Renaissance in Japan: A Cultural Survey of the Seventeenth Century

Renaissance in Japan is a superb survey of Japan's literary giants—forerunners of today's modern Japanese writers.

Called the "Kyoto epoch," the age in which these writers lived was the period in which Japanese cultural development made many of its greatest advances. In these years of the early Tokugawa era, the old aristocratic culture was confronted with the new plebeian awakening, giving rise to dynamic social developments, in effect a peaceful revolution.

The humanistic movement that emer...