IV. THE JAPANESE NOVEL
The novel has a longer history in Japan than in any other country, and has sometimes attained heights rarely reached elsewhere. It is difficult to say just when the first Japanese novel was written, if only because the definition of the word “novel” itself is so uncertain. If we adopt some arbitrary definition, such as calling any work of fiction in prose over 100 pages in length a novel, we may then say that there are Japanese novels as far back as the tenth century, and that the tradition has remained unbroken to this day.
The Japanese novel had a double origin. There were first of all the anecdotes and tales such as are found in the earliest books. Many of these may have been passed down from generation to generation as part of the national folklore, but there were also stories of Chinese and Indian origin, which came in with the introduction of Buddhism. Such stories ranged in length from a few lines to a dozen or more pages, and, although their contents were highly varied, tales of the strange and miraculous predominated, as one might expect in view of the religious inspiration of most of them.
These stories, often of a fantastic nature, furnished part of the background for the novel. The other important source lay in Japanese poetry. I have mentioned the obscurity of much Japanese verse. The shortness of the commonly used forms was such that, in the attempt to impart as much suggestive power as possible, the poets often left out such obvious information as might be necessary for the comprehension of their verses. This may have been the reason why so many of the early poems have short prose prefaces describing the circumstances under which they were composed. Thus, if the preface says that the verse was presented to a friend about to depart on a sea-journey, the words “you may be tossed about” presumably refer to the motion of the boat, rather than to any other possibility which the unelucidated words might possess. Sometimes the prefaces were longer than the poems they introduce; we can see how it might happen that a poet, instead of confining himself to the bare mention of his wife’s death, or whatever else had occasioned a poem, would tell in the preface about the love which the two had shared. The verse that followed then might be on the brevity of life, or any other suitable topic, the interest of the verse being increased by our knowledge of the particular circumstances under which it was written. In a similar manner, we can imagine how in later times someone, finding the poems left by a famous writer, might attempt in editing them to give the backgrounds of these poems, either from stories he had heard about the poet, or from his own intuitions. This may have been the origin of The Tales of Ise, a tenth-century work often attributed to Ariwara no Narihira. In this book we have 125 episodes, each built around one or more poems. There is no unified conception behind these little stories, although if we assume that the unnamed man who is the hero of most of them was Narihira himself, we may be able to consider The Tales of Ise as a kind of Vita Nuova, with the prose parts serving as explanations for the poems. But the organization of the book is so loose, and the connections between the episodes so tenuous, that no single narrative can be evolved, even of the kind which Shakespeare’s Sonnets have sometimes inspired.
The subject-matter of the poem-tales (if so we may style works in the genre of The Tales of Ise) was drawn, unlike the fantastic tales, from ordinary life. Many of the episodes concern some nobleman who, while hunting in a distant part of the country, falls in love with a village girl. The style and the manner of incorporating the poems into the episodes is most easily revealed by a section from The Tales of Ise such as the following one:
“There once lived a man in a remote village. One day, announcing to his beloved that he was going to the court for service there, he took a fond leave of her and departed. For three years he did not return, and the lady, having in loneliness waited so long for him, finally consented to spend the night with another man, who had been very kind to her. That very night her old lover returned. When he knocked at the door, asking her to unbolt it, she answered him through the door with this poem. ‘For three years I waited in loneliness, and just this night someone else is sharing my pillow.’ He replied, ‘Try then to love him as much as I have loved you through all these years.’ With this poem he started away, but the lady called out, ‘Whatever has happened or not happened, my heart is still, as it was before, yours.’ But the man did not turn back. Stricken with grief, she followed after him, but could not manage to catch up. In a place where a clear stream flowed, she fell, and there with blood from her finger she wrote on a stone, ‘I could not detain him—he went without a thought for me, and now shall I vanish.’ Thus she wrote, and there she died.”
If one reads just the four poems contained in this episode, one sees that they narrate the entire story, although not so clearly as when supplemented by the prose description. It may have been originally by way of a commentary on the poems that the tales were composed.
