# Anthology of Japanese Literature/Introduction

​Introduction
Japanese literature has about as long a history as English literature, and contains works in as wide a variety of genres as may be found in any country. It includes some of the world’s longest novels and shortest poems, plays which are miracles of muted suggestion and others filled with the most extravagant bombast. It is, in short, a rich literature which deserves better understanding and recognition.
It is not the purpose of this brief introduction to give a history of Japanese literature; I shall attempt instead to trace some of the developments linking the works included in this anthology. Most of the selections are prefaced by introductory remarks giving specific information on details of composition, etc., and it is hoped that the reader will consult them as the occasion requires.
The earliest surviving Japanese book is the “Kojiki,” or “Record of Ancient Matters,” completed in 712 A.D. It is clear, however, that there were books before that date, as well as a considerable body of songs and legends such as are found in every country. Some of this oral literature is preserved in the “Kojiki” and elsewhere, but much of it must certainly have perished, in view of the failure of the Japanese to develop independently a means of recording their lan­guage. It is interesting, if essentially fruitless, to speculate what course Japanese literature might have taken if the Japanese had devised their own script or had first come in contact with a foreign nation which had an alphabet. It was in fact the widespread adoption of Chinese culture, including the wholly unsuitable Chinese method of writing, which was to determine the course of Japanese literature over the centuries.
In the Ancient Period, if so we may designate Japanese history up to the establishment of the capital at Kyoto in 794, the important ​works, such as the “Kojiki” and the “Man’yōshū,” or “Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves,” still show comparatively little Chinese influ­ence, and may with some justice be termed examples of “pure” Japa­nese literature. The “Kojiki” opens with the Creation and continues until the seventh century of our era, moving from a collection of some­times engaging myths to an encomium of the Imperial family, par­ticularly of the line of the ruling sovereign. In its early sections the “Kojiki” has something of the epic about it, but because it was a compilation of different sorts of material and not a single long story (however complex) known and recited by professional poets, it lacks the unity and artistic finish of a true epic and tends to break down into episodes of varying literary value.
The “Man’yōshū,” on the other hand, needs no apologies. It is one of the world’s great collections of poetry. It can never cease to aston­ish us that Japanese literature produced within the same century the pre-Homeric pages of the “Kojiki” and the magnificent artistry of the “Man’yōshū.” The latter owes its reputation mainly to the genius of a group of eighth-century poets, notably Hitomaro, Yakamochi, and Okura. The period when the majority of the poems were being written rather resembled the Meiji era, when the introduction of Western civilization led to a tremendous explosion of pent-up Japa­nese energies in every field. In the eighth century the gradual diffu­sion of Chinese civilization produced a similar result. Within the “Man’yōshū” itself there are traces of Chinese influence which become quite apparent in the later poems, but there can be no doubt of the book’s essential Japaneseness: what inspired the poets were the moun­tains and the sea of the Japanese landscape, and their reactions were fresh, Japanese reactions, not echoes of Chinese example. “Countless are the mountains in Yamato”; “In the sea of Iwami, By the cape of Kara, There amid the stones under sea”; “And lived secure in my trust As one riding a great ship”—these are truly Japanese lines in their imagery and evocation.
If Chinese influence is relatively small in the “Man’yōshū” there is another eighth-century collection which is almost purely Chinese ​in its inspiration. This is the “Kaifūsō,” or “Fond Recollections of Poetry,” an anthology of poetry written in Chinese by members of the Japanese court. It was to be expected that Japanese poets writing in Chinese should have adhered closely to Chinese models, and some of the verses of the “Kaifūsō” are no more like original Chinese poems than Latin verses written by schoolboys today are like Horace. Why, it may be wondered, did Japanese choose to write poetry in a foreign language which few of them could actually speak? The answer is to be found partly in the prestige lent by an ability to write poetry in the difficult classical Chinese language, but partly also in the Japanese belief that there were things which could not be expressed within their own poetic forms. This was less true in the age of the “Man’yōshū,” when the poets enjoyed greater liberty than was to be known again in Japan for more than a thousand years, but even from the seventh century there are examples of parallel poems written in Japanese and Chinese which show what the poets thought to be the essential differences between the two mediums. The following were both written by Prince Ōtsu (662–687) shortly before his execution:
Today, taking my last sight of the mallards Crying on the pond of Iware, Must I vanish into the clouds!
