The Winter Sun Shines In: A Life of Masaoka Shiki (Asia Perspectives: History, Society, and Culture)

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The Winter Sun Shines In: A Life of Masaoka Shiki

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The Winter Sun Shines In: A Life of Masaoka Shiki by Donald Keene

Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. The Winter Sun Shines In: History, Society, and Culture by Donald Keene. Rather than resist the vast social and cultural changes sweeping Japan in the nineteenth century, the poet Masaoka Shiki instead incorporated new Western influences into his country's native haiku and tanka verse.

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By reinvigorating these traditional forms, Shiki released them from outdated conventions and made them more responsive to newer trends in artistic ex Rather than resist the vast social and cultural changes sweeping Japan in the nineteenth century, the poet Masaoka Shiki instead incorporated new Western influences into his country's native haiku and tanka verse.

By reinvigorating these traditional forms, Shiki released them from outdated conventions and made them more responsive to newer trends in artistic expression. Altogether, his reforms made the haiku Japan's most influential modern cultural export. Using extensive readings of Shiki's own writings and accounts of the poet by his contemporaries and family, Donald Keene charts Shiki's revolutionary and often contradictory experiments with haiku and tanka, a dynamic process that made the survival of these traditional genres possible in a globalizing world.

Keene particularly highlights random incidents and encounters in his impressionistic portrait of this tragically young life, moments that elicited significant shifts and discoveries in Shiki's work. The push and pull of a profoundly changing society is vividly felt in Keene's narrative, which also includes sharp observations of other recognizable characters, such as the famous novelist and critic Natsume Soseki. In addition, Keene reflects on his own personal relationship with Shiki's work, further developing the nuanced, deeply felt dimensions of its power.

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This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Feb 19, Jim Coughenour rated it liked it Shelves: I've been reading two biographies lately — the hefty Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life and this slim biography of Masaoka Shiki. Compared to the prodigious Benjamin who compels admiration, Shiki's Life struck me as remarkably slight, almost parodic, the story of a poet who never had a love affair and spent the last years of his short life confined to his bedroom by tuberculosis, writing poems about persimmons and wisteria while coughing up blood, a series of newspaper essays A Six-Foot Sickbed I've been reading two biographies lately — the hefty Walter Benjamin: His passions are as strong as they are comically inconsequential.

And yet by all accounts he was a great man, of sorts. Keene concludes that Shiki "changed the nature of poetry," rescuing the forms of haiku and tanka from oblivion.

This book is occasionally surprising, sometimes dull, and finally mysterious. As is the poetry. I suspect an English reader can only dimly appreciate the art of haiku, but Burton Watson's selection is full of charm and sadness. Jun 12, Steve added it Shelves: Originally called hokku because it was the initial verse in a long renga, or linked verse poem, the form could emancipate itself from its original context, I believe, due to the Japanese taste for the evanescent and slight.

The primary impetus for this emancipation was Matsuo Basho — , who demonstrated what a master could do with this little poetic form.

Just as one has seen in the reception of haiku in the West, it seemed so easy to compose a haiku that poetasters of every description threw themselves upon the form and merrily generated millions of quintessentially ephemeral texts. Needless to say, after a few centuries of that, when the modernizing impulses of the Meiji era arrived in Japan the haiku form appeared to be on its deathbed and destined to be cast aside into the dustbin of history.

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