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Japanese commonly use proverbs, often citing just the first part of common phrases for brevity. For example, one might say i no naka no kawazu (井の中の蛙, 'a frog in a well') to refer to the proverb i no naka no kawazu, taikai o shirazu (井の中の蛙、大海を知らず, 'a frog in a well cannot conceive of the ocean').
The Japanese yojijukugo are closely related to the Chinese chengyu, in that a great many of the former are adopted from the latter and have the same or similar meaning as in Chinese. [2] Many other yojijukugo, however, are Japanese in origin. Some examples of these indigenous Japanese four-character idioms are:
This is a list of kigo, which are words or phrases that are associated with a particular season in Japanese poetry.They provide an economy of expression that is especially valuable in the very short haiku, as well as the longer linked-verse forms renku and renga, to indicate the season referenced in the poem or stanza.
Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases composed of 17 morae (called on in Japanese) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern; [1] that include a kireji, or "cutting word"; [2] and a kigo, or seasonal reference. However, haiku by classical Japanese poets, such as Matsuo Bashō, also deviate from the 17-on pattern and sometimes do not contain a kireji.
The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories is a 2018 English language anthology of Japanese literature edited by American translator Jay Rubin and published by Penguin Classics. With 34 stories, the collection spans centuries of short stories from Japan ranging from the early-twentieth-century works of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and Jun'ichirō ...
A kakekotoba (掛詞) or pivot word is a rhetorical device used in the Japanese poetic form waka.This trope uses the phonetic reading of a grouping of kanji (Chinese characters) to suggest several interpretations: first on the literal level (e.g. 松, matsu, meaning "pine tree"), then on subsidiary homophonic levels (e.g. 待つ, matsu, meaning "to wait").
For example, niwa tsu tori (庭つ鳥, bird of the garden) was in classical Japanese a makurakotoba for kake (鶏, chicken). In modern Japanese, niwatori has displaced the latter word outright and become the everyday word for "chicken" (dropping the case marker tsu along the way). Some more makurakotoba are listed below: [7]
Poetic diary (歌日記, uta nikki) or Nikki bungaku (日記文学) is a Japanese literary genre, dating back to Ki no Tsurayuki's Tosa Nikki, compiled in roughly 935. Nikki bungaku is a genre including prominent works such as the Tosa Nikki , Kagerō Nikki , and Murasaki Shikibu Nikki .