Our Oriental Heritage

  Writing remained for a long time a luxury of the higher classes; until the latter part of the nineteenth century no pretense was made of spreading the art among the people. In the Kyoto age the rich families maintained schools for their children; and the emperors Tenchi and Mommu, at the beginning of the eighth century, established at Kyoto the first Japanese university. Gradually a system of provincial schools was developed under governmental control; their graduates were eligible to enter the university, and those graduates of the university who passed the required tests became eligible for public office. The civil wars of the early feudal period broke down this educational progress, and Japan neglected the arts of the mind until the Tokugawa Shogunate reorganized peace and encouraged learning and literature. Iyeyasu was scandalized to find that ninety per cent of the Samurai could not read or write.5 In 1630 Hayashi Razan established at Yedo a training-school in public administration and Confucian philosophy, which later developed into the University of Tokyo; and Kumazawa, in 1666, founded at Shizutani the first provincial college. By allowing teachers to wear the sword and boast the rank of the Samurai, the government induced students, doctors and priests to set up private schools in homes or temples for the provision of elementary education; in 1750 there were eight hundred such schools, with some forty thousand students. All these institutions were for the sons of the Samurai; merchants and peasants had to be content with popular lecturers, and only prosperous women received any formal education. Universal education, in Japan as in Europe, had to wait for the needs and compulsions of an industrial life.6

  II. POETRY

  The “Manyoshu”—The “Kokinshu”—Characteristics of Japanese poetry—Examples—The game of poetry—The “hokka”-gamblers

  The earliest Japanese literature that has come down to us is poetry, and the earliest Japanese poetry is by native scholars accounted the best. One of the oldest and most famous of Japanese books is the Manyoshu, or “Book of Ten Thousand Leaves,” in which two editors collected into twenty volumes some 4,500 poems composed during the preceding four centuries. Here in particular appeared the work of Hitomaro and Akahito, the chief poetic glories of the Nara age. When his beloved died, and the smoke from the funeral pyre ascended into the hills, Hitomaro wrote an elegy briefer than In Memoriam:

  Oh, is it my beloved, the cloud that wanders

  In the ravine

  Of the deep secluded Hatsuse Mountain?7

  A further effort to preserve Japanese poetry from time’s mortality was made by the Emperor Daigo, who brought together eleven hundred poems of the preceding one hundred and fifty years into an anthology known as the Kokinshu—“Poems Ancient and Modern.” His chief aide was the poet-scholar Tsurayuki whose preface seems more interesting to us today than the fragments which the book has brought down to us from his laconic muse:

  The poetry of Japan, as a seed, springs from the heart of man creating countless leaves of language. . . . In a world full of things man strives to find words to express the impression left on his heart by sight and sound. . . . And so the heart of man came to find expression in words for his joy in the beauty of blossoms, his wonder at the song of birds, and his tender welcome of the mists that bathe the landscapes, as well as his mournful sympathy with the evanescent morning dew. . . . To verse the poets were moved when they saw the ground white with snowy showers of fallen cherry blossoms on spring mornings, or heard on autumn evenings the rustle of falling leaves; or year after year gazed upon the mirror’s doleful reflections of the ravages of time, . . . or trembled as they watched the ephemeral dewdrop quivering on the beaded grass.8

