ABSTRACT
This chapter covers the roughly five hundred years that constitute the Nara and Heian periods, with some attention to the following Kamakura period. During these centuries, Japan's culture went through many changes. The literature of the Nara period incorporated elements from earlier times that, by the refined standards of the Heian court, seemed primitive. By the Kamakura, elements of medieval Japan's warrior culture were blended into the aristocratic arts. If the Nara period tends to be seen, not quite accurately, as an age that valued foreign culture, the conventional view is that, in the Heian period, aristocrats assimilated continental elements to produce a distinctively Japanese culture. Kokinshu offers insights into Heian courtly taste. Unlike the haiku of a much later time, waka in the Kokinshu manner have not found a wide audience outside Japan. This may in part be due to their verbal complexity. Heian courtly taste in literature tended toward the lachrymose—with one notable exception.
