Seeds in the Heart

With Seeds in the Heart, Donald Keene has completed his masterful, four-volume survey of Japanese literature from the earliest times to 1970--a major achievement of one of the world's most illustrious careers in literary criticism. Keene, the preeminent presenter of Japanese culture to the West, has long understood the key that literature holds to revealing a culture's sensibilities. This volume, like the first three, "will be hailed as definitive" (said Edwin O. Reischauer) as Keene employs his prodigious wealth of knowledge, depth of critical insight, and gift for narrative to guide us through one thousand years of a literary history that both defined the unique properties of Japanese prosody and prose, and produced some of its greatest works: the robust and grand poetry of the Manyoshu; the subtle and sparse perfection of the thirty-one syllable waka poem; The Tale of the Genji, still regarded as one of the greatest novels in world literature; the richly distilled poetic texts of the fifteenth-century No dramas; and the vast canvases of the medieval war tales, such as The Tale of the Heike. Detailed textual examinations of these and many other works at once present new scholarship to the expert and allow the lay reader to understand and enjoy Keene's narrative without prior knowledge of Japanese history. Above all, the author shows us the relevance this great body of literature has for all centuries; as the tenth-century poet Tsurayuki said, "Japanese poetry has its seeds in the human heart."

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.