This unique anthology is the first representative collection of Japanese literature from one of the most creative periods in Japanese culture, known variously as the Edo or the Tokugawa. It includes a wide range of fiction, poetry, and drama, and also essays, literary criticism, folk stories, and other noncanonical works with a number of new translations.

Historical Periods, Measurements, and Other Matters
1. Early Modern Japan
2. Kana Booklets and the Emergence of a Print Culture
3. Ihara Saikaku and the Books of the Floating World
4. Early Haikai Poetry and Poetics
5. The Poetry and Prose of Matsuo Bash_
6. Chikamatsu Monzaemon and the Puppet Theater
7. Confucian Studies and Literary Perspectives
8. Confucianism in Action: An Autobiography of a Bakufu Official
9. Chinese Poetry and the Literatus Ideal
10. The Golden Age of Puppet Theater
11. Dangibon and the Birth of Edo Popular Literature
12. Comic and Satiric Poetry
13. Literati Meditations
14. Early Yomihon: History, Romance, and the Supernatural
15. Eighteenth-Century Waka and Nativist Study
16. Sharebon: Books of Wit and Fashion
17. Kiby_shi: Satiric and Didactic Picture Books
18. Kokkeibon: Comic Fiction for Commoners
19. Ninj_bon: Sentimental Fiction
20. G_kan: Extended Picture Books
21. Ghosts and Nineteenth-Century Kabuki
22. Late Yomihon: History and the Supernatural Revisited
23. Nativizing Poetry and Prose in Chinese
24. The Miscellany
25. Early-Nineteenth-Century Haiku
26. Waka in the Late Edo Period
27. Rakugo
English-Language Bibliography
Index