The golden crow lights on the western huts; Evening drums beat out the shortness of life. There are no inns on the road to the grave— Whose is the house I go to tonight?
The former poem, from the “Man’yōshū,” is purely Japanese in feeling; the latter, from the “Kaifūsō,” not only uses Chinese language and allusions but attempts to give philosophic overtones lacking in the simple Japanese verse. This distinction between the content of poetry written in Japanese and in Chinese became of increasingly great importance. In the Muromachi Period, for example, Zen priests ​expressed their religious and philosophic doctrines in Chinese poetry. In the late Tokugawa Period many patriots who found that they could not adequately voice their burning thoughts within the tiny compass of a Japanese poem turned to poetry in Chinese. The function of Chinese poetry, from the time of the “Kaifūsō” almost until the present, has been principally to convey thoughts either too difficult or too extended for the standard Japanese verse forms—when, of course, it was not merely an instrument for the display of erudition.
Some of the early poetry in Chinese was devoted to Buddhist subjects—which was less often true of poetry in Japanese. The Buddhism of the early period was an optimistic religion marked by pageantry and the lavish patronage of the great temples of Nara. With the Heian Period, particularly as a result of the activities of such men as Kūkai (774–835), Buddhism became the study of many of the best minds of the age. The Buddhism taught by Kūkai was essentially an aristocratic religion, or at least restricted to those people who had the intellectual capacity to understand its profundities and the taste to appreciate its aesthetic manifestations. Toward the end of the Heian Period, however, greater attention was given to spreading Buddhist teaching to all classes of the people, and it is in the light of this development that we should read such works as “Tales from the Uji Collection,” which was designed to communicate in simple and interesting language some of the Buddhist doctrine. It was from about this time too that the invocation to Amida Buddha, a seven-syllabled prayer, came to be considered a certain means of gaining salvation.
Buddhism is to be found to a greater or lesser degree in most of the famous writings of the Heian Period. When in the novels—and indeed in real life—a situation was reached for which no other solution was immediately apparent, the person involved would usually “abandon the world,” an act accompanied by the ritual gesture of shaving the head or at least trimming the hair, a moment accompanied by great lamentations. It was not, however, considered to be in very good taste for someone still “in the world” to show unusual piety. In the “Kagerō Nikki,” for example, the husband of the author ​bursts into the room to find her at her devotions: “ ‘Terrible,’ he exclaimed, as he watched me burning incense and fingering my beads, the Sutras spread out in front of me. ‘Worse even than I had expected. You really do seem to have run to an extreme.’ ”
Japanese poetry, as I have noted, made amazing progress in the eighth century. In the tenth century Japanese prose evolved to its highest development. With respect to prose style itself, one of the most important contributors to this progress was Ki no Tsurayuki (died 946) whose preface to the “Kokinshū,” or “Collection of Ancient and Modern Poetry,” is celebrated, and whose “Tosa Diary” was the first example of what was to become an important genre, the literary diary. One may note in Tsurayuki’s prose some Chinese influence, such as the parallelism, but his is essentially a Japanese style both in vocabulary and construction.
The prose works of the early tenth century were of two main types: the fairy tales derived ultimately from the legends of Japan, China, and India; and the more realistic prose of the poem-tales. It was not until these two streams united that the Japanese novel, in a true sense, could be born. The outstanding product of this convergence and, indeed, the supreme masterpiece of Japanese literature, was “The Tale of Genji.” Although this novel contains many hundred poems, it is not, like “The Tales of Ise,” merely a collection of poetry linked by prose descriptions, and if it benefited by the example of such earlier “novels” as “The Tale of the Bamboo-Cutter,” it went immeasurably beyond them in depth and magnitude. It is a work of genius, which may justifiably be included among the great novels of the world. Thanks to the incomparable translation by Arthur Waley it is now available to Western readers.