  Tsurayuki well expressed the recurrent theme of Japanese poetry—the moods and phases, the blossoming and decay, of nature in isles made scenic by volcanoes, and verdant with abundant rain. The poets of Japan delight in the less hackneyed aspects of field and woods and sea—trout splashing in mountain brooks, frogs leaping suddenly into noiseless pools, shores without tides, hills cut with motionless mists, or a drop of rain nestling like a gem in a folded blade of grass. Often they interweave a song of love with their worship of the growing world, or mourn elegiacally the brevity of flowers, love and life. Seldom, however, does this nation of warriors sing of war, and only now and then does its poetry lift the heart in hymns. After the Nara period the great majority of the poems were brief; out of eleven hundred in the Kokinshu all but five were in the pithy tanka formfive lines of five, seven, five, seven and seven syllables. In these poems there is no rhyme, for the almost invariable vowel ending of Japanese words would have left too narrow a variety for the poet’s choice; nor is there any accent, tone or quantity. There are strange tricks of speech: “pillow words,” or meaningless prefixes added for the sake of euphony; “prefaces,” or sentences prefixed to a poem to round out its form rather than to develop its ideas; and “pivot words” used punningly in startling diversities of sense to bind one sentence with the next. These, to the Japanese, are devices sanctified by time, like alliteration or rhyme to the English; and their popular appeal does not draw the poet into vulgarity. On the contrary these classic poems are essentially aristocratic in thought and form. Born in a courtly atmosphere, they are fashioned with an almost haughty restraint; they seek perfection of modeling rather than novelty of meaning; they suppress rather than express emotion; and they are too proud to be anything but brief. Nowhere else have writers been so expressively reticent; it is as if the poets of Japan had had a mind to atone by their modesty for the braggadocio of her historians. To write three pages about the west wind, say the Japanese, is to show a plebeian verbosity; the real artist must not so much think for the reader as lure him into active thought; he must seek and find one fresh perception that will arouse in him all the ideas and all the feelings which the Occidental poet insists on working out in self-centered and monopolistic detail. Each poem, to the Japanese, must be the quiet record of one moment’s inspiration.

  So we shall be misled if we seek in these anthologies, or in that Golden Treasury of Japan, the Hyaku-nin-isshu—“Single Verses by a Hundred People”—any heroic or epic strain, any sustained or lyric flight; these poets, like the rash wits of the Mermaid Tavern, were willing to hang their lives on a line. So when Saigyo Hoshi, having lost his dearest friend, became a monk, and mystically found in the shrines at Ise the solace he was seeking, he wrote no Adonaîs, nor even a Lycidas, but these simple lines:

  What it is

  That dwelleth here

  I know not;

  Yet my heart is full of gratitude,

  And the tears trickle down.9

  And when the Lady Kaga no Chiyo lost her husband she wrote, merely:

  All things that seem

  Are but

  One dreamer’s dream. . . .

  I sleep. . . . I wake. . . .

  How wide

  The bed with none beside.10

  Then, having lost also her child, she added two lines:

  Today, how far may he have wandered,

  The brave hunter of dragon-flies!11

  In the imperial circles at Nara and Kyoto the composition of tankas became an aristocratic sport; female chastity, which in ancient India had required an elephant as its price, was often satisfied, at these courts, with thirty-one syllables of poetry cleverly turned.12 It was a usual thing for the emperor to entertain his guests by handing them words with which to fashion a poem;13 and the literature of the time refers casually to people conversing with one another in acrostic poetry, or reciting tankas as they walked in the streets.14 Periodically, at the height of the Heian age, the emperor arranged a poetry contest or tournament, in which as many as fifteen hundred candidates competed before learned judges in the making of tanka epigrams. In 951 a special Poetry Bureau was established for the management of these jousts, and the winning pieces in each contest were deposited in the archives of the institution.

  In the sixteenth century Japanese poetry felt guilty of long-windedness, and decided to shorten the tanka—originally the completion, by one
person, of a poem begun by another—into the hokku—a “single utterance” of three, lines, boasting of five, seven and five syllables, or seventeen in all. In the Genroku age (1688-1704) the composition of these hokku became first a fashion, then a craze; for the Japanese people resembles the American in an emotional-intellectual sensitivity that makes for the rapid rise and fall of mental styles. Men and women, merchants and warriors, artisans and peasants neglected the affairs of life to match hokku epigrams, constructed at a moment’s warning. The Japanese, with whom gambling is a favorite passion, wagered so much money in hokku-composing contests that some enterprising souls made a business of conducting them, fleecing thousands of devotees daily, until at last the government was forced to raid these poetical resorts and prohibit this new mercenary art.15 The most distinguished master of the hokku was Matsura Basho (1643-94), whose birth, it seemed to Yone Noguchi, “was the greatest happening in our Japanese annals.”16 Basho, a young Samurai, was so deeply! moved by the death of his lord and teacher that he abandoned the life of the court, renounced all physical pleasures, gave himself to wandering, meditation and teaching, and expressed his quiet philosophy in fragments of nature poetry highly revered by Japanese literati as perfect examples of concentrated suggestion:

  The old pond,

  Aye, and the sound of a frog leaping into the water.

