Throughout time, literature has had the power to connect readers around the world by providing them with insight into different cultures. Readers may come together by analyzing different texts and how they represent different backgrounds and give readers from a different culture a new perspective. Matsuo Bashō, a haikai master, provided readers with an insight into Japanese culture by depicting his travels around Japan in his work “The Narrow Road to the Deep North”. In the text, Bashō depicts his journey with the use of prose and haiku. Most importantly, Bashō educates readers by demonstrating the Japanese culture’s value for impermanence, the idea that time is transient. By including the idea of impermanence in his text, the writer is educating readers who may have never been exposed to the term, thus giving insight into his own culture. By analyzing the prose and haiku in Matsuo Bashō’s “The Narrow Road to the Deep North”, it is evident that the author is giving readers an insight to Japanese culture by depicting the culture’s value for impermanence. First and foremost, by taking …show more content…
In this work, the author does a magnificent job of representing his culture which allows readers to gain new knowledge regarding a culture they were not exposed to before. When I read Bashō’s work, I became fascinated by the concept of impermanence and the Japanese culture’s focus on it. Today, many people are too focused on the past or the future instead of realizing that time will always go on and bring new experiences. Also, individuals should educate themselves when it comes to cultures that aren’t their own and literature has the power give readers that understanding. Bashō’s work of art will continue to offer a beautiful representation of the Japanese culture that enthralls readers
The family relocates from a nice house to “tar-paper barracks sitting beneath the hot sun”(Otsuka, ch. 2). The new home for the mother and two children contains only one light bulb and they have to sleep on three iron cots. Compared to the soft and cozy beds at their house this was a huge change. The reader sees how this new barrack and missing father deprive the family of all happiness. The mother learns how to crochet because “It’s something to do.
1. Discuss your future experience in the context of an intentional search for adventure, beauty, and meaning. In Kevin Fedarko’s novel The Emerald Mile Kenton Grua lived a life that would be remembered for years to come.
Samurai warriors led some of the most complex and interesting lives of any kind of warrior. They were expected to be top notch warriors but just as importantly, they needed to be “highly cultured and literate.” Samurai were experts in things that you would only expect a noble or rich person to be able to do, such as calligraphy. They were nothing like what you would think a person in the military would be like today. To further explore the many facets of their lives, this paper will discuss their religion, the Bushido Code, fighting as a Samurai, and the history of Samurai in Japan.
In the novel “A Tale For The Time Being” by Ruth Ozeki, Ruth, a writer, finds a diary washed up by the sea. In the diary, 16-year-old Japanese girl Naoko Yasutani attempts to write about the story of her Zen Buddhist grandmother but soon gets distracted by her life events. Throughout the novel, Ruth Ozeki had created the character Ruth and Nao to make reading and writing a huge part of their lives that deeply affected them in many ways. Ruth reads the diary, she gets deeply drawn into Nao’s life that it affected her sense of reality her mental state of well-being but also sparked interest of zazen. Nao, on the other hand, had plan to write about Jiko making it her reason to continue living and her duty before she killed herself and Jiko died.
Due to this, Kogawa gives life to her story and obtains the sympathy of her audience. The structure of these descriptions is loaded with long sentences that describe the experiences of being in a large group. Her language is sensitive, incisive, and melancholy. Kogawa chooses details that talk in images as well as emotions, comparing the wronged subjects to “fragments of fragments” and the “silences that speak from stone”. Despite the fact Kogawa explains they are “the despised rendered voiceless”, we realize that stories such as hers give these survivors and deceased a voice.
In Derek Walcott’s poem “XIV,” the uses of personification, imagery and metaphor convey a mesmerized feeling in both the audience and the speaker. Through using a poem to narrate his childhood experience of listening to an old woman telling tales, Walcott successfully passes on this wonderful and great experience to the readers. The poem is not just about an experience with the old story teller, but a memory that holds the speaker and the speaker’s brother together in Caribbean. By using personification in the poem, the speaker presents himself as a child by imagining the inanimate objects with human like characteristics.
