KIMURA, Shotaro, & Charlotte M. A. Peake.

£875 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Sword and Blossom Poems from the Japanese. Done into English verse. Illustrated by Japanese Artists. A complete set, formed from later printings as often, of this attractive trilogy. Around 1910, having issued each beautiful volume individually, Hasegawa began marketing sets in a wraparound case, as here, compiling these from available stocks of different printings.The poems, composed in the short, unrhymed Chinese style, date from the 10th to the 19th centuries and are predominantly drawn from the famous Kokinshu poetry anthology. In Volume I, Hasegawa includes a three-page postscript discussing poetry's cultural and literary subtleties: "The Japanese are quick to take an artistic hint, and to them in poetry as in painting the half said thing is dearest. The words distinguished by capital letters in these Blossom Songs would to a Japanese reader be alone almost enough to indicate the meaning of the whole poem."This set comprises second printings of volumes II and III and a third printing of Volume I.

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