The Man'yōshū is the oldest extant collection of Japanese waka, compiled sometime after AD 759 during the Nara period. The anthology is one of the most revered of Japan's poetic compilations. The compiler, or the last in a series of compilers, is today widely believed to be Ōtomo no Yakamochi, although numerous other theories have been proposed. The chronologically last datable poem in the collection is from AD 759 (No. 4516). It contains many poems from a much earlier period, with the bulk of the collection representing the period between AD 600 and 759. The precise significance of the title is not known with certainty.
Japanese literature throughout most of its history has been influenced by cultural contact with neighboring Asian literatures, most notably China and its literature. Early texts were often written in pure Classical Chinese or lit. 'Chinese writing', a Chinese-Japanese creole language. Indian literature also had an influence through the spread of Buddhism in Japan.
The Kokin Wakashū, commonly abbreviated as Kokinshū (古今集), is an early anthology of the waka form of Japanese poetry, dating from the Heian period. An imperial anthology, it was conceived by Emperor Uda and published by order of his son Emperor Daigo in about 905. Its finished form dates to c. 920, though according to several historical accounts the last poem was added to the collection in 914.
Donald Lawrence Keene was an American-born Japanese scholar, historian, teacher, writer and translator of Japanese literature. Keene was University Professor emeritus and Shincho Professor Emeritus of Japanese Literature at Columbia University, where he taught for over fifty years. Soon after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, he retired from Columbia, moved to Japan permanently, and acquired citizenship under the name Kīn Donarudo. This was also his poetic pen name and occasional nickname, spelled in the ateji form 鬼怒鳴門.
Makoto Ueda was a professor emeritus of Japanese literature at Stanford University. Ueda won the Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature in 1996 for his translated anthology Modern Japanese Tanka.
Ian Hideo Levy is an American-born Japanese language author. Levy was born in California and educated in Taiwan, the US, and Japan. He is one of the first Americans to write modern literature in Japanese, and his work has won the Noma Literary New Face Prize and the Yomiuri Prize, among other literary prizes.
James Philip Gabriel is an American translator and Japanologist. He is a full professor and former department chair of the University of Arizona's Department of East Asian Studies and is one of the major translators into English of the works of the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami.
Rush Rehm is professor of drama and classics at Stanford University in California, in the United States. He also works professionally as an actor and director. He has published many works on classical theatre. Rehm is the artistic director of Stanford Repertory Theater (SRT), a professional theater company that presents a dramatic festival based on a major playwright each summer. SRT's 2016 summer festival, Theater Takes a Stand, celebrates the struggle for workers' rights. A political activist, Rehm has been involved in Central American and Cuban solidarity, supporting East Timorese resistance to the Indonesian invasion and occupation, the ongoing struggle for Palestinian rights, and the fight against US militarism. In 2014, he was awarded Stanford's Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for Outstanding Service to Undergraduate Education.
Edwin Augustus Cranston (1932–2021) was a Professor of Japanese literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Harvard University. His primary research interest was the classical literature of Japan, especially traditional poetic forms. He received the Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature in 1992 for his translation A Waka Anthology: The Gem-Glistening Cup. Vol I.
Valdo H. Viglielmo was a prominent scholar and translator of Japanese literature and works of Japanese philosophy.
The Wakan Rōeishū is an anthology of Chinese poems and 31-syllable Japanese waka for singing to fixed melodies.
Leza Lowitz is an American expatriate writer residing in Tokyo, Japan and in the American Southwest. She has written, edited and co-translated over twenty books, many about Japan, its relationship with the US, on the changing role of Japanese women in literature, art and society, and about the lasting effect of the Second World War and the desire for reconciliation in contemporary Japanese society. She is also an internationally renown yoga and mindfulness teacher recognized for her work bridging poetry and the spiritual path through disciplines like yoga and mindfulness.
Howard Hibbett was a translator and professor of Japanese literature at Harvard University. He held the Victor S. Thomas Professorship in Japanese Literature.
Jeffrey Angles (ジェフリー・アングルス) is a poet who writes free verse in his second language, Japanese. He is also an American scholar of modern Japanese literature and an award-winning literary translator of modern Japanese poetry and fiction into English. He is a professor of Japanese language and Japanese literature at Western Michigan University. Among his awards are the Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature in 2009 for his translation of Forest of Eyes: Selected Poems of Tada Chimako by Tada Chimako and the 2017 Yomiuri Prize for Literature in the poetry category for his own Japanese-language poetry collection Watashi no hizukehenkosen.
The Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature was established in 1979 and is administered by the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University. It is the oldest prize for Japanese literary translation in the United States.
Sharon Marcus is an American academic. She is currently the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She specializes in nineteenth-century British and French literature and culture, and teaches courses on the 19th-century novel in England and France, particularly in relation to the history of urbanism and architecture; gender and sexuality studies; narrative theory; and 19th-century theater and performance. Marcus has received Fulbright, Woodrow Wilson, Guggenheim Fellowship, and ACLS fellowships, and a Gerry Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award at Columbia. She is one of the senior editors of Public Culture, as well as a founding editor and Fiction Review Editor of Public Books.
Jonathan Chaves, B.A. Brooklyn College, 1965; M.A. Columbia University, 1966; PhD Columbia University, 1971, is Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He is a translator of classic Chinese poetry.
Dennis Washburn is an American academic and translator. He's the Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor of Asian Studies at Dartmouth College where he has taught since 1992. He has served as chair of the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Literatures and is currently chair of the Comparative Literature Program. Washburn has published extensively on Japanese literature and culture and is an active translator of both modern and classical Japanese fiction. In 2004 he received the Japanese Foreign Ministry's citation for contributions to cross-cultural understanding, and in 2008 he received the Japan-US Friendship Commission Translation Prize for translating Tsutomu Mizukami's The Temple of the Wild Geese and Bamboo Dolls of Echizen.
Tokyo Stories: A Literary Stroll is an anthology of Japanese short stories set in Tokyo. The translator and editor Lawrence Rogers won the Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature from the Donald Keene Center of Japanese culture in 2004 for his work on this book. The stories are ordered by the areas of Tokyo in which they take place.
"Star" is a short story by Yukio Mishima. It was originally published in the November 1960 issue of Gunzo, a literary magazine published by Kodansha. It was later included alongside "Patriotism" and "Hyakuman'en senbei" in the short story collection of the same name, Sutā (スタア), which was published on 30 January 1961 by Shinchosha.
