The Art of Seeing Flowers: Exploring the Lexical Landscape of Early Modern Japanese Poetry

Co-sponsored with the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies

The emergence of haikai 俳諧 (popular linked verse) in early 17th-century Japan opened the door to poetry of the common people. The earliest works of this genre are known as kohaikai 古俳諧 (old popular linked verse), which flourished until the mid-1680s. Kohaikai serves as a treasure trove of everyday expressions, with the links between its verses relying on word associations that reflect the common understandings of its time. Despite its cultural value, however, it has received limited scholarly attention, mainly due to the prevailing literary historical perspective that regards the later Bashō-style haikai as the pinnacle of literary achievement. This talk reexamines the literary significance of kohaikai through close reading analyses based on foundational research in the field. My study begins by exploring the challenges of understanding popular Japanese perception of the West in the 17th century due to a lack of surviving documentation. It then traces the historical transformation of the motif of sunbathing (hinataboko) as a case study of how the foreign influences and forgotten nuances contained within an ordinary word can illuminate broader ways of thinking at the time. Through such analyses, this study argues that kohaikai can offer a window into the worldview of early modern Japan and contribute to the study of literary and cultural history.