The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan
10 best books like The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan (Ono no Komachi): The Confessions of Lady Nijō, The Gossamer Years: The Diary of a Noblewoman of Heian Japan, River of Stars: Selected Poems, The Spring of My Life and Selected Haiku, One Hundred Leaves: A new annotated translation of the Hyakunin Isshu, The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan, As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams: Recollections of a Woman in Eleventh-Century Japan, Spring Essence: The Poetry of Hô Xuân Huong, 100 Poems from the Japanese, The Selected Poems of Tu Fu
| Author | Lady Nijō |
| ISBN | 0804709300 |
In about 1307 a remarkable woman in Japan sat down to complete the story of her life. The result was an autobiographical narrative, a tale of thirty-six years (1271-1306) in the life of Lady Nijo, starting when she became the concubine of a retired emperor in Kyoto at the age of fourteen and ending, several...
| Author | Michitsuna no Haha |
| ISBN | 0804811237 |
Kagero Nikki, translated here as The Gossamer Years, belongs to the same period as the celebrated Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikuibu.
This remarkably frank autobiographical diary and personal confession attempts to describe a difficult relationship as it reveals two tempestuous decades...
| Author | Akiko Yosano |
| ISBN | 1570621462 |
Yosano Akiko (1878-942) is one of the most famous Japanese writers of the twentieth century. She is the author of more than seventy-five books, including twenty volumes of original poetry and the definitive translation into modern Japanese of the Tale of the Genji. Although probably best known for...
| Author | Kobayashi Issa |
| ISBN | 1570621446 |
Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827), along with Basho and Buson, is considered one of the three greatest haiku poets of Japan, known for his attention to poignant detail and his playful sense of humor. Issa's most-loved work, The Spring of My Life, is an autobiographical sketch of linked prose and haiku in the...
The Hyakunin Isshu is a poetry anthology beloved by generations of Japanese since it was compiled in the 13th century. Many Japanese know the poems by heart as a result of playing the popular card game version of the anthology. Collecting one poem each from one hundred poets living from the 7th century...
| Author | Ivan Morris |
| ISBN | 1568360290 |
The World of the Shining Prince, Ivan Morris's widely acclaimed portrait of the ceremonious, inbred, melancholy world of ancient Japan, has been a standard in cultural studies for nearly thirty years. Using as a frame of reference The Tale of Genji and other major literary works from Japan's Heian...
| Author | Lady Sarashina |
| ISBN | 0140442820 |
In the mainstream of Japan's literary tradition, As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams not only reveals much that is most appealing in Japanese literature but also stands on its own as a remarkable and haunting portrait of a woman.
Born in A.D. 1008 at the height of the Heian period, Lady Sarashina (as she...
| Author | Hồ Xuân Hương |
| ISBN | 1556591489 |
Hồ Xuân Hương — whose name translates as "Spring Essence" — is one of the most important and popular poets in Vietnam. A concubine, she became renowned for her poetic skills, writing subtly risqué poems which used double entendre and sexual innuendo as a vehicle for social, religious, and...
| Author | Kenneth Rexroth |
| ISBN | 0811201813 |
The poems are drawn chiefly from the traditional Manyoshu, Kokinshu and Hyakunin Isshu collections, but there are also examplaes of haiku and other later forms. The sound of the Japanese texts i reproduced in Romaji script and the names of the poets in the calligraphy of Ukai Uchiyama. The translator's...
| Author | Du Fu |
| ISBN | 0811211002 |
Tu Fu radically altered poetry as he found it in the High T’ang period. In addition to making formal innovations in language and structure, he extended the range of acceptable subject matter to include all aspects of public and private experience, thus becoming in the words of translator David Hinton,...
| Author | Robert Hass |
| ISBN | 0613339983 |
American readers have been fascinated since their exposure to Japanese culture late in the nineteenth century, with the brief Japanese poem called the hokku or haiku. The seventeen-syllable form is rooted in a Japanese tradition of close observation of nature, of making poetry from subtle suggestion....
| Author | Matsuo Bashō |
| ISBN | 0140444599 |
Basho, one of the greatest of Japanese poets and the master of haiku, was also a Buddhist monk and a life-long traveller. His poems combine 'karumi', or lightness of touch, with the Zen ideal of oneness with creation. Each poem evokes the natural world - the cherry blossom, the leaping frog, the summer...
| Author | Jane Hirshfield |
| ISBN | 0060779195 |
My first sustained meeting with Jane Hirschfield, and I've a feeling we'll sit for coffee again, given her knack for subtle metaphor and fascination with, oh, dogs and mortality and personification. I felt it was stronger BEFORE than After, but maybe it was me. The beginning of the book I read at 4 a.m.,...
| Author | Sam Hamill |
| ISBN | 1570620199 |
Here are more than two hundred of the best haiku of Japanese literature translated by one of America’s premier poet-translators. The haiku is one of the most popular and widely recognized poetic forms in the world. In just three lines a great haiku presents a crystalline moment of image, emotion,...
| Author | Burton Watson |
| ISBN | 0231034504 |
This collection is one of the earliest and most important works of Chinese Buddhist poetry and is especially influential in the later literature of the Zen Sect of Buddhism, which looked back to these poems as a classic of Zen literature. The poems cover a wide range of subjects: the conventional lament...
The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse
| Author | Anthony Thwaite |
| ISBN | 0141190949 |
Poetry remains a living part of the culture of Japan today. The clichés of everyday speech are often to be traced to famous ancient poems, and the traditional forms of poetry are widely known and loved. The congenial attitude comes from a poetical history of about a millennium and a half. This classic...
| Author | Ikuko Atsumi |
| ISBN | 0811208206 |
In this collection (originally published by The Seabury Press in 1977 as The Burning Heart, Kenneth Rexroth and Ikuko Atsumi have assembled representative works of seventy-seven poets. Staring with the Classical Period (645-1604 A.D.), characterized by the wanka and tanka styles,followed by...
| Author | Yoel Hoffmann |
| ISBN | 0804831793 |
"A wonderful introduction the Japanese tradition of jisei, this volume is crammed with exquisite, spontaneous verse and pity, often hilarious, descriptions of the eccentric and committed monastics who wrote the poems." —Tricycle: The Buddhist Review
Although the consciousness of...
List of Illustrations
Foreword, by Donald Keene
Introduction & Notes
Further Reading
Note on the Translation and Text
--The Tales of Ise
A Note on the Commentary
Commentary
Appendix 1: Glossary of Literary and Social Conventions
Appendix...
Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf: Zen Poems of Ryokan
| Author | Ryōkan |
| ISBN | 1590301080 |
The Japanese poet-recluse Ryokan (1758-1831) is one of the most beloved figures of Asian literature, renowned for his beautiful verse, exquisite calligraphy, and eccentric character. Deceptively simple, Ryokan's poems transcend artifice, presenting spontaneous expressions of pure Zen spirit....
