subject of his risqué, somewhat pornographic novels. The authorities, fearful lest the works of men like Saikaku corrupt public morals, often attempted to suppress them. But with the increased use of printing in the Tokugawa period, this was not an easy task even for the well-organized Edo police, and the novels of Saikaku continued to have a great vogue with city dwellers.
The drama of the age, like the novel, reflected the tastes of the city merchant class. Starting with a puppet drama in the seventeenth century, there developed in the course of the Tokugawa period a new dramatic form known as Kabuki, which is still the most popular form in Japan. Kabuki stressed realism of action and of setting. It utilized the revolving stage with great success, and the settings it developed were in many respects far superior to those of the Occidental theater. In sharp contrast to the slow moving and sedate Nō drama of the Ashikaga period, the Kabuki maintained a high degree of emotional tension and dealt freely in scenes of violence and melodrama.
Possibly the influence of the city dwellers may be seen also in the field of poetry, in which there appeared a new and excessively brief poetic form, the haiku—a reduction of the classical thirty-one syllable poem to a mere seventeen syllables. In the hands of a master like the seventeenth-century poet, Basho, the haiku was a superbly clever creation, conjuring up a whole scene with all its emotional overtones in a simple phrase or two. But its brevity made it even more limited as a literary form than the old classical poem, and the thousands of faddists who took up haiku writing during the