One of the early novels which most clearly shows the two sources, the strange story and the poem-tale, is The Hollow Tree, a work of the tenth century. In the first part of the book is related the story of a musician who journeys to distant countries, as far even as Persia, in search of some magic wood with which to make lutes. After many curious adventures, the man finds the wood, but it is guarded by monsters. Only with the aid of supernatural intervention is he able to carry any wood back to Japan to make his wonderful musical instruments. The rest of this part of The Hollow Tree is conceived in the fantastic vein of the earlier short-stories. But in the second part of the novel, concerned mainly with an account of the Princess Atemiya and her suitors, we are taken into a far more realistic world, and the influence of the poem-tale is conspicuous. The Hollow Tree contains some 986 poems, which is almost as high a proportion as The Tales of Ise. It is a curious book in every way, representing an undigested set of influences. But as it moves towards its close The Hollow Tree acquires considerable power, as if the author were gradually gaining confidence in the new literary medium. It is, in a sense, a history of the development of the early Japanese novel. It has every feature of a missing link save that it is not missing. It affords us exactly the kind of transition which we might have conjectured between The Tales of Ise and The Tale of Genji, written about 1000 A.D.
When the first volume of Arthur Waley’s translation of The Tale of Genji appeared in 1923, Western critics, astonished at its grandeur and at the unsuspected world which it revealed to them, searched desperately for parallels in more familiar literature. The Tale of Genji was likened to Don Quixote, The Decameron, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Tom Jones, even to Le Morte d’Arthur; in short, to almost every major work of fiction with such notable exceptions as Moby Dick. The relative suitability of such parallels will be clear after a brief consideration of the nature of the book, and of its author, Lady Murasaki.
The Tale of Genji would seem to be a conspicuous exception to many of the generalizations I have made about the qualities of Japanese literature. Far from being a work of cryptic brevity, it runs to some 2,500 pages in most editions. Older novels, such as The Hollow Tree, were quite long too, but the faultiness of their construction generally resulted in the books falling into clearly defined and almost independent segments. The Tale of Genji is not constructed in accordance with any Western novelist’s conception, but possesses rather the form of one of the horizontal scrolls for which Japan is famous. They often start with just a few figures, gradually develop into scenes of great complexity and excitement, and as gradually dwindle back into a cluster of men, then a horse, then, almost lost in the mist, a last solitary soldier. In its magnitude and its sureness of technique, The Tale of Genji is indeed exceptional, yet the work is clearly the product of purely Japanese traditions. It represents the culmination of all that had gone before, and at the same time its central importance makes it the most typical as well as the greatest work of Japanese literature. It was a classic in its own day and, devotedly read and annotated by emperors and philosophers, as well as by all manner of ordinary people, it has inspired a great deal of other literature and art. When in the seventeenth century an era of peace and prosperity followed centuries of terrible wars, it was to The Tale of Genji that the wealthy merchants turned for the model of the life they wished to enjoy, and novelists forgot six centuries of gloom in recreating Genjis of their own. That the influence of The Tale of Genji still survives, is evidenced by its great importance in the work of Tanizaki, perhaps the leading Japanese novelist of our day. Now, thanks to Arthur Waley’s superb translation, it is available to Western readers, who can now judge for themselves whether it is not only the world’s first real novel, but one of its greatest.
About the author of The Tale of Genji, Lady Murasaki (c. 975–c. 1025), we know few facts, but we fortunately still have her diary, which affords us interesting insights into her character. She says of herself:
“That I am very vain, reserved, unsociable, wanting always to keep people at a distance—that I am wrapped up in the study of ancient stories, conceited, living all the time in a poetical world of my own and scarcely realizing the existence of other people, save occasionally to make spiteful and depreciatory comments upon them—such is the opinion of me that most strangers hold, and they are prepared to dislike me accordingly. But when they get to know me, they find to their extreme surprise that I am kind and gentle—in fact, quite a different person from the monster they had imagined; as indeed many have afterwards confessed. Nevertheless, I know that I have been definitely set down at Court as an ill-natured censorious prig. Not that I mind very much, for I am used to it and see that it is due to things in my nature which I cannot possibly change. The Empress has often told me that, though I seemed always bent upon not giving myself away in the royal presence, yet she felt after a time as if she knew me more intimately than any of the rest.”[1]
We, too, as we read The Tale of Genji, feel that we are learning a great deal about Lady Murasaki, especially in such asides as
“You may think that many of the poems which I here repeat are not worthy of the talented characters to whom they are attributed. I can only reply that they were in every case composed upon the spur of the moment, and the makers were no better pleased with them than you are.”[2]
She was undoubtedly a most elegant and sophisticated lady, aware of her genius as a novelist, and possibly incurring enmity for that reason. As a novelist, she stands without rival in her time, but there were several other women who were exceptionally talented in poetry and essay-writing. Indeed, it was an age of women writers, principally because the men preferred to devote themselves to writing in Chinese, leaving the women to express the genius of the time in the native language.
