2-723-280 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Autumn Evening with Full Moon on Musashino Plain, early 1600s. The Japanese view of the world is a temporal one, guided in its major rhythms by the seasons. Poems of the four seasons have been crafted since the ninth century and compiled into anthologies that, in turn, spawned a legion of new poems and anthologies that, cumulatively, are regarded as the origins of Japanese literature. Of those poems, those with autumn themes predominate.