One of the unusual features of Heian literature is that such works as the “Kagerō Nikki,” “The Pillow Book” of Sei Shōnagon, “The Tale of Genji,” most of the diaries, and much of the poetry were written by women. The usual explanation for this curious fact is ​that the men considered writing in Japanese to be beneath them and devoted themselves to the composition of poetry and prose in Chinese, leaving the women to write masterpieces in the native language. This is not a complete explanation—some of the lesser novels and other prose works in Japanese were written by men—but it is close enough to the truth to warrant its acceptance. Of the literature written in Chinese during the period, the poems by Sugawara no Michizane (845–903) are especially fine. Michizane was an accomplished poet, and was so widely known for his learning that after his death he was enshrined as a god of literature and calligraphy.
The poetry of the Heian Period both in Japanese and Chinese is far more restricted in subject matter and manner than that of the earlier period. The Japanese poems are filled with falling cherry blossoms and maple leaves, the Chinese poems with the scent of plum blossoms and chrysanthemums. There is nothing wrong with these subjects, but it is hard to think of any fully developed poet devoting the major part of his attention to such themes. The aim of Heian poets was to perfect rather than to discover, to hit upon exactly the right adjective or image to be used in a familiar situation, rather than to invent a new one. This method may be most clearly illustrated by the following two tenth-century poems:
| Aki kaze ni Shitaha ya samuku Narinuramu Kohagi ga hara ni Uzura naku nari | The under leaves In the autumn wind Must have become cold: In the moor of little lespedezas The quail are crying. |
| | Fujiwara no Michimune |
| Tsuyu musubu Hagi ga shitaha ya Samukaramu Aki no nohara ni Ojika naku nari | The under leaves of the lespedeza When the dew is gathering Must be cold: In the autumn moor The young deer are crying. |
| | Lady Sagami |
​Both of these poems were honored by being included in Imperial collections, but it is obvious that they are in essence the same poem. To say this, however, would not detract from the value of either poem in the eyes of the authors or of traditional Japanese critics. It may be difficult for a modern Western reader to sympathize with such a point of view, but it might have seemed less strange to a seventeenth-century English poet who sang the beauties of Cynthia or who proclaimed the doctrine of carpe diem.
What draws most of us to Japanese poetry is not the polish of a perfectly turned verse on the red maple leaves floating on blue waves but the living voice of a poet talking about love, death, and the few other themes common to all men. The “Man’yōshū” is the easiest collection for us to appreciate because of its range of subjects and its powerful imagery. The “Kokinshū” also has poems which move us, but some of the most famous ones, masterpieces of diction and vowel harmonies, must unfortunately remain beyond communication to Western readers.
The court nobles, who wrote most of the poems in the “Kokinshū,” continued to be the chief contributors to the successive Imperial anthologies. The skill of some of these poets is quite remarkable, but the subjects to which they applied their skill were often inadequate.
The next major collection after the “Kokinshū” was the “Shinkokinshū,” or “New Collection of Ancient and Modern Poetry,” compiled in the Kamakura Period, after the terrible warfare which ended the Heian Period. Much of the gloom and solitude of those times is discoverable in the poetry, particularly that of the outstanding contributor to the “Shinkokinshū,” the priest Saigyō (1118–1190). His waka—thirty-one-syllabled poems—are among the most beautiful and melancholy in the language.
The same melancholy may also be found in “The Tale of the Heike,” the greatest of the war tales—which were among the characteristic literary products of the Kamakura Period. These tales contain many descriptions of military glory, of men in magnificent armor riding into battle, but what we remember most vividly are the scenes of loneliness and sorrow—the death of the boy Atsumori or the description of the life of the former Empress in the solitude ​of a mountain convent. The vanity of worldly things—often enough expressed by the Heian aristocrats but seldom very seriously—acquired meaning in the days of destruction and disaster; in Kamo no Chōmei’s “Account of My Hut” we hear a cry from the heart of medieval darkness.
Separation is a contant theme in the writings of the Japanese medieval period—the Kamakura and Muromachi periods. Several emperors were driven into exile, and the account of their misfortunes is the chief theme of the “Masukagami” or “The Clear Mirror,” one of the important historical romances of the time. For sixty years after the beginning of the Muromachi Period sovereigns of the legitimate line were cut off from the capital (where there was a rival court) and forced to live in the mountains of Yoshino. In addition to those who were compelled by stronger adversaries to leave the capital, there were also many men who fled the world in disgust, voluntarily seeking refuge in one or another remote place. “Essays in Idleness” by Yoshida Kenkō (1283–1350) is one of the most cheerful examples of the writings of a medieval recluse, and indeed suggests at many places comparison with “The Pillow Book” of Sei Shōnagon, but a note of death is struck over and over, in a manner foreign to the Heian writer.
