Murmured Conversations is the first complete and rigorously annotated translation of Sasamegoto (1463-1464), considered the most representative poetic treatise of the medieval period in Japan because of its thoroughgoing construction of poetry as a way to attain, and signify through language, the mental liberation (satori) that is the goal of Buddhist practice.

Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen is Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Heart's Flower: The Life and Poetry of Shinkei (Stanford, 1994), and the co-editor of The Father-Daughter Plot: Japanese Literary Women and the Law of the Father (2001).