'The Creation of the Soul of Japan" is how Donald Keene, the eminent Japanologist, subtitled his 2003 biography of 15th-century shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa. What is the soul of Japan? Tea, flowers, noh drama, simplicity, suggestiveness. War too — but Yoshimasa had no taste for war. No taste for power either. He wished he'd never been made shogun. As soon as he could — not soon enough — he abdicated.

"(Possibly) the worst shogun ever to rule Japan," Keene calls him, in "Yoshimasa and the Silver Pavilion." There were, to be fair, extenuating circumstances. Yoshimasa (1436-90) was born into a maelstrom. His father — Shogun Ashikaga Yoshinori — was murdered. That was in 1441; Yoshimasa was 5. Yoshinori was a monster of cruelty who deserved his fate if anyone did. Still, the child must have been deeply shaken.

He became shogun at 13, in 1449, immediately falling into the clutches of the predictable palace cabal — ambitious retainers, scheming women. "Instead of entrusting the affairs of the country to his worthy ministers," says the contemporary "Chronicle of Onin," "Yoshimasa governed solely by the wishes of inexperienced wives and nuns" — chiefly his mother, his wife and his former nurse. "Yet these women did not know the difference between right and wrong and were ignorant of public affairs and the ways of government."