  Or

  A stem of grass, whereon

  A dragon-fly essayed to light.17

  III. PROSE

  1. Fiction

  Lady Murasaki—The “Tale of Genji”—lts excellence—Later Japanese fiction—A humorist

  If Japanese poems are too brief for the taste of the Western mind, we may console ourselves with the Japanese novel, whose masterpieces run into twenty, sometimes thirty, volumes.18 The most highly regarded of them is the Genji Monogatari (literally and undeniably “Gossip about Genji”), which in one edition fills 4,234 pages.19 This delightful romance was composed about the year 1001 A.D. by the Lady Murasaki no-Shikibu. A Fujiwara of ancient blood, she married another Fujiwara in 997, but was left a widow four years later. She dulled her sorrow by writing an historical novel in fifty-four books. After filling all the paper she could find, she laid sacrilegious hands upon the sacred sutras of a Buddhist temple, and used them for manuscript;20 even paper was once a luxury.

  The hero of the tale is the son of an emperor by his favorite concubine Kiritsubo, who is so beautiful that all the other concubines are jealous of her, and actually tease her to death. Murasaki, perhaps exaggerating the male’s capacity for devotion, represents the Emperor as inconsolable.

  As the years went by, the Emperor did not forget his lost lady; and though many women were brought to the palace in the hope that he might take pleasure in them, he turned from them all, believing that there was not anyone in the world like her whom he had lost. . . . Continually he pined that fate should not have allowed them to fulfil the vow which morning and evening was ever talked of between them, the vow that their lives should be as the twin birds that share a wing, the twin trees that share a bough.21

  Genji grows up to be a dashing prince, with more looks than morals; he passes from one mistress to another with the versatility of Tom Jones, and outmodes that conventional hero by his indifference to gender. He is a woman’s idea of a man—all sentiment and seduction, always brooding and languishing over one woman or the next. Occasionally, “in great unhappiness he returned to his wife’s house.”22 The Lady Murasaki retails his adventures gaily, and excuses him and herself with irresistible grace:

  The young Prince would be thought to be positively neglecting his duty if he did not indulge in a few escapades; and every one would regard his conduct as perfectly natural and proper even when it was such as they would not have dreamed of permitting to ordinary people. . . . I should indeed be very loath to recount in all their detail matters which he took so much trouble to conceal, did I not know that if you found that I had omitted anything you would at once ask why, just because he was supposed to be an emperor’s son, I must needs put a favorable showing on his conduct by leaving out all his indiscretions; and you would soon be saying that this was no history but a mere made-up tale designed to influence the judgment of posterity. As it is, I shall be called a scandal-monger; but that I cannot help.23

  In the course of his amours Genji falls ill, repents him of his adventures, and visits a monastery for pious converse with a priest. But there he sees a lovely princess (modestly named Murasaki), and thoughts of her distract him as the priest rebukes him for his sins.