Death and the world of the dead figure prominently in the Nō play, one of the most beautiful of Japanese literary forms. In most of the plays there are ghosts or spirits, and in all of them is a sense of other-worldly mystery. The greatest master of the Nō, Seami Motokiyo (1363–1443), describing the three highest types of Nō performances, cited these verses: “In Silla at midnight the sun is bright”; “Snow covers the thousand mountains—why does one lonely peak remain unwhitened?”; “Snow piled in a silver bowl. With these three verses he attempted to suggest the essential qualities of the Nō—its other-worldliness, its profundity, and its stillness.
In contrast to the Nō are the kyōgen plays, brief comedies which came to be performed in conjunction with the Nō. Sometimes the kyōgen parody the tragic events of the Nō plays they follow, but more often they depend for humor on the situations in which such stock characters as the clever servant or the termagant wife find ​themselves. Unlike the Nō, with its innumerable allusions and complexities of diction, the kyōgen is very simple in its language, and must indeed have been quite close to the speech of the common people of its day.
One of the characteristic literary products of the Muromachi Period is linked-verse, of which the outstanding example is probably “Three Poets at Minase.” The mood of this poem changes from link to link, as the different poets take up each other’s thoughts, but the prevailing impression is one of loneliness and grief, as was not surprising in a work composed shortly after the Ōnin Rebellion (1467–1477) which devastated Kyoto. From the period of the rebellion comes this curious allegorical poem found in a funeral register:
| Mi hitotsu ni Hashi wo narabete Motsu tori ya Ware wo tsutsukite Koroshihatsuramu | Upon one body Double heads opposing chop- Stick beaks in order. Peck peck pecking off to death One bird: both heads and body. |
The image of the double-headed bird pecking itself to death is an apt one for the Japan of the period of wars. It was not until the end of the sixteenth century that Japan again knew peace.
The establishment of peace with the Tokugawa regime did not immediately bring about any flood of literature, for the country had still to recover from the wounds of a century of warfare. Humorous, or at least rather eccentric, verse began to be produced in large quantities, and a variety of frivolous tales also appeared. The first ​important work of the new era was a novel by Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693) called “The Man Who Spent His Life at Love-Making.” It is obvious that in writing this novel Saikaku looked back to “The Tale of Genji” for guidance, although two novels basically more different can hardly be imagined. The world that Saikaku described in this novel and most of his subsequent ones was that of the merchant class in the cities. Heian literature had dealt mainly with the aristocracy. With the Kamakura Period the warrior class came to figure prominently in literature, but in the new literature of the Tokugawa Period it was the merchant who was the most important. It was for him also that the novels and plays of the time were written, and it was the merchant class which supplied many of the leading writers. Saikaku’s “Eternal Storehouse of Japan” is, in his own words, a “millionaire’s gospel,” a collection of anecdotes intended to help a man to make a fortune or prevent him from losing one. Saikaku was not, however, a dreary moralizer—his works are filled with a lively humor which sometimes borders on the indecent, and with a vigor that comes as a welcome relief after centuries of resigned melancholy.
Not all of the Tokugawa writers threw off the gloom of medieval Japan as readily as Saikaku did. The greatest of the poets of the age, Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694), was drawn in particular to Saigyō and the world of “Three Poets at Minase.” But there is a great difference between Bashō’s loneliness and that of the medieval poets. Bashō sought out loneliness in the midst of a very active life. There was no question of his taking refuge except from the attentions of his overly devoted pupils. The sorrows he experienced were those which any sensitive man might know, not those of a black-robed monk who sees the capital ravaged by plague or the depredations of a law­ less soldiery. There is much humor in Bashō, and indeed in his last period he advocated “lightness” as the chief desideratum of the seven­ teen-syllabled haiku. He is the most popular of all Japanese poets and one of the chief men of Japanese literature.
