"The annals of Japanese literary history abound with stories of suffering literati. [...] None of these, however, seems to have borne more grief than the Zen monk Shotetsu (1381-1459), [...] For Shotetsu was not once but thrice stricken: first, by the loss of all of the poems of his first thirty years—more than 30,000 of them—in a fire that destroyed his residence in 1432, at the age of fifty-two; second, by the confiscation of his estate revenues by an angry shogun at around the same time; and lastly by the refusal of his rivals to allow him any representation whatsoever in the only imperially commissioned poetic anthology of his time, the Shin shokuko-kinshū of 1439."