The short story “The Handsomest Drowned man” shows a broader development of identity through a society. One of the important characters in the “The Chinese Seamstress” is the narrator, who is not only vital because he is the main character but also because he goes through a lot of development and evolution based of the narratives he reads. Four eyes, the narrators friend, had a stash of foreign books that he had received from his mother that were banned
Child’s Play, written by Higuchi Ichiyo, is a short novel centred around the growth of children, particularly those associated with the pleasure quarters. The story takes place over a few days, nevertheless, we are given an idea on the backgrounds of the three main characters, Shōta, Midori, and Nobu, and watch them gradually lose their childlike innocence. Although not explicitly stated, the last three paragraphs suggest that all three protagonists have followed the footsteps of their parents and in Midori’s case, her older sister. This essay discusses the impending tragic future of children who are destined to take after the occupations of their family.
The almost obsessive occupation of the Japanese with self-definition has reached the point of self-Orientalism and self-exoticism. The Japanese is now conceived as absolutely and systematically different from the Western. Assigning distinctive qualities, such as Japan being close to nature and feminine and the West as dominating nature and masculine (thus rational and materialistic) has been part of this discourse and has diffused into the world of kimono, where it is regarded as fostering the Japanese unique sensitivity to nature and as a symbol of pure feminine
Mono no aware, or “the pathos of things”, was an aesthetic extensively utilized in Japanese literature. To further expand, this bittersweet term describes the beauty in things that dwindle and its role of impermanence in life. In the autobiographical narrative The Confessions of Lady Nijo, this particular aesthetic is highlighted in Book Four when she journeys pasts the Eight Bridges in Yatsuhashi. During this scene, an allusion to Section Nine in the Tales of Ise is concocted. To elucidate about this allusion, Section Nine in the Tales of Ise acquaints with a group of nameless men in the story who exile themselves to the Eastern Provinces of Japan.
When a samurai gets a taste of poetry, you would never guess what happens! With the samurai’s passion for poetry and ambition to become the best, you can guess what happens. The master of the haiku, Matsuo Basho is one of the most celebrated Japanese poets from the 1600s. Basho met Yoshitada as a kid, who helped him publish his first poem in 1662. Later in life, Basho became ill, but continued to live out his dreams of writing and teaching.
Thesis: Kawabata uses the motif of windows and mirrors in relation to Shimamura infatuation with Yoko and Komako to highlight the fantasy derived from the Japanese patriarchal society that oppresses women into rigid gender roles to entertain the men who perpetuate it. Shimamura’s constant observation of Yoko through reflective surfaces highlights how young girls’ naivete is exploited to fit the male-dominated view of the oppressive society they live in. While Shimamura is on a train “into the snow country” (3), the train arrives “at a signal stop” (3) when “a girl … opened the window in front of Shimamura” (3). The word “girl” signifies that the human being opening the window is a young female, at this instance she is opening a window which serves as a separation between the inside of the
In this poem Henry Longfellow describes a seaside scene in which dawn overcomes darkness, thus relating to the rising of society after the hardships of battle. The reader can also see feelings, emotions, and imagination take priority over logic and facts. Bridging the Romantic Era and the Realism Era is the Transcendental Era. This era is unusual due to it’s overlapping of both the Romantic and Realism Era. Due to its coexistence in two eras, this division serves as a platform for authors to attempt to establish a new literary culture aside from the rest of the world.
A Pale View of Hills Kazuo Ishiguro is a novelist born in Nagasaki, Japan in 1954. He came to Britain in 1960 and continued his study in University of Kent at Canterbury and the University of East Anglia. And now he settles in London. He has written several well known novels. In 1996 one of the novels was chosen for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Book of the year, namely An Artist of the Floating World.
Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country (1956) is a Japanese novel based on the sense of loss, entrapment and the complexity of human emotions. In the novel, the author uses the omniscient third person, highlighting the male protagonist, Shimamura’s point of view. This narrative technique is one of the primary methods used to convey the themes of wasted beauty, isolation, unfulfilled love and transience, by being of a “stream of consciousness” nature. This narrative mode takes the form of an interior monologue within the character, reflecting the immediate occurrence of ideas in his mind and highlighting his thought process. The reader witnesses very little change in the setting of the novel, as all significant parts take place amidst the small