The Tale of Genji is a novel of a society, the extremely civilized, perhaps even decadent court of tenth-century Japan. We should not, however, be misled into imagining that Lady Murasaki has given us a realistic portrayal of contemporary conditions. Rather, her novel is the evocation of a world which never quite existed. She tells us that the events she describes occurred at some indefinite time in the past, and hers was essentially a romantic view of a now-faded golden world. Even within the time covered by the novel, we find an increasingly pessimistic tone, and when the hero, the peerless Genji, dies, his successors are no more than likeable young men, no more, in fact, than the kind of people who really did live at the Japanese court. In this respect and many others the novel betrays an obsession with the idea of time similar to that observable in much of Japanese poetry. The splendour and beauty that marked every aspect of the career of Prince Genji fade away. Even as he watches some particularly graceful dancer or the blossoms falling from a lovely tree, there is the almost painful awareness that these things must pass. Or when, riding in the country, Genji comes across some old palace now overgrown with weeds, the sight stirs doubts within him about the magnificent mansion he himself is building. And when, later in the book, the light suddenly falls on the face of one of his old mistresses, and he realizes that to any eyes but his own she must seem no more than a middle-aged woman, the passing of time is given its sharpest expression.
Although the novel is full of humour and charm, the prevailing impression is one of sadness, in large part because of this insistence on the inexorable motion of time. Its beauty is like that of some of the paintings of Watteau, where we feel something perishable and painfully sad behind the exquisite scenes of ladies and their lovers. The impression of sadness is so dominant that we wonder what conceivably could have made critics liken the work to Tom Jones or to The Decameron. Probably it was no more than the large number of love-affairs treated in the course of the novel. But what a difference between the women Genji courts and those we find in Fielding or Boccaccio! Whether they are haughty like Aoi, or humble like Yugao, possessive like Rokujo, or yielding like the Lady from the Village of Falling Flowers, they are all possessed of an amazing degree of sensitivity and delicacy. The society of The Tale of Genji was of an almost unimaginable subtlety. People constantly exchange remarks as obscure as any conversations in a novel by Henry James, and generally in poetry. Love-affairs, unlike the hearty adventures described in Tom Jones, usually involved more pain than pleasure, as the lovers realized the impossibility of being an entire world for one another. The conduct of the love-affairs is extremely remote from any described in Western books. It was never a matter of boy meets girl, if only because girl remained concealed from boy until they were on the terms of greatest intimacy. What attracted a man to a woman might be hearing her play a musical instrument as he passed by her quarters at night, or it might be a note in her handwriting of which he caught a glimpse, or it might be just her name. Any of these things could persuade a man that he was madly in love with a woman, and cause him to pursue her until she yielded, all this without ever having seen her except at night, or perhaps by the light of fireflies.
The only Western book of which I am reminded in reading The Tale of Genji is Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. There are striking similarities of technique between the two works, such as that of casually mentioning people or events, and only later, in a symphonic manner, developing their full meaning. But above such resemblances in manner there are the grand themes common to the two. The subject of both novels is the splendours and decline of an aristocratic society, and in both the barons are noted less for their hunting and fishing than for their surpassing musical abilities, their flawless taste and their brilliant conversation. These were snobbish societies, extremely sensitive to pedigree and rank. In The Tale of Genji, for instance, the young princess who is being feared as a future empress is shocked beyond words when the truth, carefully concealed from her until that moment, is disclosed that she was born in the country and not in the capital! It is as if the Duchesse de Guermantes discovered that she had been born in some industrial suburb! In both novels, also, there is an overpowering interest in the passage of time and its effects on society. Proust is far crueller than Lady Murasaki describing how, with the passage of time, Mme. de Villeparisis, for whom fortunes were once squandered by her lovers, has become a wrinkled hag, or how the odious Mme. Verdurin in time becomes Princesse de Guermantes. But if Murasaki is kinder, she is none the less insistent on the point—the dashing young men become boring and pompous state councillors, the distinguished ladies become talkative old crones. With the figures in the novel she really cares for, however, she is more merciful, killing them off before they reach an unattractive state. In contrast to Proust, who turns the glorious world he at first pictures into a miserable company of parvenus and hideously aged aristocrats, Murasaki gradually dissolves her society into the empty spaces of her painting, leaving only a reduced figure here and there to show how great a falling-off there has been.
