A History of Japanese Literature by Donald Keene
Published 1976 · 600,000 words · about 50 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Literary History
How hard is A History of Japanese Literature to read?
A History of Japanese Literature scores 58 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 65 out of 100
- Japanese literary terms — mono no aware, wabi, makura-kotoba, haiku, renga — explained but essential; requires engagement with a foreign critical vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- Sustained engagement with classical Japanese aesthetics, Buddhist and Shinto influence on form, and the ideological pressures on modern literature.
- Information density: 82 out of 100
- Extraordinarily dense; four volumes covering 1,300 years of literary production across every genre.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Direct scholarly survey; each period is introduced, its major figures analyzed, and their significance assessed.
- Symbolic density: 14 out of 100
- Critical and historical throughout; Keene explains the symbolic systems of Japanese literature rather than deploying them.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- Keene's mild irony appears when Western critical frameworks prove inadequate to Japanese literary practice.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- Each section resolves its argument; critical judgments are stated clearly and defended.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- Four volumes requiring the reader to track generic, periodic, and ideological strands across 1,300 years.
How A History of Japanese Literature is regarded
A History of Japanese Literature holds a literary regard score of 48 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.