Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts

by Haruo Shirane

Elegant representations of nature and the four seasons populate a wide range of Japanese genres and media―from poetry and screen painting to tea ceremonies, flower arrangements, and annual observances. In Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons , Haruo Shirane shows how, when, and why this practice developed and explicates the richly encoded social, religious, and political meanings of this imagery.

Refuting the belief that this tradition reflects Japan's agrarian origins and supposedly mild climate, Shirane traces the establishment of seasonal topics to the poetry composed by the urban nobility in the eighth century. After becoming highly codified and influencing visual arts in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the seasonal topics and their cultural associations evolved and spread to other genres, eventually settling in the popular culture of the early modern period. Contrasted with the elegant images of nature derived from court poetry was the agrarian view of nature based on rural life. The two landscapes began to intersect in the medieval period, creating a complex, layered web of competing associations. Shirane discusses a wide array of representations of nature and the four seasons in many genres, originating in both the urban and rural textual (poetry, chronicles, tales), cultivated (gardens, flower arrangement), material (kimonos, screens), performative (noh, festivals), and gastronomic (tea ceremony, food rituals). He reveals how this kind of "secondary nature," which flourished in Japan's urban architecture and gardens, fostered and idealized a sense of harmony with the natural world just at the moment it was disappearing.

Illuminating the deeper meaning behind Japanese aesthetics and artifacts, Shirane clarifies the use of natural images and seasonal topics and the changes in their cultural associations and function across history, genre, and community over more than a millennium. In this fascinating book, the four seasons are revealed to be as much a cultural construction as a reflection of the physical world.

Genres: Japan, History, Nonfiction, Art, Cultural, Japanese Literature, Asia

336 pages, Paperback

First published March 13, 2012

Reviews

[Harajyuku · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good read. Knowing little about waka beforehand, I found this book most accessible and an excellent introduction to both the themes of waka and the historical progression and place of waka in Japanese cultural consciousness. Exhaustive research and examples support the handful of conclusions he espouses in the outset and reinforces throughout. If he does repeat his point a little overmuch then it is only because the evidence is so overwhelmingly convincing. Will definitely reread.

[Bjorn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even to someone who only knows fragments of Japanese Culture and the cultural associations with the Four Seasons, it was a joy to read and learn more about how ingrained seasonal associations are within Japanese art. Recommend it to anyone who wants a closer look into this phenomenon!

[Simina · Rating 3 out of 5]

In part extremely insightful, but sometimes dragging and boring

[Katrinka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very helpful.

[Norman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent so far, but I'd expect nothing less from Shirane.

[Jonas Stephan Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good day all well i faith this is a good book through the seasons god bless correct go in peace.