(1868–1912) was vast. Much of it is no longer of any real interest, but this is not surprising, for neither is much of the literature produced in England during the same period. Some of it, particularly the novels and poetry written in the first flush of enthusiasm for Western ways, is distinctly comic today, as for example this poem translated by Sansom:
O Liberty, Ah Liberty, Liberty O!
Liberty, we two are plighted until the world ends.
And who shall part us?. Yet in this world there are
clouds that hide the moon and winds that destroy the
blossoms. Man is not master of his fate.
It is a long tale to tell
But once upon a time
There were men who wished
To give the people Liberty
And set up a republican government.
To that end. …[1]
But it is really unfair to deride such poems or the translation of The Bride of Lammermoor entitled “A Spring Breeze Love Story”. They were products of the dilemma of Japanese writers faced at the same time with an avalanche of new ideas and new ways of expressing them, and with the problem of how much, if anything, to retain of the old ideas and ways. The man who wrote the ode to liberty, with its utterly foreign ideas, nevertheless used the Japanese images of the clouds that hide the moon and the winds that destroy the blossoms. Similarly, even in novels written after The Drifting Cloud there were usually passages or themes or solutions which seem false to the new medium, although they are true to Japan.
The conflict between old and new forms of expression is
- ↑ Sansom, The Western World and Japan, p. 428.