Murasaki gave her views on the art of the novel in a famous passage in The Tale of Genji. Genji, discovering one of the court-ladies deeply engrossed in reading a romance, at first teases her, then continues:
“ A‘s a matter of fact I think far better of this art than I have led you to suppose. Even its practical value is immense. Without it what should we know of how people lived in the past, from the Age of the Gods down to the present day? For history-books, such as the Chronicles of Japan, show us only one small corner of life; whereas these diaries and romances which I see piled around you contain, I am sure, the most minute information about all sorts of people’s private affairs. …’ He smiled, and went on: ‘But I have a theory of my own about what this art of the novel is, and how it came into being. To begin with, it does not simply consist in the author’s telling a story about the adventures of some other person. On the contrary, it happens because the storyteller’s own experience of men and things, whether for good or ill—not only what he has passed through himself, but even events which he has only witnessed or been told of—has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart. Again and again something in his own life or in that around him will seem to the writer so important that he cannot bear to let it pass into oblivion. There must never come a time, he feels, when men do not know about it. That is my view of how this art arose. “ ‘Clearly then, it is no part of the storyteller’s craft to describe only what is good or beautiful. Sometimes, of course, virtue will be his theme, and he may then make such play with it as he will. But he is just as likely to have been struck by numerous examples of vice and folly in the world around him, and about them he has exactly the same feelings as about the pre-eminently good deeds which he encounters: they are important and must all be garnered in. Thus anything whatsoever may become the subject of a novel, provided only that it happens in this mundane life and not in some fairyland beyond our human ken.’ ”[3]
The ideas in this passage are so familiar to us because of the works of modern writers, particularly Proust, that we cannot perhaps immediately see how extraordinary they actually are. Clearly, neither the strange story nor the poem-tale, the two forerunners of the Japanese novel, attempted to give us any coherent idea of the past in a desire to preserve it from oblivion. Nor, for that matter, do we find any such intent in The Decameron, Tom Jones, nor in many other European novels before the nineteenth century. To tell a good story in such a way as to keep the reader’s attention from page to page is an essential feature of every novel, but to make this story the vehicle for one’s own thoughts, one’s own memories and impressions, one’s own feeling for the past, seems a strikingly modern method. Again, the dispassionate acceptance of all material, whether good deeds or bad ones, with no attempt at drawing a moral from them, is also an exceptionally advanced idea, especially for Japan, where it was shortly to be buried for many centuries.
It is when looking at The Tale of Genji in its historical surroundings that we feel most keenly its unique charm for us. We do not stand at a sufficiently great distance from the world and time of Proust to know what finally happened to the kind of people he described, but the melancholy fate of the Japanese court society is the subject of many of the novels of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. The most famous of them, The Tale of the Heike, begins:
“In the sound of the bell of the Gion Temple echoes the impermanence of all things. The pale hue of the flowers of the teak-tree show the truth that they who prosper must fall. The proud ones do not last long, but vanish like a spring-night’s dream. And the mighty ones too will perish in the end, like dust before the wind.”
This is the mood of the times which succeeded Murasaki’s. Less than a century after she finished The Tale of Genji with its picture of the most elegant society ever known, the country was torn by civil wars. The lovely capital was wasted by fires, plagues and famines. It was at one point decided to abandon the old city, and a boy emperor was taken off to a miserable mountain village. In such terrible times many men turned to religion for comfort. In The Tale of Genji religion plays quite an important part too, a religion which finds expression in pageantry, great ceremonies in which thousands of priests participate or in the marvellous variety of Buddhist art created for those who sought to obtain merit by rich donations to the church. The Buddhism of the centuries following Lady Murasaki was essentially a pessimistic religion. Some sects preached the doctrine that the world had entered its last degenerate days, and that the only course left open for the religious man was to flee the world altogether and live as a hermit in the mountains. Salvation could be gained by murmuring one simple phrase rather than by costly rituals. The beautiful temples were left to rot, or were broken up for firewood by the sufferers from wars and natural disasters. At the end of the twelfth century a military dictatorship was established which, in one guise or another, lasted until 1868 and perhaps longer. For much of this long period it was the soldier, and not the aristocrat, who figured most importantly in Japanese novels. The generals whose chief occupation in The Tale of Genji seemed to be blending perfumes, gave way to men who slept with their swords by their pillows.
