edition of ten thousand copies, creating a demand for paper which, we are told, appreciably affected the market-price of that commodity.
In addition to his novels, Bakin wrote a miscellany entitled Yenseki Zasshi, which gives interesting information on such subjects as folk-lore and popular superstitions. His Gendo Hōgen is another work of a somewhat similar character. He also wrote an account of a journey to Kiōto in 1802, which was published long after his death.
Bakin's writings have some obvious merits. They prove, sometimes only too conclusively, that he was a man of great learning, intimately acquainted with the history, religion, literature, and folk-lore both of China and Japan. His style is usually flowing, perspicuous, and elegant, and he possesses a command of the resources of his own tongue unique among his contemporaries. His language is a happy medium between the purism of such writers as Motoöri and the semi-Chinese jargon of the later Kangakusha. It is honourable to him that at a time when pornography was the rule rather than the exception with writers of fiction, his writings are free from all indecency of language, and are invariably moral in their tendency. They alone were excluded from the sweeping prohibitive measure directed against light literature by the Shōgun's Government in 1842.
Perhaps the quality which most strikes European readers of Bakin's novels is his prodigious fertility of invention. The number and variety of surprising incidents with which they are crowded can have few parallels. On the other hand, his faults are as glaring as his merits are conspicuous. For the profusion of incidents with which he crowds his pages, he has recourse to his memory as
