Weighed down by this incubus at the top, the national spirits sought a vent in the lower strata of society. In the inimitable sketch-book of Hokusai, the bourgeois artist who threw all classical rules to the winds, we see the sort of people who really "had a good time," while their betters bored themselves to extinction, namely, the Japanese shopkeepers and artisans. We see their homely jokes, their drunken sprees, their occasional sly hits at superiors, as when, for example, a group of street Arabs is depicted making fun of some Confucian sage behind his back, or as when the stately Daimyō's procession becomes a procession of grass hoppers bearing a mantis in a basket. The theatre, which no gentleman ever entered, was their happy hunting-ground, the pieces being written expressly to suit them, so that what nourished on the boards was, as may be supposed, not precisely a classic taste. The same in literature:—we must turn our backs on the books written for the upper class, and betake ourselves to vulgar company, if we want to be amused. Often, no doubt, the expressions are coarse. Nevertheless, let us give honour where honour is due. Though spades are called spades, we rarely, if ever, encounter any attractive refinement of wickedness.
It will have been gathered that most of the European forms of fun have Japanese parallels. Japanese puns, for instance, are not so very unlike our own, excepting one class which rests on the shapes of the Chinese written characters. Their comedies are of two kinds. The more modern ones are genuine comedies of manners; those handed down from the Middle Ages, and ranking as semi-classical because acted as interludes to the Nō, or lyric dramas, are of the nature of broad farce,—mere outline sketches of some little drollery, in which a leading part is generally played by the man-servant Tarōkaja, a sort of Japanese Leporello, and which always ends in a cut and run. Japanese comic poetry is mostly untranslatable. Fortunately their comic art speaks a dialect which all can more or less understand, though doubtless acquaintance with Japanese manners and customs, traditions, and superstitions will add much to an appreciation of the artists verve.
