Table of Contents:
“…Volume I: The first thousand years -- The age of the Manyōshū -- The first turning point -- The age of the Genji monogatari and the Konjaky monogatari -- The second turning point -- The age of Nō and Kyōgen -- Volume II: The years of isolation -- Part I: The third turning point -- Contact with the West -- The intellectuals -- Hon'ami Kōetsu and his circle -- The masses: tears and laughter -- Genroku culture -- The 'Japanization' of Confucianism -- Ogyū Sorai and his method -- Arai Hakuseki -- Glorious deaths -- Haikai: the art of Bashō -- Chōnin ideas and reality: Ihara Saikaku -- Part II: The age of wit and learning -- Education, peasant risings, the distant West -- Bunjin: the literati -- Tominaga Nakamoto and Andō Shōeki -- Shingaku: studies of the heart -- Chūshingura and the popular novel -- Hiraga Gennai and the 'Dutch scholars' -- Miura Baien and Yamagata Bantō -- Moroori Norinaga and national learning -- Ueda Akinari -- Kabuki and pictures of the 'floating world' -- The literature of laughter -- Volume III: The modern years -- Part I: The fourth turning point -- The way to the modern age -- The national polity and 'Dutch studies' -- Poetry and prose in Chinese -- The realism of everyday life -- Chōnin escapism -- The peasants: disaffection unrecorded -- Yoshida Shōin and the generation of 1830 -- Fukuzawa Yukichi and "Westernization' -- Nakae Chōmin: 'Freedom and people's rights' -- Narushima Ryūhoku and nostalgia for Edo -- Part II: The age of Meiji -- The generation of 1868 -- Kōda Rohan and Izumi Kyōka -- Suzuki Daisetsu and Yanagita Kunio -- Masaoka Shiki and Natsume Sōseki -- Mori Ōgai -- Unchimura Kanzō, Abe Isō and Christian ideals -- The 'naturalist' novelists -- Kōtoku Shūsui, Kawakami Hajime and socialism -- Arshima Takeo and Nagai Kafū -- Part III: The age of industrialization -- The generation of 1885 -- Tanizaki Jun'ichirō and other novelists -- Kinoshita Mokutarō and other poets -- The generation of 1900 -- Marxism and literature -- Akutagawa, Kawabata and Taishō fiction -- Scholars of foreign literature and poets -- Three co-ordinates -- Part IV: The postwar years -- Recovery -- In retrospect: personal experiences of war -- Japan opens to the world -- Rapid growth and the managed society.…”