Haruo Shirane - Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons. Nature, Literature, and the Arts [2012][A]

Book Description
Publication Date: March 20, 2012
Elegant representations of nature, explicitly the four seasons, fill a wide range of Japanese genres and media—from poetry and screen painting to tea ceremony, flower arrangement, and annual observances. Haruo Shirane shows, for the first time, how, when, and why this occurred and explicates the richly encoded social, religious, and political meanings these representations embodied.
Refuting the long held belief that this phenomenon reflects agrarian origins, this book demonstrates how elegant representations of the four seasons first emerged in an urban environment among nobility in the eight century. They became highly codified and then spread to different social classes, eventually settling in popular culture and the pleasure quarters. Shirane accounts for all types of manifestations: textual (poetry, chronicles, tales), cultivated (gardens, flower arrangement), material (kimonos, screens), performative (noh drama, festivals), and gastronomic (tea ceremony, food rituals). He reveals how this kind of "secondary nature," which flourished in Japan's urban architecture and gardens, frequently fostered a sense of harmony with the natural world—just at the point at which it was receding. Eventually, alternative representations of nature derived from farm villages and elsewhere began to intersect with these elegant representations in the capital, creating a complex web of competing associations.
Anyone with an interest in Japanese visual arts, literature, cultural history, and social customs will relish this book, which illuminates the deeper meaning behind Japanese aesthetics and artifacts. Shirane explicates nature's complex codification, especially the use of images, the seasons to which they were attached, and the changes in cultural associations across history, genre, and community. His fascinating research shows these seasons to be as much a cultural construction as a reflection of the physical world.

Reviews
Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons provides a compelling account of how Japan has appropriated, interpreted, and valued nature over the centuries. Haruo Shirane's wide-ranging study tracks the culture of nature in Japan and especially the central role of waka in constructing a vision of nature that influenced all the arts. In its breadth, depth, and accessibility, his book is of great value not only to scholars and students of Japan but also to anyone interested in the intersections of art and nature.(Andrew M. Watsky, Princeton University)

A tour de force. Haruo Shirane synthesizes the long and complicated encoding of flora, fauna, toponyms, and annual events of the Japanese landscape and calendar, untangling their synchronic connections and their historical development from the eighth to the nineteenth centuries, from the small cuckoo ( hototogisu) as a harbinger of summer in the Kokinshu to the lovemaking of cats as a topic for comic haikai verse in the Edo period. Shirane's book is essential for anyone interested in virtually any genre of the traditional Japanese arts: poetry, costume, painting, noh theater, architecture, tea ceremony, flower arranging -- or even Japanese sweets ( wagashi)!(Joshua Mostow, University of British Columbia)

'Sensitivity to nature' is one of those commonplaces about Japanese tradition that, because of its all-too-easy association with cultural nationalism, tends to set many people's teeth on edge. This engaging and impressive study provides a welcome antidote. Drawing from literary, visual, historical, and religious sources, Haruo Shirane cuts through the clichés to uncover multiple, evolving, and sometimes surprising dimensions of the Japanese relationship with nature from early times to the present.(Kate Wildman Nakai, professor emerita, Sophia University)

A comprehensive view of the subject, replete with fascinating detail, and full scholarly apparatus.(David Burleigh, Japan Times)

As accessible as it is erudite, this volume will appeal to those with interest in any aspect of the arts...Highly recommended. (Choice 1900-01-00)

A vital contribution to our understanding of the literature, art, and daily practices of Japan over the centuries.(Elizabeth Oyler, Monumenta Nipponica 1900-01-00)

The heart of the book is in its descriptions--grounded in careful exegesis according to what we know from historical sources--of prominent seasonal images associated with Japanese poetry and culture. It should be a valuable tool for anyone interested in Japanese poetry and literature and for those interested in art and art history, the tea ceremony, flower-arranging, clothing, cuisine, and a variety of other Japanese customs. Haruo Shirane's work offers a wealth of valuable information and many interesting and original insights.
(Steven Carter, Stanford University)

About the Author
Haruo Shirane is Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture at Columbia University. He is the author and editor of numerous books on Japanese literature, including, most recently, The Demon at Agi Bridge and Other Japanese Tales, Envisioning The Tale of Genji: Media, Gender, and Cultural Production; Traditional Japanese Literature: An Anthology, Beginnings to 1600; Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600-1900; Classical Japanese: A Grammar; and Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho, and The Bridge of Dreams: A Poetics of the Tale of Genji