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In his introduction to this volume, Haruo Shirane points out that the notion of literature as "imaginative writing" is a comparatively recent invention in Japan, where poetry, fictional narrative, and drama were, until the nineteenth century, never seen as separate from other genres of socially valued writing, such as philosophical, religious, historical, or political texts (p. 12). He makes clear that the notion of Japanese literature as works written in Japanese is also a recent concept emerging from specific social and cultural circumstances; for most of Japan's history, Japanese literature was understood as works written by Japanese people and thus included a significant corpus of texts in Chinese. Through embracing these two more inclusive definitions and pushing his understanding of the compass of literature to include non-elite, communal forms, Shirane has created a comprehensive and innovative anthology that succeeds at offering a "broader and more complex view of Japanese literature" (p. xxiii) to 1600 than has previously been available in a single volume.
While the volume's size undoubtedly appears large compared to most academic monographs, it is tiny in comparison to the corpus of works that could be included. In his choice of selections, Shirane was obviously guided not only by the principles just listed, as well as by practical considerations of which translations were available through former students and colleagues, but also by the expectations of the Columbia University Press series of anthologies to which this volume belongs. As Shirane notes, this is a sister volume to his thousand-page Early Modern Japanese Literature