CHAPTER V
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Kangakusha—Fiction—Jishō and Kiseki—Jitsuroku-
Mono—Wasōbiōye—Popular Drama
Kangakusha
The pursuit of Chinese studies reached its height in the eighteenth century. In its early years Hakuseki, Kiusō, and other distinguished men of letters still lived and wrote. They had numerous successors, who continued to bring out volume after volume of commentaries on the Chinese classics, works on government, the art of war, history, finance and political economy, ethics, metaphysics and religion, under which the shelves of Japanese libraries are groaning at this day. But, as the Heike Monogatari says, "that which flourishes must also decay." After the philosophers came the sophists. Japan had little more to learn from the Chu-Hi philosophy, and the renewed study of the ancient Chinese literature which it had promoted. The impulse derived from these sources had spent its force, though it continued to be indirectly felt in other departments of literature than the writings of the Kangakusha.
In the eighteenth century the Chu-Hi philosophy was no longer so universally recognised as the unquestioned
300
