led to the composition of a particular poem or group of poems. In For All My Walking, master translator Burton Watson makes Santoka's life story and literary journeys available to English-speaking readers and students of haiku and Zen Buddhism. He allows us to meet Santoka directly, not by withholding his own opinions but by leaving room for us to form our own. Watson's translations bring across not only the poetry but also the emotional force at the core of the poems. This volume includes 245 of Santoka's poems and of excerpts from his prose diary, along with a chronology of his life and a compelling introduction that provides historical and biographical context to Taneda Santoka's work.

Author: Holly Thompson
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
ISBN: 1880656655
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Caitlin Ober, an American English instructor in Japan, tries to deal with the loss of her childhood best friend, Mei, fifteen years earlier, while developing a friendship with fourteen-year-old Naomi.

Author: Kuniko Mukoda
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press, Inc.
ISBN: 9781880656099
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
Mukoda's wonderful stories vividly present the strengths and sorrows of modern Japanese women.--Gail Tsukiyama "Superbly rendered into English."--Publishers Weekly

Author: Junzo Shono
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
ISBN: 0893469718
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
A masterpiece of quiet lyricism set against a backdrop of change and renewal in suburban Tokyo. The most celebrated work by one of Japan's master literary stylists, Evening Clouds is a book filled with delicate images of ordinary life, richly and precisely observed. A family moves into a new home on a windswept hilltop in western Tokyo. Around them are forests and farms. But the developers are coming, and the children are growing up. There are meals, quandaries, conversations...Life appears comfortable and serene, yet Shōno's portrayal has a strange and evocative undercurrent, as the most minute details slowly resonate out through a universe that is changing and unforgiving. Evening Clouds combines the crafted naturalism of haiku with the Ozu-like clarity of film to produce a story that is wistful and real. Read Shōno slowly, a luxuriate in his vision.

Author: Leza Lowitz
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press, Inc.
ISBN: 1880656159
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Winner of the 1995 Benjamin Franklin Award, this is a landmark anthology of traditional short verse. In haiku and tanka fifteen Japanese women poets reveal universal female themes through the lens of a challenging spiritual and physical Japanese environment.

Author: Hiroaki Sato
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811227421
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
Everything you want to know about haiku written by one of the foremost experts in the field and the “finest translator of contemporary Japanese poetry into American English” (Gary Snyder) Who doesn’t love haiku? It is not only America’s most popular cultural import from Japan but also our most popular poetic form: instantly recognizable, more mobile than a sonnet, loved for its simplicity and compression, as well as its ease of composition. Haiku is an ancient literary form seemingly made for the Twittersphere—Jack Kerouac and Langston Hughes wrote them, Ezra Pound and the Imagists were inspired by them, Hallmark’s made millions off them, first-grade students across the country still learn to write them. But what really is a haiku? Where does the form originate? Who were the original Japanese poets who wrote them? And how has their work been translated into English over the years? The haiku form comes down to us today as a cliché: a three-line poem of 5-7-5 syllables. And yet its story is actually much more colorful and multifaceted. And of course to write a good one can be as difficult as writing a Homeric epic—or it can materialize in an instant of epic inspiration. In On Haiku, Hiroaki Sato explores the many styles and genres of haiku on both sides of the Pacific, from the classical haiku of Basho, Issa, and Zen monks, to modern haiku about swimsuits and atomic bombs, to the haiku of famous American writers such as J. D. Salinger and Allen Ginsburg. As if conversing over beers in your favorite pub, Sato explains everything you wanted to know about the haiku in this endearing and pleasurable book, destined to be a classic in the field.

Author: Sumita Oyama
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
ISBN: 1462922325
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
The fascinating and quirky biography of a disheveled poet, skillfully interwoven with his original works. Zen monk Santoka Taneda (1882-1940) is one of Japan's most beloved modern poets, famous for his "free-verse" haiku, the dominant style today. This book tells the fascinating story of his life, liberally sprinkled with more than 300 of his poems and extracts from his essays and journals--compiled by his best friend and biographer Sumita Oyama and elegantly translated by William Scott Wilson. Santoka was a literary prodigy, but a notoriously disorganized human being. By his own admission, he was incapable of doing anything other than wandering the countryside and writing verses. Although Santoka married and had a son, he devoted his life to poetry, studying Zen, drinking sake and wandering the length and breadth of the Japanese islands on foot, as a mendicant monk. The poet's life alternated between long periods of solitary retreat and restless travel, influenced by his tragic childhood. When not on the road, he lived in simple grass huts supported by friends and family. Santoka was a lively conversationalist who was often found so drunk he could only make it home with the help of a friendly neighbor or passerby. But above all, throughout his life, he wrote constantly; poetry and essays flowed from him effortlessly. Santoka's eccentric style of haiku is highly regarded in Japan today for being truly modern and free from formal constraints. His journals and essays are equally thought-provoking--the musings of an unkempt but supremely self-conscious mind on everything from writing to cooking rice and his failure to live a more orderly life. This translation and its introduction are by best-selling author William Scott Wilson, whose other works include The Book of Five Rings and The Lone Samurai. Wilson provides sensitive renditions of the haiku illustrating Santoka's life as well as an extensive introduction to the influences on Santoka's work, from contemporary haiku poets and his Buddhist teachers. Alongside the book, readers have access to a two-hour online audio recording of 331 of Santoka Taneda's haiku, read in Japanese by a native speaker, and in English.

Author: Princess Shikishi (daughter of Goshirakawa, Emperor of Japan)
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824814830
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Princess Shikishi, Emperor Goshirakawa's third daughter, who served as saiin, or shrine vestal, in her teens, left a body of poems luminous with tranquil beauty and sadness. In her own lifetime she was counted among the outstanding poets of the age. In this volume, noted translator Hiroaki Sato makes available in one-line form all of the tanka - 400 poems - attributed to Princess Shikishi. Following an introduction that details Shikishi's era and the prosodic techniques of her time, Sato presents a group of poems gleaned from anthologies - among them a sequence of eleven which Shikishi wrote in condolence for the death of the wife of Fujiwara no Shunzei, her mentor - and three important 100-poem sequences. To provide allusive contexts, many of the poems are accompanied by extensive footnotes and endnotes, often with complete episodes from Tale of Ise and other classical texts.