Niino’s Snow Festival in Shinshū and Other Essays

At Niino’s Snow Festival, masks, sacred visitors, and village performers preserve traces of an older world. Orikuchi Shinobu begins with this living tradition in Shinshū and follows its connections into the rituals and stories of ancient Japan.

This collection brings together four complete essays first published between 1926 and 1930. Their subjects range from ceremonial speech and changing word meanings to the origins of folk song and the relationship between religious observance and love poetry. Along the way, Orikuchi considers communal song contests, poetic exchanges, seasonal abstinence, and the ways remembered customs become literature.

His arguments combine close observation with bold historical speculation. They reveal a distinctive folklorist and critic thinking across disciplines, challenging familiar readings of the Man’yōshū and asking how social life shapes artistic expression.