Hyakunin’shu

Hyakunin’shu: Reading the Hundred Poets in Late Edo Japan explores the “popular literary literacy” of the Japanese at the edge of modernity. By reproducing and translating a well-known annotated and illustrated Ansei-era (1854–1859) edition of the Hyakunin isshu —for hundreds of years the most basic and best-known waka primer in the entire Japanese literary canon—Joshua Mostow reveals how commoners of the time made sense of the collection. Thanks to the popularization of the poems in the early m