The Asian Shelf · to 1970

Two hundred and fifty-nine authors, corpora and anonymous classics; three hundred works exactly. The limit was set deliberately: a shelf of this range could easily run to a thousand titles and become a catalogue rather than something a reader might actually work through. Three hundred is a decade of serious reading, and every inclusion had to displace something.

What the shelf covers

China, Japan and India carry the weight — roughly ninety, sixty and seventy entries respectively — because those three literatures are the deepest and the most continuously documented. Korea, Tibet, Vietnam, Java, Thailand and the Mongol steppe are represented by their standout works rather than surveyed: the Nine Cloud Dream, Milarepa's songs, the Tale of Kieu, the Secret History of the Mongols. That is a real imbalance and a deliberate one; a Korean or Vietnamese reader would rightly build this differently.

Where it stops, and why

1970 — twenty years beyond the Western shelves, because 1950 cut the post-war generation off at the knees. The shelf now carries Mishima, Ōe, Endō, Abe and Ibuse; Pramoedya, Faiz and Qurratulain Hyder; Ananthamurthy and Narayan at full strength. Mishima's suicide in November 1970, after the failed coup at the Ichigaya garrison, makes as good a closing date as any. What is still missing is everything after it: the Cultural Revolution's survivors, Rushdie's generation, Murakami, the Korean and Taiwanese booms. Any end-point here is arbitrary and this one is less arbitrary than most.

What is deliberately not here

The Islamic world has its own shelf covering Arabic, Persian, Turkic and Indic vernacular writing to about 1700, so Rumi, Hafiz, Ferdowsi, the Thousand and One Nights and the Mughal Persian tradition belong there rather than here. Two exceptions have been made for writers who fall after that shelf's cut-off and are unmistakably part of the modern Indian story: Ghalib and Iqbal.

Sacred texts are included where they are also literature or where no account of a civilisation survives their omission — the Rigveda, the Pali canon, the Daodejing, the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Commentarial traditions, ritual manuals and the vast technical literatures of law, medicine and astronomy are represented by a handful of monuments rather than surveyed.

Two doors in

The Standing filter divides the shelf three ways. Foundational marks the texts a civilisation defined itself by — the Analects, the Upanishads, the Man’yōshū, the Adi Granth, the Laws of Manu, Mao’s essays. Read as literature marks what survives as art — Genji, Du Fu, the Dream of the Red Chamber, Bashō. Most of the greatest things are both, and the three-way split is a rough instrument rather than a judgement.

Authors, corpora and anonymity

A great deal of this material has no author in the modern sense. Where a text is anonymous or accretive it appears under its own name — The Tale of the Heike, the Panchatantra, Jin Ping Mei — and where a tradition matters more than any individual it is grouped: the Alvars and Nayanars, the sijo poets, the Jian’an poets. Attributions like Vyasa, Valmiki and Laozi are retained as the names under which the works are known, not as claims about authorship.

On translation

More than on the Western shelves, the choice of translation determines what a reader actually encounters. Waley’s Genji and Seidensticker’s and Tyler’s are three different books; the same is true of every rendering of the Daodejing. Where the choice materially changes the experience, the edition note says which one and why.

Dates

Dates are given as BC and AD throughout, with AD supplied wherever a bare number in the first millennium would be ambiguous. Where a text accreted over centuries — the Mahabharata, the Pali canon, the Arthashastra — the span is given rather than a false precision, and the entry is filed at the point the text became substantially what it now is.

Absences that were hard to accept

Casualties of the three hundred limit include the Chinese anthologies of Buddhist verse, most of the Japanese war tales, the Prakrit and Apabhramsha lyric, the Sanskrit commentators, the Ming and Qing drama beyond four titles, the whole tradition of Chinese landscape and calligraphy criticism, and almost all Burmese, Khmer, Sinhalese and Filipino writing. If the cap were four hundred, those would come first.

Nothing here is settled. Argue with it; the list is meant to be argued with.