Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts by Haruo Shirane (review)

Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons is an ambitious and wide-ranging exploration of the way spring, summer, autumn, and winter became thematized in the arts and lives of the Japanese from the Nara to the Edo periods. Here, Haruo Shirane has crafted a sustained engagement with the poetic tradition (traced primarily through waka, renga, and haikai/haiku), and he has also contextualized these genres within the nexus of cultural practices in which they became culturally embedded over time: screen painting, flower arrangement, tea ceremony, performing arts, and food culture. Although primarily a study of the past, the book also points to the enduring vitality of the complex and ornate system of seasonal representation. One of its surprising pleasures is the way it brings into relief the relevance of the past to the present, providing histories of practices that seem far removed from, yet were deeply shaped by, their earlier incarnations (the Hina Matsuri, for example, or the names of sumo wrestlers, or the yearly schedules of kabuki performances). This important work will undoubtedly make a lasting contribution to the way we conceptualize (and teach) premodern Japanese culture in relation to contemporary Japan.

As he has in his earlier works, Shirane demonstrates remarkable insightfulness and clarity; in particular, he synthesizes a complicated tangle of influences and trends into a lucid but multivalenced view of the broad cultural significance of images associated with the seasons. Opening with a discussion of seasonal references in early poetry collections, he sketches the layers of complexity that they take on as they are shaped first by Heian aristocrats; then by medieval warriors, poets, and painters; and finally by urban commoners during the Edo period. Over time, Shirane argues, things that seem on the surface to represent opposite poles in fact worked in productive dialogue to create Japan’s fabled love of nature: the pastoralization of the countryside by aristocrats versus the often confrontational engagement with nature by provincial people working the land; a close association of natural images with the changing seasons versus the “trans-seasonal” (p. 21) talismanic nature of some of them; the interiorization (and domestication) of landscape in the home versus increased movement to and through actual landscapes made famous in poetry and art; and the spread of artistic practices like renga and haiku to urban commoners versus the increasing complexity of rules for their composition.

The overarching themes of the work are the ways in which nature from very early on became interiorized (both mentally and architecturally) in Japanese culture; how it was organized seasonally, with various flora, fauna, and atmospheric conditions coming to represent each season or part of a season; and how seasonal references expanded, contracted, and became objects of experimentation and parody over time. Underlying Shirane’s argument for changes over time is the status the seasons have held throughout Japanese history as an organizational principle that has allowed meanings in life and in art to change while simultaneously remaining within a recognized framework.

Shirane’s primary interest is the development of “secondary nature” (p. 4), an engagement with the natural world mediated by multiple cultural lenses. His argument aptly opens with a discussion, in chapter 1, of poetry and the way it represents the seasons. For example, the Kokinshū builds on seasonal associations transmitted from China (and found in the Man’yōshū) in ordering its first six chapters by season. Specific words evoke each season (willows and plum in spring; the cuckoo, summer; the moon and falling leaves, autumn). This structure continued in the imperial anthologies throughout their history. Within the developing affective poetic tradition, each image was also shot through with emotional meanings. Thus poetry, and the codified group of seasonal and natural images that grew from it (especially references to plants, animals, and atmospheric conditions), became a primary mode of expressing emotion in Heian Japan.

The author...