A History of Japanese Literature: The First Thousand Years

by Shūichi Katō

Book by Kato, Shuichi

Genres: Japan, Nonfiction, Japanese Literature, Academic

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Shūichi Katō (加藤 周一) was a Japanese critic and author best known for his works on literature and culture.
Born in Tokyo, Katō trained as a medical doctor at the University of Tokyo during World War II, specializing in haematology. The experience of living in Japan during the war and American bombing of Tokyo would shape a lifelong opposition to war, especially nuclear arms, and imperialism. It was also in this period that began to write.
In the immediate postwar period, Katō joined a Japanese-American research team to assess the effects of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. He subsequently travelled to Paris for a research fellowship at the Pasteur Institute. When he returned to Japan, he turned to writing full time. After participating in a 1958 conference of writers from Asia and Africa, he gave up practicing medicine entirely.
Fluent in French, German, and English, while being deeply focused on Japanese culture and classical Chinese literature, Katō gained a reputation for examining Japan through both domestic and foreign perspectives. He served as lecturer at Yale University, professor at the Free University of Berlin and the University of British Columbia, guest professor at Ritsumeikan University (Dept. of International Relations), and curator of the Kyoto Museum for World Peace. From 1980 until his death, he wrote a widely-read column in the evening culture pages of the Asahi Shimbun in which he discussed society, culture, and international relations from a literate and resolutely leftist perspective.
In 2004, he formed a group with philosopher Shunsuke Tsurumi and novelist Kenzaburō Ōe to defend the war-renouncing Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan.

Reviews

[RKanimalkingdom · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

I have a fascination with Japanese Literature so I thought it would be great to read this book which was on the history of Japanese Literature. Here's the thing though, All my eye's saw were the words: A History of Japanese Literature. They did not catch the subtitle, The First Thousand Years, and most of my favourite Japanese books/authors are from a MUCH later time period. So you can imagine the deflation in my excitement when I saw that I would not be reading about the time period I wanted.

Nonetheless, the book was informative and helped explain some the the origins of a lot of similar/repeated themes in Japanese Literature. Why things are seen the way they are or how they came to be. I learned a lot of interesting facts like how early Japanese Literature and poetry actually included a LOT about romance and love. And it was a love between a man and woman. Sometimes it was the emotion and sometimes it was the physical act. This is actually a stark contrast to the way love and romance is shown in later Japanese literature. It was shocking to see the change.

Overall, My favourite chapters were 1, 2, and 5. I guess, I would enjoy the later volumes of this series. The writing style was okay. Not very poetic/drawing but not static either.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Akira Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress" tells the story of a medieval Japanese princess on the run after losing battles, protected by a single general (the incomparable Toshiro Mifune who in this film meets his match in the actress playing the princess, Misa Uehara). George Lucas' Star Wars borrowed heavily from the film, including the robot characters who in the original were two clownish Japanese peasants who agree to help the fugitives (for recompense) without knowing that the fleeing woman is royalty. At the end of the Kurosawa film, order has been restored, as it should be in a comedy, to what Kurosawa acerbically depicts as the Japanese norm: elaborate class-based ritual, in which the general is subservient to the princess he has grown close to and from which the two peasants are banished despite risking their lives. The inescapable conclusion is that the princess was freer before being restored to her pedestal, when she could run in loose clothing instead being bound by royal costumes and rites, when she was actually allowed to speak with and learn about her subjects. In this book, Shuichi Kato undertook the probably impossible task of reviewing a thousand years of Japanese literature in three hundred pages; what strikes one most (aside from the necessity of dispatching masterpieces like Genji or the Tale of the Heike in a few pages), is the utter absence of peasant clowns, of Falstaffs and Wives of Bath. It is literature of the aristocracy by the aristocracy, as befits a poetry that has its origins in lamentations on the death of Emperors. To the credit of the book, shifts in the ruling structure--whether the Emperors are being bossed around the Fujiwaras or some other clan, or by that peculiar rival court presided over by Retired Emperors--are seen as one of the dominant forces shaping the literature. The other, intertwined with it, is the wandering path of the various sects of Buddhism that held sway. It is to Shuichi Kato's credit that I almost understood the dueling schools of esoteric Buddhism, Shingon and Tendai, before they gave way to the more familiar Pure Land (which has much in common with Christianity although no Christ) and Zen. Shuichi Kato lucidly explains why each sect was in turn prevalent among the rigid and quarrelsome nobility (hard to think of any kind of Buddhism in that context, but there it is) and how that affected a literature dominated, as apparently everything was, by the aristocracy. What suffers in this account is the literature: if anything, one would like more on the extraordinary group of ladies-in-waiting who gave us diaries and Genji or the development of No from Shinto ritual. In that sense, Shuichi Kato is most compelling on the development of the early poetry, from royal laments to romantic poetry, so often depicted through observations of flora and the turning of the seasons.

[k.]

a truly excellent inroad to understanding both the development of japanese literature, but also the development of literate japan and the wider social sphere. highly recommend.

[Jasmina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Think this is a book that needs to be read through a larger period of time otherwise the amount of facts will make your brain set fire to itself. With that said, I really liked this book. Learned quite a bit about my favorite poetry era.

[Brent Newhall]

A fascinating survey of Japanese literature from around 500 AD to 1500 AD. As one might expect, the first centuries are heavy on poetry and religious treatises, then dairies and novels become popular with the Tale of Genji. Kato does an excellent job of providing the cultural and religious context of these works so the reader can understand why they were so significant.