From the Country of Eight Islands

Rating:
Summary: Essential for all lovers of Japanese poetry
Review: An excellent selection of Japanese poetry through the ages, with translations by two excellent translators. (Whatever Amazon thinks, Hiroaki Sato is a well-known translator.)

Rating:
Summary: Indispensable
Review: If you write, read, or care in any way about poetry, this book should be by your bedside or at your work table. I gave mine away, but I intend to replace it.

Rating:
Summary: A must-have for students of Japanese Lit.
Review: There are any number of small and large collections of Japanese poetry available, some being general anthologies, some being translations of entire works. In this single volume, an enormous amount of poetry has been selected and translated, making it one of the best English references/texts on Japanese literature available.

Little more needs to be said about the good points, so a little about what this book does not have.

It would have been nice to have the original Japanese along with the translations. Although translation-only books are the norm, the student looking to get further in-depth will need to go and search through the original texts to find. This is a great pain as the only clues a person has to go on are the work the poem was taken from, the author, and English translations. It would also be nice to see a new edition which includes the Sinpen Kokka Taikan reference numbers for the poems. If a person had just these, even, looking up the originals would be simplicity itself.

Another problem is the lack of detailed notes. Although some terms and other words are defined in footnotes and the glossary, there is still much that a serious student will need to fully explore the poems.

Even if you can read the poems in the original, this is still a nice reference to have. If you need to teach, or need to check up on possible translations for a passage or poem, this may be of more use than it seems. Japanese studies students should have a copy handy, to say the least.