The Emergence of Landscape Poetry

How did Japanese poetry learn to see a landscape for its own sake? Orikuchi Shinobu finds answers in ancient ritual, songs improvised at travel banquets, and the changing arts of Hitomaro, Kurohito, Akahito, and Yakamochi.

His essay follows mist over a river, birds in mountain trees, an unseen boatman’s song, and snow hiding plum blossoms. These vivid fragments become evidence in a searching argument about memory, performance, poetic form, and the difference between sincere feeling and inherited convention.

Orikuchi, a major scholar of Japanese folklore and literature, challenges the idea of an unchanging national character and questions familiar praises of ancient poetry. His judgments are sometimes severe, but his attention to the sounds and structures of individual poems is exacting and alive.