What kind of images did ancient people have about a natural phenomenon? This article will focus on the representations of snow to examine the symbolic functions of weather in ancient literature. Snow originally represented natural disaster in general, but in the six chronicles called Rikkoku-shi its image becomes more ritualistic due to the political and religious use of it at the imperial court. In Settsu-no-kuni-fūdoki, however, snow is poetically treated; the snowfall on the backs of deer is depicted with the image of a field covered with snow. It is also associated with salt that both metaphorically and metonymically conveys the local atmosphere of the area.

In his pioneering study of ancient literature Jinkei Hirano analyzed the epistemological structures of ancient times concerning nature, time, and religion. He defined the cognitive state of ancient people as a product of dynamic interactions between gods, human beings, and nature. Thus like today's ecocritics Hirano developed his own study—literary, historical, ecological, and epistemological—beyond the binary opposition between nature and culture.

When a mountain was cut out for the construction of the large statue of Buddha in Tōdai-ji Temple, the people of different classes in Heijō-kyō made different responses to it. The members of the imperial family prayed the Buddhist statue to subdue the fury of nature symbolized by the mountain. Forgetful of their religious duties in pursuit of worldly profits, the priests struggled to gain the ownership of estates around the construction site. The common people showed a detached attitude toward the event and made satirical songs about the imperial family's superstition and the priests' mammonism. Satirical poems called “rakushu” originated from them. Thus unexpectedly the destruction of nature for the building of the statue gave birth to a new type of popular literature.

A heavy snow is a key image of Makura-no-sōshi. It reflects Sei-Shōnagon's emotion, especially her affection for Empress Teishi. In the eighty-fourth chapter the author impersonally describes Teishi's entry into the court as an empress consort. After it the image of snow comes to be more boldly used as an objective correlative for her faith in the empress. It is as if she tried to cover the prosaic monotony of the eighty-fourth chapter with the poetical beauty of snowy landscapes.

In the Nara Period a wooden slip was excavated from the gutter of the Nijō-ōji Avenue. On the slip there are inscribed the magic words which prescribe the treatment of malaria with the metaphor of a divine gatekeeper who lets loose a tiger to devour the demon of epidemics. The prescription is thought to be roughly based on the Chinese medical book Senkin-yokuhou, but the same kind of magic words can be found already in Sankai-kyō and other earlier medical books. Therefore the prescription on the wood slip must be grasped in the context of not only medical but also magical and animistic discourses that had been formed since the eighth century.

When I re-read several classical works after the Tohoku Earthquake in 2011, I couldn't help finding a certain marks of natural disasters left on some of them. So I thought that the author of Ise-monogatari might have depicted the landscape of Shiogama with the memory of the Jogan Sanriku Earthquake in mind. The fury of vengeance in Soga-monogatari must have been modeled after the violence of catastrophes such as earthquakes and eruptions. Takizawa-Bakin often used natural disasters as an important narrative device probably because he saw something sublime and transcendent in them. In this way here I will consider a relation between nature and literature in terms of the impact of natural disasters on literary works.