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book: An Unfamiliar Place
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An Unfamiliar Place

Poetry, Power, and the Travel Memoir in Medieval Japan
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2026

About this book

In mid-fourteenth-century Japan, amid decades of civil unrest caused by a violent rivalry over imperial succession, three men embarked on journeys that would lead them to reimagine their world: the second Ashikaga shogun and general Yoshiakira (1330–1367), the Buddhist lay priest Sōkyū (ca. 1350), and the statesman Nijō Yoshimoto (1320–1388). All three shared elite social status, political connections, and a deep engagement with poetry.

Yoshiakira traveled from Kyoto to Sumiyoshi Shrine in Osaka to pray for poetic skill; Sōkyū left his home in Kyushu and wandered for three years across Honshu, visiting sites celebrated in traditional waka poetry; and Yoshimoto, after fleeing an attack on his home in Kyoto, found refuge in distant Ojima and comfort in composing poetry surrounded by “the scene of an unfamiliar place.” Their memoirs, written within a decade of each other, offer important insights into how their worldviews—formed by centuries of canonical literature and court traditions—were increasingly challenged by their encounters with new situations and territory, landscapes they would capture from perspectives of absence and erasure.

An Unfamiliar Place examines how these three traveler-poets used both literal and metaphorical “unfamiliar places” as sites of expressive power, to not only explore novel ways of existing in and moving through the world, but also reassess their assumptions about the social and cultural significance of geographic space.

Author / Editor information

Contributor: Kendra Strand Kendra Strand is associate professor of premodern Japanese literature and visual culture at the University of Iowa.

Reviews

Through a careful explication of the ‘geographical imagination’ and an analysis of three literary travel diaries from the Muromachi period, Kendra Strand guides readers along a path to understanding how travel literature navigates spatial and temporal realms as a mode of writing that places the traveller-poet in conversation with the past while offering powerful commentary on the poet’s present. --- Kendra Strand’s study is an original piece of scholarship that poses provocative questions about several important but under-studied Japanese medieval texts in a fascinating historical era. It’s an exciting work for its approach, subject matter, and the period covered, and the field will be all the better for it.

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    Frontmatter

    i
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    Contents

    ix
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    Acknowledgments

    xi
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    Abbreviations

    xiii
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    Conventions

    xv
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    INTRODUCTION It Was the Scene of an Unfamiliar Place

    1
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    CHAPTER 1 Between History and Literature

    22
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    CHAPTER 2 The “Travel Mode” in Nanbokuchō Travel Memoirs

    36
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    CHAPTER 3My Brush Is No Match for It

    60
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    CHAPTER 4 In This Treacherous World

    88
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    CHAPTER 5 A Brocade of Red Leaves

    116
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    CHAPTER 6 To Look Is Superb

    135
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    CHAPTER 7 From Famous Places to an Unfamiliar Road

    156
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    Conclusion

    180
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    Appendix 1 Waka from the Travel Memoirs

    193
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    Appendix 2 A Translation of Nijō Yoshimoto’s Solace of Words at Ojima (1353)

    209
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    Notes

    225
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    Bibliography

    245
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    Index

    251
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
November 5, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9798880702107
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
View content
https://doi.org/10.1515/9798880702107
eBook ISBN: 9798880702107
Keywords for this book
asia poetry; Japan history; Japan poetry; medieval Japan
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
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