Thursday, April 25 at 5 p.m., Humanities 250 For writers, clerics, officials, and others living in Japan around the turn of the 13th century, China functioned simultaneously as the matrix of a shared regional culture and as a contrastive background against which patterns of Japanese cultural formation could be discerned. This lecture will discuss the imagining of contemporary and ancient China in various works written by the influential Japanese poet and courtier Fujiwara no Teika including the Tale of Matsura.