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Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō
Written sometime between 1330 and 1332, the Essays in Idleness, with their timeless relevance and charm, hardly mirror the turbulent times in which they were born. Despite the struggle between the Emperor Go-Daigo and the usurping Hojo family that rocked Japan during these years, the Buddhist priest Kenko found himself "with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head." The resulting essays, none of them more than a few pages in length and some consisting of but two or three sentences, treat a great variety of subjects in a congenial, anecdotal style. Kenko clung to tradition, Buddhism, and the pleasures of solitude, and the themes he treats are all suffused with an unspoken acceptance of Buddhist beliefs. Above all, Kenko gives voice to a distinctively Japanese aesthetic principle: that beauty is bound to perishability.
Book Details
- Publisher: Columbia University Press
- Publish Date: May 6th, 1998
- Pages: 235
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - 0002
- Dimensions: 8.68in - 5.34in - 0.60in - 0.63lb
- EAN: 9780231112550
- Categories: • Buddhism - History• Asia - Japan• Asian - General
About the Author
Donald Keene is Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University. He is the author of more than thirty books, including So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers; Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan; Frog in the Well: Portraits of Japan by Watanabe Kazan, 1793-1841; and Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, as well as a definitive multivolume history of Japanese literature.
Praise for this book
A most delightful book, and one that has served as a model of Japanese style and taste since the seventeenth century. These cameo-like vignettes reflect the importance of the little, fleeting futile things, and each essay is Kenkō himself.-- "Asian Student"
If you enjoy things briefly told, if you want to try the prose equivalent of waka and haiku, if you already know Montaigne and would like to meet a spiritual kinsman, then you might want to take an evening and read Essays in Idleness.... [A] superb translation.-- "Washington Post"
A sensitive, personal reading.-- "Journal of Asian Studies"
The Tsurezuregusa is a key instrument in attempting to teach the classical Japanese tradition to the modern Western student.... This is indeed a welcome volume.-- "Monumenta Nipponica"
