A central feature of traditional Japanese poetry (waka) is the use of utamakura--a category of poetic words, many of which are place-names or the names of features associated with them--to cultivate allusion and intertextuality between individual poems and within the tradition. In this book Edward Kamens analyzes a wide selection of poems to show how utamakura came to wield special powers within Japanese poetry. He reveals how poets in generation after generation returned, either in person or in imagination, to these places and to poems about them to encounter again the...