A History of Japanese Literature, vol. 3: The High Middle Ages.

• Author: Carter, Steven D.

This third installment of Konishi Jin'ichi's ambitious work, A History of Japanese Literature, follows the pattern of his two earlier volumes in every respect. Once again, the narrative is structured around a series of oppositions - most significantly, ga (glossed as "refined," "high," and "precedent") and zoku "nonstandard," "lower art"), but also including Chinese and Japanese, prose and poetry, old and new, "weighty and light," and so on; once again Konishi borrows his apparatus from the sciences, insisting upon a view that sees literary genres in evolutionary terms, which he attempts to rationalize via elaborate periodizations and taxonomies.

The period covered by volume three is what Konishi calls the High Middle Ages, a period encompassing the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries, during which, in the author's view, old courtly genres such as the waka, the monogatari, and the nikki lost vitality, giving way before the rise of renga and no. Also noted are the fall of Chinese poetry at court, followed by the subsequent rise of Chinese poetry in the Gozan monasteries, the displacement of classical prose" by "quasiclassical prose," the advance and dissemination of the "mixed style," and the advent of the zuihitsu, or "miscellany." As was the case in previous volumes, Konishi pays special attention to continental influences, but in other ways assumes - correctly or not - that many of his readers will already be in a position to provide the necessary social and historical contexts for his statements.

There is of course a wealth of information in Konishi's book, and it includes details of a sort one does not general get from other such works written in English. Thus, while giving relatively little attention to biographical details or to social or religious history, he gives fuller consideration to the historical "evolution" of genres; while offering little information on the institutions of literary production and consumption he treats the question of the modes of literary "authority" some depth. Any student will be grateful for such information, and for the erudition Konishi brings to his narrative.

The drawback of Konishi's approach on a general level that his terms - particularly his ga and zoku - often make too simplistic an accounting of complex texts and literary movements. His method, in a word, tends to see literary history as a grand seesaw whose motion leaves the reader a bit dizzy. And the situation is not helped by the...