In his own time Ikkyu Sjun was more important as a Zen master than as a writer. Yet, the expression of who he was is concentrated so vividly in his writings, particularly in the retrospective verse collection Kyunshu (Crazy Cloud Anthology, circa 1480), that he appears to stride across centuries and present himself with an immediacy unparalleled among other medieval writers. As the Zen scholar Yanagida Seizan put it, “It is a strange and wonderful thing that everyone has the sense of secretly having met him somewhere before. Is he not perhaps the only one of a kind in the history of Buddhism through India, China and Japan"” One gets a sense of what Yanagida is speaking about by looking at the portrait of Ikkyu produced by his student Bokkei, one of the most famous portraits in the history of Japanese art. Half sadly, half challengingly, his eyes stare...