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A Note on the Translation

The Journal of Sōchō (Sōchō shuki ) was compiled from  to  by Saiokuken Sōchō (–), the preeminent linked-verse (renga) poet in Japan at the time. It depicts four major journeys between the Kyoto area and Suruga, where Sōchō served as the poet laureate of the Imagawa daimyo house, as well as several shorter excursions and long periods of stasis at various hermitages. Much of Sōchō’s time in and around the capital was spent at Daitokuji or other temples related to his spiritual master, the Zen prelate Ikkyū; in the east, he generally divided his time between lodgings in the Suruga capital and in his Brushwood Cottage (Saioku), in Mariko not far away. The historical and literary context of the work is introduced in the companion volume to the translation, entitled Song in an Age of Discord: The Journal of Sōchō and Poetic Life in Late Medieval Japan. As described in that study, Sōchō’s journal was written during the Age of the Country at War (Sengoku jidai), a century of unprecedented collision between social groups and artistic genres. It was perhaps for that reason that linked verse was the most popular and widely practiced literary form during that era, for its practitioners linked not only verses but cultures as well. Renga masters traveled between the capital, still Japan’s cultural center, and the periphery, facilitating interaction and cultural borrowing as they linked verses into long renga sequences. Sōchō’s journal reflects the interaction of the period and the diverse upbringing of its author, a companion of daimyo and warlords, a disciple of Sōgi, the renga master who sought to preserve orthodox poetic neoclassicism, and a devotee of Ikkyū, the iconoclastic Zen priest. It provides one of the most personal literary self-portraits in the medieval literary corpus. The work is notable for its breadth and freshness of observation, not only of the activities of linkedverse poets and the affairs of great courtiers and daimyo, but also of the lives of local warriors and commoners. This richness of cultural detail is matched by the