Just Living: Poems and Prose by the Japanese Monk Tonna

by Ton'a and Steven D. Carter

Book Overview

The medieval Buddhist poet-monk Tonna (1289-1372) was regarded as the leading poet of his day and a prominent scholar and critic. Despite his commoner status, he was assigned the task of acting as compiler for an imperial anthology of poetry and counted a number of prominent courtiers among his students and patrons. And yet his works, which remained required reading for virtually all serious poets in Japan for five hundred years after his death, have...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231125534
• ISBN13: 9780231125536
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.2" x 9.2"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Froggy Goes a Courting

This is a fine selection of poetry by Tonna, a poet who was prestigious once but mostly ignored in modern times. The poems are in the "waka" form and are definitely in the tradition of courtly poetry starting with the "Kokinshu" and the other imperial anthologies. In that sense they evince the usual refined elegance and courtly restraint common to such poetry, though Tonna clearly comes in at a late point in the tradition's development...any number of his poems assume the reader's acquaintance with prior pieces and only make sense if one knows them. Carter fills in this knowledge with apt footnotes, but this level of self-referentiality and insider-knowledge dependence suggests that the poetic tradition in question was on the verge of getting top-heavy and stale. For that very reason, the inclusion of some of Tonna's more informal linked verse couplets is very significant, for you can kind of see the shadowy origins of a new and vibrant poetic form, the haiku, in the works here. The topics are the usual (nature, blossoms, unhappy love); Tonna may have been a Buddhist monk, but almost none of these poems really treat Buddhist themes or have religious implications per se. All the poems are given in the original Japanese (in romanji) as well as in accurate and poetic English translation. Also included in this little volume is a work of prose criticism by Tonna called "From a Frog at the Bottom of a Well" (hence the book's cover). Full of anecdotes and observations and somewhat reminiscent of Tonna's acquaintance Yoshida Kenko's "Tsurezuregusa", this work gives us an invaluable glimpse of the social context of this poetry as well as the self-understandings, poetic standards, attitudes, and conceptions of poetry held by the court poets of this time. The book also has plenty of useful reference tidbits: a helpful introduction, a glossary of important people and places mentioned throughout the book (there are lots), and an index of first lines for the poems as well as a guide for each poem's source text. This book is then great for the student of Japanese Literature as well as for anyone who wants to sit down and enjoy some nice poetry.