About

Haruo Shirane is the Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture, and serves as the Vice Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. He teaches and writes on premodern and early modern Japanese literature and culture, with particular interests in prose fiction, poetry, performative genres such as storytelling and theater, and visual culture. His research explores Japanese literary and cultural history through various media, emphasizing manuscript culture, media, vocality, and performance, especially from social peripheries. Shirane has authored and edited numerous influential works, including Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, which examines cultural constructions of nature across a broad spectrum of Japanese literature, media, and visual arts from ancient to modern times. He is engaged in ongoing projects such as Media, Performance, and Play: Japanese Culture from Outside In. His scholarship also encompasses the impact of The Tale of Genji on Japanese cultural history, as well as new approaches to Japanese literary theory and methodology. Shirane has translated and edited key anthologies of Japanese literature, and written pedagogical texts on classical Japanese language. His contributions have been recognized through various grants and awards, including the Ueno Satsuki Memorial prize for outstanding research on Japanese culture.

Research topics

• Classical mechanics
• Environmental science
• Literature
• Physics
• Art

Selected publications

• Defilement, Outcasts, and Disability in Medieval Japan: Reassessing Oguri and Sermon Ballads as Regenerative Narratives

  Japanese Journal of Religious Studies · 2025-03-31

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  This article explores four major types of defilement in premodern Japan—what I call contact defilement, transgressive defilement, Buddhistic defilement, and cyclical defilement—that are critical to understanding a wide range of premodern Japanese cultural and social phenomena and that lie behind the emergence of outcasts and the belief in serious illness as defilement from the mid-twelfth century. I demonstrate how these different types of defilement and corresponding purification rites intersect and form the backbone for such notable sermon ballads as Shintokumaru and Oguri, which flourished in the late medieval and early Edo period and which can be understood as “regenerative narratives” in which the protagonist suffers from a series of defilements and social ostracization before being purified and resurrected. The article unpacks the significance of pilgrimage to Kumano that represents both pollution and purification, and reveals the revolutionary roles that the Jishū mendicants and itinerant women (like Kumano nuns) had in pushing back against established notions of defilement and aiding those considered to be most polluted. Finally, I look at the role of original-ground stories, a new medieval paradigm in which gods/deities first suffered as human beings before deification, an excruciating experience that enabled them to understand and aid the deprived and the outcast.

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• Beyond the Haiku Moment

  Routledge eBooks · 2023 · 2 citations

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  • Art
  • Physics
  • Literature

  This chapter discusses preconceived ideas about haiku, including haiku as direct personal experience and haiku as non-metaphorical, seasonal words, and the division between haiku and senryu. Shirane argues for broadening the form’s parameters for English-language writers, reminding readers that traditional Japanese literary markers are complex and non-replicable outside their specific cultural context. Expanding on prevailing notions of haiku as a form of poetry about nature, the chapter demonstrates haiku’s deep roots in human relationships and cultural meaning. In this way, haiku is framed within the notion of transit, suggesting that the strongest haiku works will engage with poetic and spiritual predecessors. The chapter concludes that for the haiku poet interested in serious poetry, it is important to attend to two key axes: the vertical axis that entails awareness of one’s previous literary traditions and cultural memories and the horizontal axis that registers contemporary, everyday life.

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• 「作者」とは何か : 継承・占有・共同性

  岩波書店 eBooks · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Environmental science
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• What Global English Means for World Literature

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2019-06-13

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• Haiku

  New Literary History · 2019-01-01 · 7 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Haiku Haruo Shirane (bio) The seventeen-syllable (5/7/5) haiku is often said to be the shortest poetic genre in the world. How is it possible for it to be so short and still be poetry? How did the haiku come to be? Is the haiku really short? What impact did the genre have in the global marketplace? Let us begin with a famous haiku by Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694): kareeda nikarasu no tomarikeriaki no kure on a leafless brancha crow comes to rest—autumn nightfall1 The haiku (originally called hokku, or the opening verse, in haikai, or popular linked verse) relies traditionally on a seasonal word (aki no kure, autumn evening), to indicate the time and place of the hokku. The haiku was usually composed in a communal setting, with the opening poem often an address from the guest (the poet) to the host. Equally important, the seasonal word anchored the poem in a historical and social moment, and the same haiku could be used later in diaries and travel literature, much like a photo might be today, as snapshots to record an experience or memorable scene. The seasonal word had another key function: to anchor the verse in an established poetic tradition, where "autumn" implied loneliness and fading of life, a culturally shared association. The other key aspect of haiku was the "cutting word" (kireji), which splits the poem in two and allows the two halves to reverberate. Here the image of the crow settling on a leafless branch in evening (kure means both "evening" and "end," implying the end of autumn) reverberates with the seasonal word ("autumn evening," or "evening in late autumn"). The reader must enter into the "cut," the open space, and connect the two parts in her head. As the term hokku (opening verse) suggests, the hokku was followed by a fourteen-syllable "added verse" (tsukeku) to create a world or scene [End Page 461] (5/7/5/7/7) that combined the world of the hokku with that of the tsukeku. The tsukeku, usually composed by another poet, was in turn followed by yet another "added verse" (5/7/5) that played on the hokku to create a new scene (5/7/5/7/7), which combined the third verse and the second verse. A group of poets (sometimes solo) thus created sequences of thirty-six verses, 100 verses, and so forth. The hokku/haiku (the opening verse of a haikai linked verse) was therefore both a short, autonomous form and the beginning of a larger sequence. Only in the modern period, under the influence of modern Western notions of autonomous verbal art "owned" by a single author, was the opening verse divorced from the poetic sequence and from the communal functions that it occupied in the premodern and early modern periods. Japan's preeminent classical genre was waka (literally, Japanese poetry), a short thirty-one-syllable (5/7/5/7/7) lyric that was identified with a single author and that could be read as an autonomous text. But most waka included a brief preface giving either the circumstances of composition or the poetic dai, or "topic" (such as "autumn evening"). Waka also appeared in collections, anthologies, poetic sequences, and in diaries and prose, where it was interspersed as a form of dialogue. Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), the pioneer of modern Japanese poetry, condemned haikai linked verse, which he regarded as a trivial social game, and declared that only the hokku, the opening seventeen-syllable verse, which he saw as textually autonomous, had value. "The hokku (haiku) is literature. Renga (classical linked verse) and haikai (popular linked verse) are not." "Linked verse emphasizes change, a non-literary element."2 However, the legacy of the linked verse genre today remains in at least three ways: first, the idea that the haiku marks a particular social time and space; second, that anyone should be able to compose a haiku; and third, that the reader must complete the haiku. The shortness and simplicity of haiku were the result of social necessity: the need for an easily accessible verbal medium to mark a social occasion. The haiku poet does not...

