Matsuo Bashō’s Realism

In his seminal essay, “The Discovery of Landscape,” Karatani Kōjin argues that, in the history of Japanese literature, the beauty of landscape was discovered for the first time at the turn of the twentieth century. In Karatani’s view, poets in the medieval court only looked at the natural world through the lens of classical literary convention, and early modern poets such as Matsuo Bashō (1644–94) and Yosa Buson (1716–83) still did not look at the landscape with their own eyes. It would simply be anachronistic, then, to assume that premodern poets had the sense of scenic beauty as