Yoshimasa and the Silver Pavilion: The Creation of the Soul of Japan

Medieval Japan was a brutal, violent epoch in which local lords strived to carve out their own power niches. The best hope for stability was a strong, ruthless shogun, a type of military dictator who supposedly ruled on behalf of the emperor. Based on that necessity, the fifteenth-century shogun Yoshimasa was particularly ill suited for the job. He seems to have been repelled by the military arts, and he had little taste for the political manipulations required to control the ambitious feudal barons. He presided over the virtual destruction of the power of the shogunate. Yet Keene (Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 2002) is not writing a hatchet job. Rather, he shows how this monkish aesthete sponsored a great flowering and diffusion of Japanese culture, including theater, poetry, and architecture, and the influence of that flowering is still felt in modern Japan. This is a book that requires patience and at least a rudimentary knowledge of Japanese history. But for those who wish to fully appreciate the roots of Japanese culture, it has value. —Jay Freeman, Booklist