their teeth and strain their arms [with rage] by his writings."
That there is some truth in this I am not concerned to deny. I nevertheless venture the prediction that when the Japanese people have more completely shaken off, as they are doing every year, the Chinese influences which have moulded their character and formed their tastes for centuries, Bakin's heroes and heroines will appear to them as grotesque and unreal as they do to us. His works will then be relegated to the same limbo which contains the romances of chivalry so dear to Europe before Cervantes, and be regarded merely as a document of a passing phase of the national development.
The best known of Bakin's contemporaries is Riutei Tanehiko (1783–1842), a Samurai of the Tokugawa house, from which he received an annual allowance of two hundred bales of rice. Like Kiōden, he was in early life an artist. He also practised Haikai writing with some degree of success. As a writer of fiction he is best known for his romantic novels; but he also published stories in dramatic form (shōhonjidate), meant only for reading, and not for the stage. Another kind of novel, of which he wrote a few volumes, was the ninjōbon or "sentiment book," which will be noticed presently. He was also the author of several works which are of a useful character, but have no pretensions to be regarded as literature.
Among his novels may be mentioned the Awa no Naruto (1807), the Asamagatake Omokage Zōshi (1808), and its continuation the Shujaku Monogatari (1812). The plot of the last two works is taken from an old play, and the scene is in the fourteenth century.
