In Utsuho-monogatari Fujiwara-no-Nakatada almost unreasonably shows distrust for his daughter's wet nurse although she is a woman of a very decent family. This can be attributed to a primal experience in his early childhood. His parents didn't have their son under the care of a wet nurse on the superstition that wet-nursing tortures a baby. This prejudice subconsciously implanted in his mind comes to the surface when Nakatada has his own child to take care of.
When the new grand hall was completed in 1818, Bizen-ya, the famous brothel at Furuichi of Ise, distributed free copies of Ise-meibutsu-kayou-kamikaze written by Shikitei-Sanba and illustrated by Utagawa-Kuninao for an advertisement. The house also ordered Shikitei-Sanba and Shikatsube-no-Magao to make a brochure and used the ukiyoe prints by Ryūryūkyo-Shinsai and by Utagawa-Kunimaru for its commercial purpose. The framed calligraphic work by Ōta-Nanpo was hung on the alcove of the grand hall. As the brothel's taste for Edo arts shows, Ise and Edo were more closely bound by cultural ties than has ever been thought.
Tachibana-Akemi, a poet of the late Edo Period, made a series of poems with the word “cold” in their titles. Probably he did so under the influence of Shō-Shisen, a Chinese poet of the Qing Dynasty, through the two kanshi poets Rai-Sanyō and Hirose-Gyokusō. This paper will examine Tachibana's poetical style in terms of his relations to the three poets and his use of uncommon themes that was patterned after the style of Kan-Chazan as well as that of Hirose-Gyokusō.
Sakutarō Hagiwara can be called a “suburban writer” not only because he moved to the suburban areas of Tokyo after the Great Kantō Earthquake but also because from his own suburban experiences he created insightful literary writings on modern urbanization. Tabata and Magome, then the small towns on the edge of Tokyo, meant to him a sort of imaginary hometown, a frontier soon to be swallowed up by the great wave of urbanization and commercialism. This paper will review his poems, essays, and novels to show how Hagiwara saw modern Japan from the viewpoint of a suburban writer.