the rule in Japan at this time; at least they often style it the "Queen-country." Many instances might be quoted of Japanese women exercising an influence and maintaining an independence of conduct quite at variance with our preconceived notions of the position of women in the East. It is this which gives their literary work an air of freedom and originality which it would be vain to expect in the writings of inmates of a harem.
The fact that the Heian literature was largely the work of women no doubt accounts partly for its gentle, domestic character. It abounds in descriptions of scenes of home and court life, and of amours and sentimental or romantic incidents. Though the morality which it reveals is anything but strait-laced, the language is uniformly refined and decent, in this respect resembling the best literature of China, upon which the Japanese taste was formed, and contrasting strongly with the pornographic school of popular fiction which disgraced Japan in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The Heian period witnessed an important advance in the art of writing, the invention of the phonetic script known as Kana. The ancient Japanese had no writing. When they began to write their own language phonetically they had no alternative but to use Chinese ideographs for the purpose. This system was open to two objections. A Chinese character is a complicated contrivance, consisting of numerous strokes, and as a complete character was required for each syllable of the polysyllabic Japanese words, an intolerable cumbersomeness was the result. The second objection was that a given Japanese syllable might be represented by any one of several Chinese characters. Some hundreds were actually in use to write the forty-seven syllables of which
