One of the great fiction writers of Japan, Ihara Saikaku (1623-93) wrote of the lowest class in the Tokugawa world the townsmen who were rising in wealth and power but not in official status. The title story in this collection of 12 works, told by an again beauty whose highly erotic nature is her constant undoing, ranges over all of 17th century Japanese life. The narrator is successively wife, court lady, courtesan, priest s concubine, mistress of a feudal lord and streetwalker. Ivan Morris, chairman of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures of Columbia University has done a...

Long recognized as a core book in any study of Japanese culture and literature, The Nobility of Failure examines the lives and deaths of nine historical individuals who faced overwhelming odds, and, realizing they were doomed, accepted their fate--to be killed in battle or by execution, to wither in exile, or to escape through ritual suicide. Morris then turns his attention to the kamikaze pilots of World War II, who gave their lives in defense of their nation in the full realization that their deaths would have little effect on the course of the war.
Through detail, crystal-clear prose and...