The quality of many of the novels of the period is perhaps best suggested by a fragmentary little story which, strictly speaking, does not belong to any novel at all. It is, however, typical of many of the episodes in such works as The Tale of the Heike. It is called The Tale of Tokiaki.
“When Yoshimitsu was serving as Captain of the Guards, word reached him in the capital that his elder brother, the Governor of Mutsu, had attacked the rebellious barons. He asked leave of the court to depart from the capital, and when this permission was refused, tendered his resignation as Captain of the Guards. Slinging his bowstring-bag by his side, he rode out of the capital towards the fighting.“Just this side of Kagami, in the province of Ōmi, a man wearing a dark-blue unlined hunting-cloak and green trousers, with a strapless visor pulled down over his face, rode up behind Yoshimitsu, whipping and urging his pony forward. Yoshimitsu was at first disturbed, but as the rider approached he could see that it was Toyohara Tokiaki. ‘Why have you come here?’ Yoshimitsu asked. The boy did not answer the question, but said merely, ‘I am going with you.’
“Yoshimitsu attempted to dissuade him. ‘It would make me very happy to have you with me, but the business which has taken me from the capital is very grave, and you would only be in the way if you came.’ But the boy would not listen to him, and insisted on following. Yoshimitsu could do nothing to change his mind, and thus they travelled together as far as Ashigara Mountain in the province of Sagami. Here Yoshimitsu drew up his horse and said, ‘That you have come thus far in spite of my efforts proves how strong your determination is. However, it will be an extremely difficult matter to get through the barrier at this mountain. I shall spur on my horse and break through somehow, for ever since leaving the capital I have placed no value on my life. But there is no sense in your coming any farther. Please turn back here.’ But Tokiaki still would not listen to him.
“No further word was said. Yoshimitsu understood then of what Tokiaki was thinking. Leaving the road a little, they headed through the fields to some shady trees. There Yoshimitsu cut away the underbrush and dismounted. He then placed two shields on the ground, sat on one, and had Tokiaki sit on the other. Putting all worldly thoughts far from his mind, he drew from his quiver a piece of paper which he showed to Tokiaki. On it were two pieces of music in the Arabian mode written in the hand of Tokiaki’s father, Tokimoto. Yoshimitsu had been a pupil of Tokimoto and had learned from him the secret of the arts of flutes and strings. Tokiaki’s father having died before the boy was ten, he had never taught him the secret. Yoshimitsu asked, ‘Do you have your Chinese flute with you?’ ‘Yes, it is here,’ and he took it from his breast pocket.
“ ‘You are already very good on the easy works. That must be why you were so determined to follow me.’ Yoshimitsu then taught the boy the two pieces. He said, ‘My mission is so grave a one, that I cannot tell if I shall survive. But if, one chance in a hundred, I do return to the capital, I hope I shall see you there. Now, your family has furnished the Court with musicians for many generations, and are an essential part of it. That is why I want you to return to the capital and become a master of the art.’ When he had thus spoken, the boy yielded to reason and went back.”
This is the tone of the medieval novels. It is one of loneliness, of single figures setting off for battle across landscapes which now seem destitute of the flowering trees and all the other charms they possessed some hundred years before. The music of The Tale of Genji was principally that of the sweet-toned lute. In the period of civil wars that followed, the sad notes of a solitary flute played by a soldier on some still battlefield sound again and again in the literature, particularly the novels. Many of the latter are war-tales, each with its burden of glory and ashes. The one with the most accounts of bitter fighting and disasters is ironically called The Chronicles of Great Peace. In such books the narrative is occasioned chiefly by the doings of the principal historical figures of the time, but there are numerous digressions telling of the deaths of other brave men, or of the fleeting moments of pleasure they enjoyed.
