Light Verse from the Floating World

Similar in form to the well-known, more serious haiku, the satirical and often humorous poems known as senryu have received little scholarly attention because most were written by anonymous amateur poets and were therefore considered popular literature unworthy of serious study. Senryu are interesting, however, precisely because they reflect the thoughts and feelings of ordinary townspeople in a way that other more orthodox types of Japanese literature do not. In his introduction on the nature and historical background of the form, Makoto Ueda explores the elements of humor and satire contained in senryu, highlighting the mores that lie behind the laughter the poems evince. Replete with keen observations on the human world rather than the natural one, the four hundred eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poems collected here comprise the first comprehensive anthology in English translation of this major genre of Japanese literature.