This is the first complete translation of Tandai shōshin roku, which provides the best source for an understanding of the eighteenth-century Japanese literary figure Ueda Akinari (1734-1809) - a man of many talents and wide-ranging interests: haikai and waka poet, writer of fiction, commentator on Japanese classical texts, doctor of Confucian medicine, keen student of history and botany, tea connoisseur and amateur potter. In this highly personal...