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This week, I'm going to recommend the narrow road to the interior and Hojoki by Matsuo Bashi and Kamo Cholme as narrated by Togo Igawa.

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your copy. Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 370, The Poetess.

As I've mentioned before on this podcast, I didn't really get poetry until I started studying Japanese history,

mostly because a lot of the poetry I read in high school was taught divorced from its historical context,

with more of a focus on how the poem worked than how it fit into a certain time or place.

Japanese poetry, and especially the poetry of the Edo period, was a big revelation for me,

because suddenly I started to get why poetry could be something other than a purely self-indulgent

exercise.

How all of this fit into a broader socio-ultural context where poetry represented a mark of cultural

sophistication and a form of intellectual competition.

And yes, before anyone gets too upset with me, it's not just Japanese poetry where that

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