The Tokugawa family held the shogunate from 1603 to 1867, ruling Japan
and keeping the island nation isolated from the rest of the world for
more than 250 years. Donald Keene looks within the "walls" of isolation
and meticulously chronicles the period's vast literary output, providing
both lay readers and scholars with the definitive history of premodern
Japanese literature.
World Within Walls spans the age in which Japanese literature began to
reach a popular audience--as opposed to the elite aristocratic readers
to whom it had previously been confined. Keene comprehensively treats
each of the new, popular genres that arose, including haiku, Kabuki, and
the witty, urbane prose of the newly ascendant merchant class.