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closely follow their European prototypes as to excite our smiles today, but a period of close imitation was necessary before the Japanese could speak with their own voices in the new idiom. When Japanese novelists wanted to describe their experiences in the new Japan, they found that the traditional Japanese literature could offer them little help. Each year brought fresh excitement from abroad as the Japanese caught up with literary developments in Europe. It was natural that they should experiment with all the new forms. However, their chief object remained always to be themselves, men of Meiji Japan, and they had no desire to imitate for the sake of deception. Their activity may be likened to that of the French painters of the nineteenth century who copied, sometimes literally as in the case of Van Gogh, the ukiyoe prints, not because they wished to rival the Japanese artists, but because they thought that ukiyoe techniques might help them express their own emotions and perceptions. It has nevertheless been the fashion in the West whenever translations have appeared of Japanese novels written during the past sixty years, to point out resemblances to well-known European examples, and then to conclude that the modern Japanese novel is entirely deriva-
