In Representations of Power, the author examines the cultural politics of dominant ideologies in Japan from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, analyzing the role played by literary texts—poetry, drama, comedy, narrative—in the creation and maintenance of political power. Each chapter deals with a major historical theme and some facet of the medieval literary canon: classical poetry as practiced in the disputes of the Northern and Southern imperial courts; no drama as appropriated for political ends by temples, shrines, and shoguns; legendary material created, adapted, and manipulated in the service of assimilation by Buddhism of non-Buddhist creeds; and, finally, the creation of a literature of the Japanese proto-bourgeoisie (machishu) as a means of resisting competing interests and giving expression to the new realities of economic power.

This is a provocative and persuasive study that seeks to restore medieval texts to their proper place in a political and cultural setting of complexity and ambiguity. The arguments it advances make it impossible for the thoughtful reader ever again to be uncritically satisfied with a purely aesthetic response to Japanese literature.