It would be misleading, however, to leave the impression that the medieval period, if so we may call the eleventh to sixteenth centuries, was a time of unrelieved gloom. Both the emperor’s court and that of the shogun knew years of prosperity, and there continued to be a fairly considerable amount of poetry turned out at these courts which, restricted as it is to the familiar clichés, scarcely shows that changes had occurred since the glorious days when Lady Murasaki wrote. But in the characteristic literary products of the period, such as the Nō plays and the linked-verse, we find the terrible sadness and loneliness which so mark the novels. Another feature of the literature of this time was its decentralization. In earlier days almost all of the important books were written in the capital by members of the aristocracy, but with the breakdown of the central government, and the retreat to hermitages and monasteries by many sensitive people, literature came to be written in distant parts of the realm, as well as at the courts. Such literature does not have local colour in any cheerful sense of the term, but reflects the loneliness and resignation of artists cut off from the poetry-making society.
In 1600 a great battle was fought on the plains of Sekigahara, as a result of which the Tokugawa family gained supreme power in Japan. From that date until 1868, this family exercised a rule of generally benevolent but increasingly ineffectual despotism. One of the results of the peace which the Tokugawa family established, was a general economic prosperity and, towards the close of the seventeenth century, a great flaring-up of all kinds of cultural activity. In the field of the novel, the medieval tales of warfare or of the life of itinerant monks no longer suited the spirit of the times. The greatest novelist of the new age, and the first important personality in this field since the Lady Murasaki of some six centuries before, was Saikaku (1642–93). The work with which he established his reputation as a novelist—he was already well known as a haiku poet—was The Man Who Spent His Life at Love-making, a gay, sometimes pornographic work which shows in many respects Saikaku’s indebtedness to The Tale of Genji. The characters of his novels are drawn for the most part from the merchant class, rather than from the aristocracy or the ranks of the samurai. Most of his so-called novels are in reality short stories of varied lengths based on the same general themes. Although the plots of these tales often show great invention, Saikaku’s outstanding qualities as a novelist are his wit and style. He is often able with a single sentence to catch a man’s character or to depict his whole way of life. For example, in describing how one alert merchant never missed a chance to increase his fortune, he says, “Even if he stumbled he used the opportunity to pick up flints for lighters.” Again, he says of this same man, “Nothing delighted him more than watching over his daughter. When the girl grew into womanhood he had a marriage-screen made for her and, since he considered that one decorated with views of Kyoto would make her restless to visit places she had not yet seen, and that illustrations of The Tale of Genji or The Tales of Ise would encourage wantonness in her mind, he had the screen painted with busy scenes of the silver and copper mines at Tada.” These excerpts are from the Treasury of Japan, a collection of stories on the theme of how to make (or lose) a fortune. The heroes of these stories are men who permit themselves no extravagance, realizing that the way to wealth lies in meticulous care of the smallest details. When some young men visit the rich merchant Fujiichi on the Seventh Day of the New Year to seek his advice on how to become millionaires, he at first has them kept waiting in his sitting-room. Then:
“When the three guests had seated themselves the pounding of an earthenware mortar could be heard from the kitchen, and the sound fell with pleasant promise on their ears. They speculated on what was in store for them. One thought it would be miso soup and pickled whale-skin. ‘No,’ said the second, ‘as this is our first visit of the New Year it should be miso soup and rice-cakes.’ But the third, after careful reflection, settled firmly for miso soup and noodles. … Fujiichi then came into the room and talked to the three of them on the requisites for a successful career. Then he concluded, “You have been talking with me since early in the evening, and you may think it high time the supper was served. But one way to become a millionaire is not to provide supper. The noise of the mortar which you heard when you first arrived was the pounding of starch for the paper covers of the great ledger.’ ”[4]
Not all of Saikaku’s stories are as humorous as this one, but even in his accounts of women who go mad for love, or of young men put to death for crimes of which they were innocent, the author maintains a detachment from the story which may remind us of Fielding in Tom Jones. At every point he contrives to show the comic features of an apparently serious tale. His books and those of other novelists of the time are sometimes called ukiyo literature. Ukiyo is a term which formerly had been used in the sense of the “sad world”, but, by taking another meaning of the word uki, ukiyo came at this time to mean “the floating world”. This was the perfect description of the new society. Change, which had formerly been considered a sad phenomenon, as expressed in the falling of the cherry-blossoms or the scattering of the autumn leaves, now came to stand for all that was most desirable. Everyone wanted to be up to date, and novelty was the goal not only of the writers of popular fiction, but of such eminently respectable people as the poet Bashō. A frequent motif in the art of the time is that of waves, the most dramatically changing of forms. The fleeting pleasures of life were more prized than the eternal values which the medieval recluses had sought. In their desire to recapture the pleasures of the day, the writers and artists sometimes went far beyond the bounds of decency, and from time to time the government adopted measures against pornographic works. But in a society where the licensed quarters were the centre of artistic life, and their denizens the subjects of most novels, plays and prints, it was perhaps too much to demand any reticence in calling a spade a spade.
