Seeds in the Heart1993

With Seeds in the Heart, Donald Keene has completed his masterful, four-volume survey of Japanese literature from the earliest times to 1970--a major achievement of one of the world's most illustrious careers in literary criticism. Keene, the preeminent presenter of Japanese culture to the West, has long understood the key that literature holds to revealing a culture's sensibilities. This volume, like the first three, "will be hailed as definitive" (said Edwin O. Reischauer) as Keene employs his prodigious wealth of knowledge, depth of critical insight, and gift for narrative to guide us through one thousand years of a literary history that both defined the unique properties of Japanese prosody and prose, and produced some of its greatest works: the robust and grand poetry of the Manyoshu;...