Classical Japanese: A Grammar (review)

In 1998 Haruo Shirane, the author of the textbook under review, presented a talk to a special meeting of the Association of Teachers of Japanese about the recent decline of premodern Japanese studies in North American universities. He noted that academic positions of premodern language and literature were going unfilled when they were vacated. As a result, the teaching of classical Japanese language, in particular, at research universities and four-year liberal arts colleges was at an all-time low. Classical Japanese: A Grammar is an attempt, I assume, to rectify that situation by providing a pedagogical tool that can be used either for self-teaching or in a classroom situation.

The publication of Classical Japanese: A Grammar signals the first new accessible book dealing with bungotai in English in many years. Accessible for the purposes of this review will mean both intellectually accessible as well as easily obtainable and financially affordable by a self-guided student or for use in a classroom. Helen McCullough's Bungo Manual (Cornell East Asia Series, 1988) continues to be our most concise reference grammar, but it has drawbacks such as its lack of original orthography (all sentences are romanized) and its cursory treatment of honorific language. McCullough's manual supplanted other books that are either out of print (Ivan Morris's Dictionary of Selected Forms in Classical Japanese Literature, Columbia University Press, 1965; P. G. O'Neill's A Programmed Introduction to Literary Japanese, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1968) or hard to obtain (Ikeda Tadashi's Classical Japanese Grammar Illustrated with Texts, Tōhō Gakkai, 1975). Thomas H. Rohlich and Akira Komai's An Introduction to Classical Japanese (Bonjinsha, 1991) was the first pedagogical attempt at a textbook in English, but the most common complaint heard about it was its use of made-up example sentences. And like the Morris and O'Neill grammars, it, too, has gone out of print. Alexander Vovin published a grammar reference in 2003 (A Reference Grammar of Classical Japanese Prose, London: RoutledgeCurzon), but it is neither affordable ($155 was the price I found online) nor easily intelligible to a nonlinguist. So there has been a great need for some time for a book that combines two functions: (1) a reference that delves in some detail into all aspects of classical Japanese grammar and does so in a way that can be easily understood by university students (and other learners of Japanese), and (2) a pedagogically sound textbook. Classical Japanese meets both needs and will not break the bank.

The dual function Shirane's textbook serves should make it attractive not only to students but also to scholars of Japanese who want an excellent reference work or who want to brush up on their classical Japanese language skills. The fact that it contains plenty of exercises, examples, tables, and grammatical points for advanced study (Nara-period grammar, for example) gives it a range of use not seen in any of the works mentioned above. In fact, the textbook even comes with a booklet providing answers to the exercises (along with numerous tables of grammatical forms), all of which are perforated for easy removal and use. By the time this review appears an accompanying literary reader and dictionary should also be available. The original texts used and cited in the textbook come primarily from the Heian and Kamakura periods, but those used in the reader (of which I've only seen the table of contents) come from every historical period through Meiji.

Classical Japanese is divided into five major parts: Inflected Forms, Noninflected Forms, Honorifics, Appendixes, and Grammar Exercises. There is also an introductory section (Elements of the Book) and a ten-page double-columned index. For each grammatical item, there are usually several extensively annotated examples. Each example sentence provides furigana, romanization, a detailed translation (parenthetical romanized Japanese words are inserted directly following their translation), the name of the text from which the example is drawn as well as where it can be found, and...