novels and poetry, often crude, but very popular. Most of the translations were from English, the language preferred by Japanese once they had discovered that the Dutch which they had so painfully mastered in the days before the opening of the ports was of little use in dealing with English and American traders. The choice of books for translation was dictated in part by the necessity of finding works which were readily intelligible to Japanese readers. Thus, a novel by Jules Verne, for all its fantasy, was not difficult for Japanese to understand, for it required only the confidence in the progress of science which they quickly acquired. On the other hand, a novel by Dickens such as Bleak House would have been virtually unintelligible because the complex society which it described could not be demonstrated to Japanese readers like the workings of a locomotive, nor did it represent a European version of problems with which they were familiar at home.
The first important monument in the creation of a new Japanese literature in which the lessons from the West were incorporated came with The Essence of the Novel written by Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935), published in 1885. Tsubouchi, deploring the poor quality of the literature of his time, sought to analyse what was wrong with it, and how it might be rectified. For the first time, he said, improved methods of printing had made it possible for there to be an almost unlimited circulation of books, and this had initially resulted in the publication of huge numbers of clumsy imitations of Bakin and other early nineteenth-century writers, for want of any new ideas. Such works conformed on the surface to the doctrine that literature is for the encouragement of virtue, and contained various pseudo-moral elements, but they were in reality of an extremely low order. Whose fault was this, asked Tsubouchi, and answered that it resulted not only from
