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bursts into the room to find her at her devotions: “ ‘Terrible,’ he exclaimed, as he watched me burning incense and fingering my beads, the Sutras spread out in front of me. ‘Worse even than I had expected. You really do seem to have run to an extreme.’ ”[1]
Japanese poetry, as I have noted, made amazing progress in the eighth century. In the tenth century Japanese prose evolved to its highest development. With respect to prose style itself, one of the most important contributors to this progress was Ki no Tsurayuki (died 946) whose preface to the “Kokinshū,” or “Collection of Ancient and Modern Poetry,” is celebrated, and whose “Tosa Diary” was the first example of what was to become an important genre, the literary diary. One may note in Tsurayuki’s prose some Chinese influence, such as the parallelism, but his is essentially a Japanese style both in vocabulary and construction.
The prose works of the early tenth century were of two main types: the fairy tales derived ultimately from the legends of Japan, China, and India; and the more realistic prose of the poem-tales.[2] It was not until these two streams united that the Japanese novel, in a true sense, could be born. The outstanding product of this convergence and, indeed, the supreme masterpiece of Japanese literature, was “The Tale of Genji.” Although this novel contains many hundred poems, it is not, like “The Tales of Ise,” merely a collection of poetry linked by prose descriptions, and if it benefited by the example of such earlier “novels” as “The Tale of the Bamboo-Cutter,”[3] it went immeasurably beyond them in depth and magnitude. It is a work of genius, which may justifiably be included among the great novels of the world. Thanks to the incomparable translation by Arthur Waley it is now available to Western readers.
One of the unusual features of Heian literature is that such works as the “Kagerō Nikki,” “The Pillow Book” of Sei Shōnagon, “The Tale of Genji,” most of the diaries, and much of the poetry were written by women. The usual explanation for this curious fact is
- ↑ Translated by Edward Seidensticker.
- ↑ See page 67.
- ↑ There is a poor English translation by F. V. Dickins and a good French one by René Sieffert.
