YOSHIMASA AND THE SILVER PAVILION: The Creation of the Soul of Japan, by Donald Keene. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, 10 illustrations, 224 pp., $29.95 (paper).

In the appropriate volume of his monumental history of Japanese literature, Donald Keene only once mentions the eighth Ashikaga Shogun Yoshimasa (1443-1490). This is in connection with the craze for composing renga poetry, a fad that "extended to every part of the country; and even in the capital where the emperor and the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa did their best to forget that people were being killed and houses destroyed a few steps away, the craze raging unabated during the worst of the fighting."

One senses disapproval. Indeed, one learns in this new history of Yoshimasa and his times that this disapproval was well deserved. Diaries of the period describe the destruction of Kyoto, the death of its citizens. One writer described how the stench from the corpses clogging the Kamo River pervaded the entire capital. When another stood on the Shijo Bridge and looked down into the water, the river looked to him like a hilly landscape of bodies.

The Shogun barely even looked out of the window, so occupied was he with renga, tea ceremonies, expensive gardens and even more expensive palaces. Yoshimasa, says Keene, "may have been the worst shogun ever to rule Japan. He was a total failure as a soldier."