Anthology of Japanese Literature (3 page)

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'y
ō
sh
Å«
" is the easiest collection for us to appreciate because of its range of subjects and its powerful imagery. The "
Kokinsh
Å«
" 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 "
Kokinsh
Å«
," 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 "
Kokinsh
Å«
" was the "
Shinko-kinsh
Å«
," 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 "
Shinkokinsh
Å«
," the priest Saigy
ō
(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 Ch
ō
mei'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 Kenk
ō
(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 Sh
ō
nagon, 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
N
ō
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
N
ō
, Seami Moto-kiyo (1363-1443), describing the three highest types of
N
ō
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
N
ō
—
its other-worldliness, its profundity, and its stillness.

In contrast to the
N
ō
are the
ky
ō
gen
plays, brief comedies which came to be performed in conjunction with the
N
ō
. Sometimes the
ky
ō
gen
parody the tragic events of the
N
ō
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
N
ō
, with its innumerable allusions and complexities of diction, the
ky
ō
gen
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."
¹⁰
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
Ō
nin Rebellion (1467-1477) which devastated Kyoto. From the period of the rebellion comes this curious allegorical poem found in a funeral register:

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 Bash
ō
(1644-1694), was drawn in particular to Saigy
ō
and the world of "Three Poets at Minase." But there is a great difference between Bash
ō
's loneliness and that of the medieval poets. Bash
ō
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 lawless soldiery. There is much humor in Bash
ō
, and indeed in his last period he advocated "lightness" as the chief desideratum of the seventeen-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, Bash
ō
, 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 Bash
ō
'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

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 Sany
ō
(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 Sanyo 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.