Abstract
"The poet Yanagawa Seigan (1789-1858) was one of the most important literary and cultural figures of nineteenth-century Japan. Over the course of his life, he composed more than three thousand poems in literary Sinitic, edited several anthologies of verse by Japanese and Chinese poets, annotated works of literary criticism by Chinese authors to make them more accessible to Japanese readers, and mentored a wide range of aspiring poets. He had multiple extended periods of residence in both early modern Japan's historical capital of Kyoto, the center of its traditional culture and the site of the imperial palace, as well as in the de facto political capital of Edo (modern Tokyo), where the shogun's castle was located and which, from the latter half of the early modern period, had increasingly also become the cultural center of Japan. This volume combines a biography of Seigan and his wife, poetic interlocutor, and traveling companion, Kōran, with a selection of their poetry, heavily weighted toward that of Seigan, as little of Kōran's work survives"--