Announcement: The Metropolitan Museum's Aki no yo no naga monogatari - An Annotated Edition and Translation

[Or Porath]

Dear All,

Please see the below announcement of a new publication:

Announcement: The Metropolitan Museum's Aki no yo no naga monogatari - An Annotated Edition and Translation into Modern Japanese.

Aki no yo no naga monogatari emaki: chūshaku to kenkyū 秋夜長物語絵巻　注釈と研究　
By Aki no yo no naga monogatari emaki kenkyūkai. 秋夜長物語絵巻研究会
(Abe Yasurō 阿部泰郎, Eguchi Keiko 江口啓子, Shikatani Yūko 鹿谷祐子, Suematsu Misaki 末松美咲, Hattori Yuka 服部友香, and オリ・ポラト（Or Porath).

Tokyo: Kachōsha, 2026.

This co-authored book explores a well-known yet comparatively understudied tale, Aki no yo no naga monogatari (“A Long Tale for an Autumn Night”), dated to the late fourteenth or the early fifteenth century, which recounts the love story between an adult monk and a young acolyte (chigo) within the monastic world of Tendai Buddhism. The work is regarded, among Japanese scholars of literature, as one of the greatest literary masterpieces in Japan, because of its layered incorporation of medieval religious worldviews, skillful narrative structure, and a diverse lyrical style. This complexity is nowhere more evident than in the illustrated scrolls preserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, whose pictorial program offers a rich visual counterpart to the text’s doctrinal and emotional frame. Written in Japanese, this volume presents a fully annotated transcription of the Metropolitan Museum of Art scrolls, a philological comparison of extant textual variants, a glossary of key terms, a comparative study of the illustrations across different versions, and a collection of short scholarly essays.

Please see the link below for purchase:

https://kachosha.com/books/9784868030348/

Best,

Or Porath

--

Or Porath, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor 

Department of East Asian Studies

Max Webb Building, Room 517
Tel Aviv University

P.O. Box 39040

Tel-Aviv, 69978, Israel

Vice-President, Society for the Study of Japanese Religions

Rituals of Initiation and Consecration in Premodern Japan: Power and Legitimacy in Kingship, Religion, and the Arts (with Fabio Rambelli)

Japan’s Forgotten God: Jūzenji in Medieval Texts and the Visual Arts