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• 15. Constructing “Japanese Literature”: Global and Ethnic Nationalism

  University of Hawaii Press eBooks · 2017-12-31

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• Reading "The Tale of Genji"

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2015-12-17 · 88 citations

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  Written one thousand years ago, The Tale of Genji is a masterpiece of Japanese literature, often regarded as its best prose fiction. Read, commented on, and reimagined by poets, scholars, dramatists, artists, and novelists, the tale has left a legacy as rich and reflective as the work itself. The most comprehensive record of The Tale of Genji's reception to date, this sourcebook presents a range of landmark texts relating to the work during its first millennium, almost all of which are translated into English for the first time. An introduction prefaces each set of documents, situating them within the tradition of Japanese literature and cultural history. These texts provide a fascinating glimpse into Japanese views of literature, poetry, imperial politics, and the place of art and women in society. Selections include a recorded conversation among court ladies gossiping about their favorite Genji characters and scenes; learned exegetical commentary; a vigorous debate over Genji's moral concerns; and an impassioned defense of Genji's ability to enhance Japan's standing among the twentieth century's community of nations. Taken together, these documents reflect Japan's fraught history with vernacular texts, particularly those written by women

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• Reading the tale of Genji

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2015-01-01

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• Setsuwa (anecdotal) literature:Nihon ryōikitoKokon chomonjū

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2015-07-31 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In the early Heian Academy, talented scholars were sometimes able to rise to posts on the Council of State itself, but the hegemony of the Fujiwara Regents' House effectively ended literati political influence. During the mid to late Heian period, the collection Godansho contains many anecdotes illustrating the friction between hereditary scholars and unaffiliated students, as in this conversation about Sugawara no Fumitoki, scion of the Sugawara lineage, and Minamoto no Shitago, a less prestigious student from the same Letters curriculum. Another burst of glory for the traditional scholarly families was Oe no Masafusa, a child prodigy who tutored and advised three emperors, and was the first of his lineage to sit on the Council in over a century. Near the end of his life, Masafusa's student Fujiwara no Sanekane, began keeping a record of his conversations with his teacher, Godansho, an important influence on later setsuwa literature.

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• ThePillow Bookof Sei Shōnagon

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2015-07-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Kayo first appeared as a literary category in the early twentieth century and was used to describe the songs of the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki to emphasize the view that they were oral songs dating from a period prior to the use of Chinese writing. The common poetic theme in both the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki is that of the ruler's marriage, which accounts for half of the songs in the Kojiki and one-third of the songs in the Nihon shoki. The Kojiki in fact has no songs at all after the sixth century and 88 songs out of its total of 112 appear in only six reigns, those of Jinmu, Yamato Takeru's father Keiko, Ojin, Nintoku, Ingyo, and Yuryaku. The Kojiki and the Nihon shoki are mytho-historical narratives of the formation of the imperial realm of Yamato, told from an impersonal perspective that is located outside the world of the text.

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Frequent coauthors

• David B. Lurie

  University of California, Los Angeles

  17 shared

• Wiebke Denecke

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  10 shared

• Joshua S. Mostow

  10 shared

• Sonja Arntzen

  7 shared

• Norma Field

  University of Chicago

  6 shared

• Ivo Smits

  5 shared

• Robert Borgen

  5 shared

• Torquil Duthie

  University of California, Los Angeles

  5 shared

Awards & honors

• Kadokawa Genyoshi Prize
• Ishida Hakyo Prize
• Ueno Satsuki Memorial prize (2010)