Cultural Imprints draws on literary works, artifacts, performing arts, and documents that were created by or about the samurai to examine individual "imprints," traces holding specifically grounded historical meanings that persist through time. The contributors to this interdisciplinary volume assess those imprints for what they can suggest about how thinkers, writers, artists, performers, and samurai themselves viewed warfare and its lingering impact at various points during the "samurai age," the long period from the establishment of the first shogunate in the twelfth century through the fall of the Tokugawa in 1868.

Introduction: Remembering the Samurai in Medieval and Early Modern Japan, by Elizabeth A. Oyler and Katherine Saltzman-Li1. Memento Mori: Mori Warriors, Manase Physicians, and the New Medico-Cultural Nexus of the Late Sixteenth Century, by Andrew Edmund Goble2. Hideyoshi and Okuni's Kabuki: Memories Preserved in a Screen Painting, by Marimi Tateno3. Finding Origins and Meaning in the Warring States, by Luke S. Roberts4. Plotting War during the Great Peace: The Uses of Warfare in Late Edo Tales of the Strange, by William D. Fleming5. Ghosts along the Road: War Memory and Landscape in Medieval Narratives, by Elizabeth A. Oyler6. Narrated and Danced Memory of Warand Resignation: The Role of Musical Delivery, by Alison Tokita7. Performing Trauma and Lament: Gendered Scenes of Samurai Anguish on the Eighteenth-Century Kabuki Stage, by Katherine Saltzman-Li8. In Memorandum: Dragonflies and Drums, by Monica Bethe9. Representing Memory in the Warrior Plays, by Thomas Hare