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impaired their literary value. Nevertheless, Chikamatsu ranks with Seami as a dramatic genius, one of the rare ones Japan has produced. His plays are of two types—heroic dramas based on historical events (however loosely) and domestic dramas that often revolve around lovers’ suicides. The former plays are usually more interesting to watch in performance at the puppet theatre, but the latter, dealing as they do with moving human experiences, have a greater attraction as literature. The poetry of Chikamatsu’s plays is also remarkable, at times attaining heights seldom reached elsewhere in Japanese literature.
Saikaku, Bashō, and Chikamatsu were not only dominant figures in their own time but the objects of adulation and imitation for many years afterward. In the domain of the novel it was not until Ueda Akinari (1734–1809) that an important new voice was heard. Akinari was heavily indebted to Chinese novels and stories for the material of his own, but by the artistry at his command was able to produce several striking works. Takizawa Bakin (1767–1848) was also much influenced by Chinese novels, some of which he translated or adapted. In contrast to these writers of academic pretensions, we have also Jippensha Ikku (1766–1831) whose “Hizakurige” is a lively, purely Japanese work which now seems more likely to survive as literature than the towering bulk of Bakin’s novels, so esteemed in their day.
There were several important haiku writers in the late Tokugawa Period, notably Yosa Buson (1716–1781) and Kobayashi Issa (1763–1828). Buson brought to the haiku a romantic quality lacking in Bashō’s and was a poet of aristocratic distinction. Issa, on the other hand, lent to the haiku the genuine accents of the common people. Haiku poets had always prided themselves on using in their verses images drawn from daily life instead of the stereotyped cherry blossoms and maple leaves of the older poetry, but the mere fact that the word “snail” or “frog” appeared in a poem instead of “nightingale” did not automatically bring it much closer to the lives of the common people. Issa had a real love for the small and humble things of the world, and he makes us see them as no other Japanese poet did. Buson was a flawless technician, but Issa’s verses, whatever their other qualities, often hardly seem like haiku at all.
