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Reviewed by:
  • Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts. by Haruo Shirane
  • Richard Bowring (bio)
Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts. By Haruo Shirane. Columbia University Press, New York, 2012. xxi, 311 pages. $29.50, cloth; $24.00, paper.

In one of the encomia on the back jacket of this book, Kate Nakai writes that “‘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.” Who has not, at some stage or another, felt a mixture of frustration and bewilderment on being blithely informed that Japan is unique in the world for having four seasons? I remember once being lectured on this point in a restaurant with Vivaldi playing in the background. Or being told in all seriousness, and in blatant contradiction to what I could see with my own eyes, that the Japanese do not fight the environment but adapt and live in harmony with it. How does one deal with this puzzle? It is, after all, an incontrovertible fact that, although the only rivers in Japan without concrete banks seem to be on land still occupied by the U.S. military in Okinawa, natural imagery and the flow from season to season play a central role in Japanese culture, both written and visual. Haruo Shirane’s answer is to start off with a clear, simple distinction between nature in the raw as it surrounds us in all its physicality and what he terms “secondary nature,” namely, nature as manifest within a particular culture. The one exists apart from man and can be investigated as an object. The other is a construct of man and cannot exist outside language and thought. Because so many members of the Heian aristocracy cut themselves off from primary nature as something to be avoided and indeed feared, living their lives almost exclusively within a “secondary,” constructed nature, [End Page 427] their world was by definition solipsistic, their emotional life only expressible via a learned code, a code that originated in the first imperially sanctioned anthology of poetry, the Kokinshū of 905. Exactly why this happened is a mystery, but happen it did and Shirane is interested in the consequences for the rest of Japanese culture.

There is, of course, nothing new in such a distinction. The Japanese themselves were only too aware of the distance between the realities of nature and how that nature was reflected and realized. Fujiwara no Shunzei writing in his Korai fūteishō of 1197 was in no doubt that culture came first and nature second. Without the poetic tradition, he argued, no one would be able to appreciate nature’s finer points or grasp its significance to man. It was the job of the poet to show why and how, to map reality onto a cultural grid so that it could be properly tamed. Despite the earlier attempt of Ki no Tsurayuki in the preface to the Kokinshū to justify poetry as the spontaneous expression of human emotion, it is this essential artificiality that lies at the heart of waka and which led to the production of lists of culturally marked words together with their connotations. These lists reinforced the idea of a grid and became even more important when the complicated linked-verse form renga emerged in the late medieval period. Eventually such a process of codification came to a peak in the saijiki books of the Edo period. Bakin’s Haikai saijiki of 1803, for example, contains over 2,600 seasonal topics, categorizing how the world was meant to look to an average man of Edo in the early nineteenth century.

It should be clear that Shirane has given himself a huge topic and one that only someone of his experience could really handle. One answer would have been to create a saijiki in translation, but I doubt that many potential readers will be composing waka and, in any case, that would have been to ignore the historical shifts in which he is interested. He has therefore designed the book to kill...

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