Anthology of Japanese Literature (2 page)

ANTHOLOGY OF
JAPANESE LITERATURE

INTRODUCTON

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
¹
; 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'y
ō
sh
Å«
," 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'y
ō
sh
Å«
," 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'y
ō
sh
Å«
." 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'y
ō
sh
Å«
" 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.
²
"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'y
ō
sh
Å«
" there is another eighth-century collection which is almost purely Chinese in its inspiration. This is the "
Kaif
Å«
s
ō
," 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 "
Kaif
Å«
s
ō
" 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'y
ō
sh
Å«
," 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
Ō
tsu (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!
³

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?
⁴

The former poem, from the "
Man'y
ō
sh
Å«
," is purely Japanese in feeling; the latter, from the "
Kaif
Å«
s
ō
," 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 "
Kaif
Å«
s
ō
" 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
⁵
—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 K
Å«
kai (774-835), Buddhism became the study of many of the best minds of the age. The Buddhism taught by K
Å«
kai 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 "
Kager
ō
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.'"
⁶

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 "
Kokinshl
Å«
" 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.
⁷
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,"
⁸
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 "
Kager
ō
Nikki
," "The Pillow Book" of Sei Shonagon, "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: