he knows it almost by heart? "How inimitable!" cries the enraptured Japanese reader, "how truly excellent!" "Excellent, yes!" the European retorts, "excellent to send one to sleep, with its interminable accounts of the impossible adventures of eight knights, who personify the eight cardinal virtues through the labyrinth of a hundred and six volumes!
Sum total: what Japanese literature most lacks is genius. It lacks thought, logical grasp, depth, breadth, and many-sidedness, it is too timorous, too narrow to compass great things. Perhaps the Court atmosphere and predominantly feminine influence in which it was nursed for the first few centuries of its existence stifled it, or else the fault may have lain with the Chinese
chiefly in the honorific terminations of the verbs, as natural to a courtly dialect as the gorgeous but cumbrous costumes and the elaborate ceremonial of the palace. There is no superabundance of descriptive adjectives or anything to correspond to our word-painting. The want of interest complained of seems to me to proceed from a misunderstanding of the writer's object. She was not bent on producing a highly wrought plot or sensational story. Her object was to interest and amuse her readers by a picture of real life, and of the sentiments and doings of actual men and women. There is no exaggeration in the Genji, no superfine morality, and none of the fine writing that abounds in modern Japanese fiction. What Murasaki-no-Shikibu did for Japanese literature was to add to it a new kind of composition, viz. the novel, or epic, of real life as it has been called. She was the Richardson of Japan, and her genius resembled his in many ways. She delighted specially in delineating types of womanhood. Indeed, the whole work may be regarded as a series of pictures of this kind, drawn with minute care, and from a full knowledge of her subject-matter. She does not deal in broad strokes of the pen. Her method is to produce graphic and realistic effects by numerous touches of detail. This is, however, incompatible with simplicity of style. Her sentences are long and somewhat complicated, and this with the antique language and the differences of manners and customs constitutes a very serious difficulty to the student. The Genji is not an easy book either to us or to the author's modern fellow-countrymen. The labour of mastering its meaning is probably one reason why it is not more appreciated. As a picture of a long past state of society, there is nothing in the contemporary European literature which can for a moment be compared with it. It contains a host of personages from Mikados down to the lowest court attendants, to elucidate whose genealogy the standard Kogetsushō edition has devoted a whole volume. Its scene is laid sometimes in Kyōto, but also changes to Hiyeizan, Suma, and other places in the neighbourhood. A whole calendar of court ceremonies might be compiled from it. If we remember that it was written long before Chaucer, Dante, and Boccaccio shone on the horizon of European literature, it will appear a truly remarkable performance." (This quotation is made, not from the History of Japanese Literature itself, but from a preliminary essay entitled The Classical Literature of Japan, read before the Japan Society, London, in June, 1898.)
