The Distant Isle honors the late Robert H. Brower with a memorial collection of fifteen essays and translations on Japanese literature. The book coheres broadly around the question of how to read Japanese, its fifteen authors bringing a range of concerns to bear. Roughly two-thirds of the papers collected here are concerned with the languages and literatures of premodern Japan. The other third concern modern Japanese language and literature. Although Professor Brower rarely published outside the field of his own expertise in waka poetry, he inspired his students to a diversity of interests and critical approaches, as these articles demonstrate.