Customer Reviews

Masaoka Shiki: His Life and Works

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This excellent book achieves a fine balance between literary biography and literary analysis, and between critical scholarship and literary sensibility. Actually, it's not so much a balance as an incredible fusion. Masaoka Shiki certainly deserves such treatment; he is a major figure in Japanese literature, and (as Beichman explains) a good deal of the credit for the fact that haiku and tanka are regarded as "poetry" and this poetry a type of "literature" at all goes to him and his efforts.

Each of the five chapters has a distinct focus. The first is a general biography contextualizing the chapters that follow. Masaoka is known as the father of modern haiku and as the haiku's reviver, and so chapter two focuses on this important facet of his literary career. However, Beichman convincingly argues that Masaoka saw his work on haiku only as part as a larger endeavor, and so the next chapters discuss his tanka poems, his prose essays, and his diaries (with an interesting comparison and contrast between his private diary and the diaries he crafted for publication).

The analysis is nuanced and critically astute. I was really interested in her discussion of how haiku and tanka were conceptualized before Masaoka. I had come across a number of his critical remarks in other books, and they always seemed commonplace or obvious. After reading this book I gained a much clearer idea of what he saw himself as working against, and these remarks then came to make sense as original critical interventions. Her translations of his poems and prose pieces make their literary qualities come alive in a fresh way, and she has a knack for unpacking their significance and layers of meanings and associations in ways that are intriguing rather than overbearing. I don't always agree with her conclusions; his final three death haiku strike me more as expressions of stoic resignation in the face of the inevitable than of the transcendence characteristic of Buddhist enlightenment (and I'm usually the first to go rooting around for Buddhist themes in literature), but she always argues her case well. And throughout the book her fascination and affection for this short-lived man of letters and his art shines through, informing and enriching her literary analysis.

In short, this is first-rate work. Anyone interested in modern poetry, in haiku and tanka, or in Japanese literature in general should give this fine book a look.

My order came neatly packaged. The book itself was in perfect condition. Shipping was fast.