The humour in the novels of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is apt to be topical, and much has therefore perished, leaving us with little more than an impression of the vitality and zest for living of the authors. So much cannot be said of the writings of Bakin (1767–1848), the last major novelist before the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Bakin, in reaction to the immorality of the novels of his immediate predecessors, declared that the purpose of his books was to “encourage virtue and reprimand vice”. This he did in an immense bulk of writing, much of which is quite unreadable today. Bakin not only wrote original novels, but also adapted some of the more famous Chinese works in this form. Up to his time, the influence of the Chinese novel had been very slight in Japan, which was a most fortunate thing. Although Chinese influence was the essential factor in the development of many aspects of Japanese culture, in literature it often proved harmful, unless thoroughly digested. Anything written in Japan in direct imitation of Chinese models, however highly valued it may have been in its day, is now completely dead. Those contemporaries of Lady Murasaki who prided themselves on their poems and essays in Chinese are now quite forgotten, and the least interesting poem in any of the famous anthologies of Japanese verse has probably been read more often than the best poem in the Chinese manner. Bakin’s novels, to the degree that they are derivative from Chinese precedents, are already falling into oblivion, even though fifty years ago he was considered by most Japanese to be the greatest of their novelists.
It is hard to give any idea with mere extracts of what Bakin is like, because the whole effect of his artistic method was achieved by drowning the inadequacies in the plot with a flood of beautiful words. The closest approximation to his style is perhaps obtained in the highly inaccurate Victorian translation of the novel entitled The Moon Shining Through a Cloud-Rift on a Rainy Night. The boy Tajikichi has just shot a hawk, and now rather regrets killing the bird. His sister speaks first.
“ ‘Ah!’ sadly ejaculated Taye; then, noticing the scroll, added, ‘What is that tied to its leg?’
“Her brother cut the silk cord, and, seeing the seal, exclaimed—
“ ‘This is a letter from our honourable father! I have killed his loyal messenger!’ As he spoke, he reverently pressed the scroll to his forehead, then, removing the fastening, read a few words; when big tears dropped from his red eyelids, and his bosom heaved with grief. After a moment he controlled his emotion, and said—‘Honourable elder sister, this is from our honourable father—written when he was about to start upon the lonely road.’ ”[5]
This is bad enough to be at once a parody of Bakin and of translation from the Chinese in general. Although the language of the original is Japanese, even metrical Japanese, the sentiments are Chinese. Or, rather, we may say that they are a Japanese piece of chinoiserie, bearing the same relation to the originals as our eighteenth-century porcelains and furniture to the real Chinese style.
It must be admitted that the Japanese novel in the early nineteenth century had dropped to its lowest level, tending to be either collections of jokes in doubtful taste, or else dreary moralizing tales in many volumes. It was a denatured literature, possessing little of the elegance of style or evocative power of the famous novels of earlier days. The 250 years of peace had created interesting new problems which should have been the subjects of novels, but the censorship made it impossible for writers to undertake them. The peasant revolts, corrupt governments, awakening interest in Europe, which mark early nineteenth-century Japan, could not be discussed by novelists. Certain contemporary events of a politically inoffensive character might be treated with impunity if suitably disguised, but nothing bordering on the nature of dangerous thoughts could be treated. The writers were thus forced to restrict themselves to hackneyed subjects which could not have engrossed them very deeply, or to trivialities of a most perishable nature.
It was the impact of the West which was to bring new life to Japanese literature, and we have not yet seen the full effects of this, even in our own day.