Kirsten Cather
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824835873
- eISBN:
- 9780824871604
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824835873.003.0006
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
This chapter focuses on two censored Japanese classic texts: The Safflower and The Record of the Night Battles at Dannoura. The Safflower is a late eighteenth-century collection of senryu, a genre of ...
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This chapter focuses on two censored Japanese classic texts: The Safflower and The Record of the Night Battles at Dannoura. The Safflower is a late eighteenth-century collection of senryu, a genre of comic verse that was essentially a more vulgar and witty offshoot of Bashō’s haikai. As an exclusive collection of indecent senryu, or “last choice” verses (suebanku), the work is composed of the bawdiest of the bawdy. Meanwhile, Dannoura focuses on the “night battles” between the captured Heike women and the Genji warriors after the final major sea battle in 1185 in which the Heike are brutally defeated and commit suicide en masse when that defeat becomes apparent. It is rife with clichés that might appear in pornography today.Less
This chapter focuses on two censored Japanese classic texts: The Safflower and The Record of the Night Battles at Dannoura. The Safflower is a late eighteenth-century collection of senryu, a genre of comic verse that was essentially a more vulgar and witty offshoot of Bashō’s haikai. As an exclusive collection of indecent senryu, or “last choice” verses (suebanku), the work is composed of the bawdiest of the bawdy. Meanwhile, Dannoura focuses on the “night battles” between the captured Heike women and the Genji warriors after the final major sea battle in 1185 in which the Heike are brutally defeated and commit suicide en masse when that defeat becomes apparent. It is rife with clichés that might appear in pornography today.
