has been for several years engaged in collecting and collating materials for a history which will probably rank with anything of the kind in existence.
In their poetry above everything the Japanese have remained impervious to alien influences. It owes this conservation to its prosody. Without rhyme, without variety of metre, without elasticity of dimensions, it is also without known counterpart. To alter it in any way would be to deprive Poetry. it of all distinguishing characteristics. At some remote date a Japanese maker of songs seems to have discovered that a peculiar and very fascinating rhythm is produced by lines containing 5 syllables and 7 syllables alternately. That is Japanese poetry (uta or tanka). There are generally five lines: the first and third consisting of 5 syllables, the second, fourth and fifth of 7, making a total of 31 in all. The number of lines is not compulsory: sometimes they may reach to thirty, forty or even more, but the alternation of 5 and 7 syllables is compulsory. The most attenuated form of all is the hokku (or haikai) which consists of only three lines, namely, 17 syllables. Necessarily the ideas embodied in such a narrow vehicle must be fragmentary. Thus it results that Japanese poems are, for the most part, impressionist; they suggest a great deal more than they actually express. Here is an example:—
| Momiji-ha wo | More fleeting than the glint of withered leaf wind-blown, the thing called life. | |
| Kaze ni makasete | ||
| Miru yori mo | ||
| Hakanaki mono wa | ||
| Inochi nari keri |
There is no English metre with this peculiar cadence.
It is not to be inferred that the writers of Japan, enamoured as they were of Chinese ideographs and Chinese style, deliberately excluded everything Chinese from the realm of poetry. On the contrary, many of them took pleasure in composing versicles to which Chinese words were admitted and which showed something of the “parallelism” peculiar to Chinese poetry, since the first ideograph of the last line was required to be identical with the final ideograph. But rhyme was not attempted, and the syllabic metre of Japan was preserved, the alternation of 5 and 7 being, however, dispensed with. Such couplets were called shi to distinguish them from the pure Japanese uta or tanka. The two greatest masters of Japanese poetry were Hitomaro and Akahito, both of the early 8th century, and next to them stands Tsurayuki, who flourished at the beginning of the 10th century, and is not supposed to have transmitted his mantle to any successor. The choicest productions of the former two with those of many other poets were brought together in 756 and embodied in a book called the Manyōshū (Collection of a Myriad Leaves). The volume remained unique until the beginning of the 10th century, when (A.D. 905) Tsurayuki and three coadjutors compiled the Kokinshū (Collection of Odes Ancient and Modern), the first of twenty-one similar anthologies between the 11th and the 15th centuries, which constitute the Niju-ichi Dai-shū (Anthologies of the One-and-Twenty Reigns). If to these we add the Hyaku-ninshū (Hundred Odes by a Hundred Poets) brought together by Teika Kyō in the 13th century, we have all the classics of Japanese poetry. For the composition of the uta gradually deteriorated from the end of the 9th century, when a game called uta-awase became a fashionable pastime, and aristocratic men and women tried to string together versicles of 31 syllables, careful of the form and careless of the thought. The uta-awase, in its later developments, may not unjustly be compared to the Occidental game of bouts-rimés. The poetry of the nation remained immovable in the ancient groove until very modern times, when, either by direct access to the originals or through the medium of very defective translations, the nation became acquainted with the masters of Occidental song. A small coterie of authors, headed by Professor Toyama, then attempted to revolutionize Japanese poetry by recasting it on European lines. But the project failed signally, and indeed it may well be doubted whether the Japanese language can be adapted to such uses.
It was under the auspices of an empress (Suiko) that the first historical manuscript is said to have been compiled in 620. It was under the auspices of an empress (Gemmyō) that the Record of Ancient Matters was transcribed (712) from the lips of a court lady. And it was under the auspices of an Influence of Women in Japanese Literature. empress that the Chronicles of Japan were composed (720). To women, indeed, from the 8th century onwards may be said to have been entrusted the guardianship of the pure Japanese language, the classical, or Chinese, form being adopted by men. The distinction continued throughout the ages. To this day the spoken language of Japanese women is appreciably simpler and softer than that of the men, and to this day while the educated woman uses the hiragana syllabary in writing, eschews Chinese words and rarely pens an ideograph, the educated man employs the ideograph entirely, and translates his thoughts as far as possible into the mispronounced Chinese words without recourse to which it would be impossible for him to discuss any scientific subject, or even to refer to the details of his daily business. Japan was thus enriched with two works of very high merit, the Genji Monogatari (c. 1004) and the Makura no Zōshi (about the same date). The former, by Murasaki no Shikibu—probably a pseudonym—was the first novel composed in Japan. Before her time there had been many monogatari (narratives), but all consisted merely of short stories, mythical or quasi-historical, whereas Murasaki no Shikibu did for Japan what Fielding and Richardson did for England. Her work was “a prose epic of real life,” the life of her hero, Genji. Her language is graceful and natural, her sentiments are refined and sober; and, as Mr Aston well says, her “story flows on easily from one scene of real life to another, giving us a varied and minutely detailed picture of life and society in Kiōto, such as we possess for no other country at the same period.” The Makura no Zōshi (Pillow Sketches), like the Genji Monogatari, was by a noble lady—Sei Shōnagon—but it is simply a record of daily events and fugitive thoughts, though not in the form of a diary. The book is one of the most natural and unaffected compositions ever written. Undesignedly it conveys a wonderfully realistic picture of aristocratic life and social ethics in Kiōto at the beginning of the 11th century. “If we compare it with anything that Europe has to show at this period, it must be admitted that it is indeed a remarkable work. What a revelation it would be if we had the court life of Alfred’s or Canute’s reign depicted to us in a similar way?”
