Episode 447 - On a Summer Night, The First Thought of Sleep
Added 2022-07-22 19:28:30 +0000 UTCSo, first things first: as I type this I'm putting the final touches on next week's episode, which will be about the Abe assassination. It's a pretty wide-ranging episode--I don't know about you, but I didn't know much about the Unification Church--but hopefully you all will find it interesting. After next week we'll return to talking poetry with an episode on Fujiwara no Teika, the other great Heian poet who somehow we still haven't covered.
This particular episode was honestly a lot of fun to write. As I mentioned in the episode, Tosa Nikki is one of the pieces I remember best from my intro to Japanese lit classes, and the story of how the Kokin Wakashu came together is a very interesting one in terms of exploring a key theme of Japanese history (the interplay between "Japaneseness" and "Chineseness" as ideas). Probably the hardest thing about this episode, meanwhile, was picking out which poems to include and deciding how much time to spend on them; I think they're interesting to hear, for sure, but my classical Japanese is very rusty!
Also, now that this is done I guess I need a new person to say "one of these days I'll do an episode about them" for. Yosa Buson is probably the next one on the list in terms of significance? Something to contemplate for the future, at any rate!
