The last major court literatus of the medieval period, Sanjnishi Sanetaka spent his entire adult life amid the anarchy and violence of Sengoku jidai (Age of the Country at War, 1467-1568) as a member of an erstwhile ruling elite that was losing the vestiges of its political power and economic base to its ostensible social inferiors among the provincial military. Admired by his contemporaries and successors for his poetry and scholarship, he is also important to literary history for his contributions to the preservation of his cultural heritage. Through tireless copying and collating he helped to save the great works of the courtly tradition from destruction, and by selling copies he made of those classics and teaching them to provincial warriors and wealthy commoners he both expanded courtly literary influence and ensured his family's physical survival in the face of dwindling revenues from his provincial holdings. Just as...