The period from the early part of the 14th century to the opening of the 17th is generally regarded as the dark age of Japanese literature. The constant wars of the time left their impress upon everything. To them is due the fact that the two principal works compiled during this epoch were, The Dark Age. one political, the other quasi-historical. In the former, Jinkōshōtō-ki (History of the True Succession of the Divine Monarchs), Kitabatake Chikafusa (1340) undertook to prove that of the two sovereigns then disputing for supremacy in Japan, Go-Daigo was the rightful monarch; in the latter, Taihei-ki (History of Great Peace), Kojima (1370) devoted his pages to describing the events of contemporaneous history. Neither work can be said to possess signal literary merit, but both had memorable consequences. For the Jinkōshōtō-ki, by its strong advocacy of the mikado’s administrative rights as against the usurpations of military feudalism, may be said to have sowed the seeds of Japan’s modern polity; and the Taihei-ki, by its erudite diction, skilful rhetoric, simplification of old grammatical constructions and copious interpolation of Chinese words, furnished a model for many imitators and laid the foundations of Japan’s 19th-century style. The Taihei-ki produced another notable effect; it inspired public readers who soon developed into historical raconteurs; a class of professionals who are almost as much in vogue to-day as they were 500 years ago. Belonging to about the same period as the Jinkōshōtō-ki, another classic occupies a leading place in Japanese esteem. It is the Tsure-zure-gusa (Materials for Dispelling Ennui), by Kenkō-bōshi, described by Mr Aston as “one of the most delightful oases in Japanese literature; a collection of short sketches, anecdotes and essays on all imaginable subjects, something in the manner of Selden’s Table Talk.”
The so-called dark age of Japanese literature was not entirely unproductive: it gave the drama (Nō) to Japan. Tradition ascribes the origin of the drama to a religious dance of a pantomimic character, called Kagura and associated with Shintō ceremonials. The Nō, however, owed its development The Drama. mainly to Buddhist influence. During the medieval era of internecine strife the Buddhist priests were the sole depositaries of literary talent, and seeing that, from the close of the 14th century, the Shintō mime (Kagura) was largely employed by the military class to invoke or acknowledge the assistance of the gods, the monks of Buddha set themselves to compose librettos for this mime, and the performance, thus modified, received the name of Nō. Briefly speaking, the Nō was a dance of the most stately character, adapted to the incidents of dramas “which embrace within their scope a world of legendary lore, of quaint fancies and of religious sentiment.” Their motives were chiefly confined to such themes as the law of retribution to which all human beings are subjected, the transitoriness of life and the advisability of shaking off from one’s feet the dust of this sinful world. But some were of a purely martial nature. This difference is probably explained by the fact that the idea of thus modifying the Kagura had its origin in musical recitations from the semi-romantic semi-historical narratives of the 14th century. Such recitations were given by itinerant Bonzes, and it is easy to understand the connexion between them and the Nō. Very soon the Nō came to occupy in the estimation of the military class a position similar to that held by the tanka as a literary pursuit, and the gagaku as a musical, in the Imperial court. All the great aristocrats not only patronized the Nō but were themselves ready to take part in it. Costumes of the utmost magnificence were worn, and the chiselling of masks for the use of the performers occupied scores of artists and ranked as a high glyptic accomplishment. There are 335 classical dramas of this kind in a compendium called the Yōkyoka Tsūge, and many of them are inseparably connected with the names of Kwanami Kiyotsugu (1406) and his son Motokiyo (1455), who are counted the fathers of the art. For a moment, when the tide of Western civilization swept over Japan, the Nō seemed likely to be permanently submerged. But the renaissance of nationalism (kokusui hoson) saved the venerable drama, and owing to the exertions of Prince Iwakura, the artist Hōsho Kuro and Umewaka Minoru, it stands as high as ever in popular favour. Concerning the
