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audible trial.com slash Japan to claim your offer. This week I'm going to recommend

Chuangzu, the inner chapters, by Jha Fu Feng. If you're not familiar with Taoism, I think this is a much better place to start

with one of China's most complex philosophic traditions than the more usual starting place,

the Daodejing. Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching tends to be, well, complicated and hard to follow

unless you have a real understanding of the concepts

being discussed.

Zhuangze, by comparison, relies more on anecdotes and storytelling, and I think is just much, much

easier to follow.

Actually, when I teach Taoism, this is the text I use.

Go to audible trial.com slash Japan to claim your copy.

Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 355, Tales of Moonlight and Rain.

Since we spent last week talking about literature, this seemed like an opportune moment

to put together an episode I've been thinking about for a very long time on one of the more interesting literary pieces from the Edo era.

Honestly, if you were to ask me to put together a class on Edo literature,

this text, which we're going to talk about today, would be one of the first places my mind would turn,

probably alongside the Kanadei-Hun Shushungura, one of the more famous fictionalized versions of the 47 Ronin story.

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