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Notes:

1. To sustain peace, the Tokugawa shoguns expelled Portuguese traders and Christian missionaries, who tended to play one feudal baron against another in order to subvert local power, and prohibited any Japanese from traveling abroad.
2. During this period of peace and stability, the role of samurai retainers in maintaining shogunal authority shifted from warriors to bureaucrats.
3. Often indifferent to tradition, this new merchant class developed a culture of its own, reflecting the fast pace of urban life in woodblock prints, short stories, novels, poetry, and plays.
4. Ihara Saikaku is known as a founder of new, popular "realistic" literature, writing about the foibles of the merchant class in urban Osaka.
5. Cultivating the persona of the lonely wayfarer, Matsuo Basho's austere existence was the antithesis to Saikaku's prosperity.
6. Ueda Akinari is known for his successful insinuation of the supernatural into everyday life and his keen understanding of the irrational implications of erotic attachment.

Text:
* blue words within the text indicate important notes to remember

1. From the middle of the fifteenth century until the beginning of the seventeenth, Japan was splintered by chaos and bloodshed until the Tokugawa clan reunited it under a strict but peaceful rule. To sustain peace, the Tokugawa shoguns expelled Portuguese traders and Christian missionaries, who tended to play one feudal baron against another in order to subvert local power, and prohibited any Japanese from traveling abroad. This policy of isolation was designed to freeze political, social, and economic conditions.
2. During this period of peace and stability, the role of samurai retainers in maintaining shogunal authority shifted from warriors to bureaucrats. Urban samurai developed needs that were quickly met by enterprising merchants, artisans, and laborers. Although the new commercial class that emerged from these changes was denied access to political power, as the nation's bankers and suppliers they did control much of the real power.
3. Often indifferent to tradition, this new merchant class developed a culture of its own, reflecting the fast pace of urban life in woodblock prints, short stories, novels, poetry, and plays. Pun and parody were central to popular literature. As publishing is itself a commercial enterprise, books began to circulate in printed form rather than manuscript form, so that literature came to the urban masses.
4. Ihara Saikaku is known as a founder of new, popular "realistic" literature, writing about the foibles of the merchant class in urban Japan. Inheriting his family's business at a young age, Saikaku "retired" after the death of his wife before his thirtieth birthday. Even before his "retirement," he was well known as an "amateur" poet, particularly for the new form of "chain poetry" that involved the collaboration of several poets in a stream-of-consciousness-like manner. Restrained by poetry, he turned to prose fiction at age forty.
5. After the death of his friend and poetry companion, Matsuo Basho moved to Edo (now Tokyo) to better his chances at establishing a career as a teacher and corrector of poetry. Cultivating the persona of the lonely wayfarer, Matsuo Basho's austere existence was the antithesis to Saikaku's prosperity. As a prose equivalent of a linked sequence of haiku, Basho embedded haiku into the travel narrative of The Narrow Road of the Interior. Some 250 years after his death, the publication of the second diary of Sora, Basho's traveling companion, revealed that Basho was more practical and wily than in his own recording and that he had altered details of their trip in order to cultivate patrons and students.
6. A physician and scholar, Ueda Akinari is best remembered as a writer of ghost stories. Ueda Akinari is known for his successful insinuation of the supernatural into everyday life and his keen understanding of the irrational implications of erotic attachment. He was a student of Japanese classics, medieval Japanese folktales, Chinese literature, and no theater.