written in the colloquial language. An acquaintance with English is evinced by the short sentences, the copious use of personal pronouns, and the frequent introduction of words which, although composed of Chinese elements, can only be fully understood when we have recognised the English word which they are intended to represent. Such English-Chinese-Japanese words are by no means peculiar to Ozaki. They now form a considerable part of the vocabulary of newspaper and magazine writers. Ozaki frequently gives the impression of having thought in English, and then presented his readers with a literal translation into Japanese. He is said to be an admirer of M. Zola.
The Tajō-takon ("Much Feeling, Much Hate") is a study of sentiment. It opens with the lachrymose lamentations of a disconsolate widower. At the eightieth page the hero is still plaguing his friends and exhausting the reader's patience with a maudlin grief, which must be even more obnoxious to Japanese feeling than to our own. One weary reader left him at this point, wiping his streaming eyes with a borrowed pocket-handkerchief, and complaining that he had now nobody to wash his own dirty ones for him.
One of the most considerable literary figures of the present day is Kōda Nariyuki (pseudonym, Rohan). He writes in the ordinary literary dialect, using the colloquial speech only for the dialogue, and in some of his writings not even for that. He has imagination, lofty aims, and a fine flow of language, never descending to vulgarity, and rising frequently to poetical descriptions of a high order of merit. But the action of his stories moves slowly, and the speeches of his personages are terribly lengthy. His Hige-otoko (1897) is a historical
