hara-kiri, urges caution. He ultimately succeeds in tracing out, by his detectives, the whole history of Tenichi Bō's criminal career, and the story ends dramatically with the arrest, exposure, and execution of the chief culprits. It is true in all its more important features.
The Jitsuroku-mono were suppressed by the Shōgun's Government in 1804, as containing matter injurious to the fame of Iyeyasu, the deified founder of the dynasty, and his lieutenants. At the same time all mention of real personages belonging to the military caste who lived after 1573 was prohibited in works of fiction. The Jitsuroku-mono continued, however, to be read in manuscripts, which formed a substantial part of the stock of the circulating libraries.
Wasōbiōye is a sort of Japanese Gulliver. The hero drifts out to sea from the port of Nagasaki in a fishing-boat, and reaches the Land of Perennial Youth and Life, the Land of Endless Plenty, the Land of Shams, and finally the Land of Giants, meeting with numerous adventures, which are related with no little humour. This work has not been treated as a very important contribution to Japanese literature. Mr. Chamberlain, who has translated the best part of it for the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan,[1] speaks of it as of no particular importance or celebrity, and the native writers of literary history take no notice of it whatever. It appears to me that it is deserving of a more favourable judgment, and I confess that I prefer it to the more celebrated work suggested by it, namely, the Musōbiōye of Bakin. I tran-
- ↑ Vol. vii. (1879).