  The priest began to tell stories about the uncertainty of this life and the retributions of the life to come. Genji was appalled to think how heavy his own sins had already been. It was bad enough to think that he would have them on his conscience for the rest of his present life. But then there was also the life to come. What terrible punishments he had to look forward to! And all the while the priest was speaking Genji thought of his own wickedness. What a good idea it would be to turn hermit, and live in some such place! . . . But immediately his thoughts strayed to the lovely face which he had seen that afternoon; and longing to know more of her he asked, “Who lives with you here?”24

  By the coöperation of the author Genji’s first wife dies in childbirth, and he is left free to give first place in his home to his new princess, Murasaki.*

  It may be that the excellence of the translation gives this book an extraneous advantage over other Japanese masterpieces that have been rendered into English; perhaps Mr. Waley, like Fitzgerald, has improved upon his original. If, for the occasion, we can forget our own moral code, and fall in with one that permits men and women, as Wordsworth said of those in Wilhelm Meister, to “mate like flies in the air,” we shall derive from this Tale of Genji the most attractive glimpse yet opened to us of the beauties-hidden in Japanese literature. Murasaki writes with a naturalness and ease that soon turn her pages into the charming gossip of a cultured friend. The men and women, above all the children, who move through her leisurely pages are ingratiatingly real; and the world which she describes, though it is confined for the most part to imperial palaces and palatial homes, has all the color of a life actually lived or seen.* It is an aristocratic life, not much concerned with the cost of bread and love; but within that limitation it is described without sensational resort to exceptional characters or events. As Lady Murasaki makes Uma no-Kami say of certain realistic painters:

  Ordinary hills and rivers, just as they are, houses such as you may see everywhere, with all their real beauty of harmony and form—quietly to draw such scenes as this, or to show what lies behind some intimate hedge that is folded away far from the world, and thick trees upon some unheroic hill, and all this with befitting care for composition, proportion and the life—such works demand the highest master’s utmost skill, and must needs draw the common craftsman into a thousand blunders.26

  No later Japanese novel has reached the excellence of Genji, or has had so profound an influence upon the literary development of the language.27 During the eighteenth century fiction had another zenith, and various novelists succeeded in surpassing the Lady Murasaki in the length of their tales, or the freedom of their pornography.28 Santo Kioden published in 1791 an Edifying Story Book, but it proved so little to its purpose that the authorities, under the law prohibiting indecency, sentenced him to be handcuffed for fifty days in his own home. Santo was a vendor of tobacco-pouches and quack medicines; he married a harlot, and made his first reputation by a volume on the brothels of Tokyo. He gradually reformed the morals of his pen, but could not unteach his public the habit of buying great quantities of his books. Encouraged, he violated all precedents in the history of Japanese fiction by demanding payment from the men who published his works; his predecessors, it seemed, had been content with an invitation to dinner. Most of the fiction writers were poor Bohemians, whom the people classed with actors among the lowest ranks of society.29 Less sensational and more ably written than Kioden’s were the novels of Ky
okutei Bakin (1767-1848), who, like Scott and Dumas, transformed history into vivid romance. His readers grew so fond of him that he unwound one of his stories into a hundred volumes. Hokusai illustrated some of Bakin’s novels until, being geniuses, they quarreled and parted.

  The jolliest of these later novelists was Jippensha Ikku (d. 1831), the Le Sage and Dickens of Japan. Ikku began his adult life with three marriages, of which two were quickly ended by fathers-in-law who could not understand his literary habits. He accepted poverty with good humor, and, having no furniture, hung his bare walls with paintings of the furniture he might have had. On holidays he sacrified to the gods with pictures of excellent offerings. Being presented with a bathtub in the common interest, he carried it home inverted on his head, and overthrew with ready wit the pedestrians who fell in his way. When his publisher came to see him he invited him to take a bath; and while his invitation was being accepted he decked himself in the publisher’s clothes, and paid his New Year’s Day calls in proper ceremonial costume. His masterpiece, the Hizakurige, was published in twelve parts between 1802 and 1822, and told a rollicking tale in the vein of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club—Aston calls it “the most humorous and entertaining book in the Japanese language.”30 On his deathbed Ikku enjoined his pupils to place upon his corpse, before the cremation then usual in Japan, certain packets which he solemnly entrusted to them. At his funeral, prayers having been said, the pyre was lighted, whereupon it turned out that the packets were full of firecrackers, which exploded merrily. Ikku had kept his youthful promise that his life would be full of surprises, even after his death.