Looks at the history of Japanese literature, identifies major authors and their works, and discusses literary terms, theater, and criticism.

The description for this book, The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature, will be forthcoming.

"[The] Companion is superb. . . . It is one of the most important reference tools ever to have appeared in the field of Japanese studies and its writers have earned our gratitude as well as our admiration. . . . All this information, a whole library in a single volume, is--thanks to its original structure--extremely easy to use."---Donald Richie, The Japan Times