The third of the great literary figures of the early Tokugawa Period was Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725). Chikamatsu wrote most of his plays for the puppet stage, and the care he devoted to making his plays successful in this medium has sometimes, we may feel, ​impaired their literary value. Nevertheless, Chikamatsu ranks with Seami as a dramatic genius, one of the rare ones Japan has produced. His plays are of two types—heroic dramas based on historical events (however loosely) and domestic dramas that often revolve around lovers’ suicides. The former plays are usually more interesting to watch in performance at the puppet theatre, but the latter, dealing as they do with moving human experiences, have a greater attraction as literature. The poetry of Chikamatsu’s plays is also remarkable, at times attaining heights seldom reached elsewhere in Japanese literature.
Saikaku, Bashō, and Chikamatsu were not only dominant figures in their own time but the objects of adulation and imitation for many years afterward. In the domain of the novel it was not until Ueda Akinari (1734–1809) that an important new voice was heard. Akinari was heavily indebted to Chinese novels and stories for the material of his own, but by the artistry at his command was able to produce several striking works. Takizawa Bakin (1767–1848) was also much influenced by Chinese novels, some of which he translated or adapted. In contrast to these writers of academic pretensions, we have also Jippensha Ikku (1766–1831) whose “Hizakurige” is a lively, purely Japanese work which now seems more likely to survive as literature than the towering bulk of Bakin’s novels, so esteemed in their day.
There were several important haiku writers in the late Tokugawa Period, notably Yosa Buson (1716–1781) and Kobayashi Issa (1763–1828). Buson brought to the haiku a romantic quality lacking in Bashō’s and was a poet of aristocratic distinction. Issa, on the other hand, lent to the haiku the genuine accents of the common people. Haiku poets had always prided themselves on using in their verses images drawn from daily life instead of the stereotyped cherry blossoms and maple leaves of the older poetry, but the mere fact that the word “snail” or “frog” appeared in a poem instead of “nightingale” did not automatically bring it much closer to the lives of the common people. Issa had a real love for the small and humble things of the world, and he makes us see them as no other Japanese poet did. Buson was a flawless technician, but Issa’s verses, whatever their other qualities, often hardly seem like haiku at all.
​The same desire to write of the common things of life may be found in the waka of Okuma Kotomichi (1798–1868) and, in particular, Tachibana Akemi (1812–1868). Almost any poem of Akemi’s will reveal how great his break was with the traditional waka poets even of the Tokugawa Period:
| The silver mine |
| Akahada no Danshi mureite Aragane no Marogari kudaku Tsuchi uchifurite | Stark naked, the men Stand together in clusters; Swinging great hammers They smash into fragments The lumps of unwrought metal. |
Akemi was a violent supporter of the Emperor against the Tokugawa Shogunate, partly as the result of his studies of the classics (then under the domination of ultra-nationalist scholars) but partly also because he was a sharer in the growing discontent with the regime. The poets who wrote in Chinese were particularly outspoken. Rai Sanyō (1780–1832), the greatest master of Chinese poetry in the Tokugawa Period, if not all of Japanese literature, wrote bitter invective against the regime, usually only thinly disguised. When one reads the poetry of Issa, Akemi, or Sanyō one cannot help feeling that the Tokugawa regime was doomed in any case, even if its collapse had not been hastened by the arrival of the Westerners.
The literature produced in Japan after the Meiji Restoration is of so different a character that it has been felt advisable to devote a separate volume to it. It is hoped that with the publication of the two volumes of this anthology the Western reader will be able to obtain not only a picture of the literature produced in Japan over the centuries, but an understanding of the Japanese people as their lives and aspirations have been reflected in their writings.
* ↑ For a fuller introduction see Donald Keene, “Japanese Literature,” and W. G. Aston, “A History of Japanese Literature.”
* ↑ There are examples of direct Chinese influence on some of the poems, but their number is not very considerable.
* ↑ Translated by Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai.
* ↑ Translated by Burton Watson.
* ↑ See page 162.
* ↑ Translated by Edward Seidensticker.
* ↑ See page 67.
* ↑ There is a poor English translation by F. V. Dickins and a good French one by René Sieffert.
* ↑ Translated by Arthur Waley.
* ↑ See page 314 for an explanation of linked-verse.
* ↑ Translated by Sam Houston Brock. This is a very ambiguous poem and may be interpreted variously. The poet William Burford has rendered it: Carrion With your chop- stick beaks Pointed at me Have you come, at last, To peck me to death?