Japanese Literature/Chapter 1

by Donald Keene

I. INTRODUCTION

Japanese literature, in spite of its beauty, richness and immediate charm, is as yet inadequately known in the West. The reasons for this neglect are not hard to discover. The intricacies of the Japanese language prevent all but a handful of foreigners from approaching the literature in the original, and the uninspired nature of many translations often causes the enthusiasm of the most adventurous-minded reader to cool. The good translations which do exist, notably those by Arthur Waley, have won their circle of admirers, but many Western readers remain reluctant to extend their interests in the direction of Japanese literature, if only because of a widespread belief that since the Japanese are a “race of imitators”, their literature can be no more than a pale reflection of the Chinese.

The question of the degree of Japan’s indebtedness to China is so basic that I must discuss it briefly, before going on to any more critical consideration of the literature. It would be impossible to deny the enormous role played by China in the development of Japanese civilization. The method of writing, the philosophy, much of the religion, and certain literary genres had their origin in China, and Japanese have at all times professed the greatest admiration for the older culture, frequently paying it the supreme compliment of imitation. But if this is true of Japan’s relationship to China it is equally true of France’s and even England’s to the classical world, although we do not say of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra or of Racine’s Phèdre that they are “nothing but” imitations. I do not think it fair, either, to say it about those Japanese works which obviously have their roots in China. With the exception of very short periods of indiscriminate borrowing, everything that Japan took from China was filtered through the basically different Japanese temperament and considerably modified. We may contrast this Japanese resistance to the powerful influences of Chinese culture with the almost unquestioning acceptance of them by Korea. Even when the Japanese were trying very hard to take over some Chinese doctrine, such as Confucianism, they appear to have been unable to refrain from altering it; thus it was that some of the Japanese Confucian scholars were at the same time devout worshippers of the gods of the Land of the Rising Sun and sought to reconcile the two beliefs. The Korean Confucianists, on the other hand, tended towards extreme orthodoxy, and a chance remark attributed to Confucius, that the superior man did not talk while he ate, resulted in centuries of silent meals in Korea, though not in China, much less in Japan.

But Japan has been far more than a skilful modifier of Chinese civilization. In the field of literature, with which we are primarily concerned here, we shall find that Japanese poetry is in most ways unlike Chinese, that the Japanese were writing novels of magnitude and beauty centuries before the Chinese, and that the Japanese theatre, far surpassing the Chinese, ranks with the great dramatic achievements of the world.

It is small wonder that Chinese and Japanese literature are so dissimilar, for the two languages are entirely different. Chinese is a monosyllabic language with musical tones to distinguish the many identical syllables. In its classical form at least, Chinese is a language of great compactness. Japanese, on the other hand, is polysyllabic, has no tones like the Chinese, and sounds rather like Italian, at least to those who do not know Italian. In contrast with the brevity of classical Chinese, Japanese is a language of interminable sentences—sometimes literally interminable, in which case they are left incomplete, at the end of the twentieth or fortieth subtle turn of phrase, as if their authors despaired of ever coming to the end of their task. Again, Chinese poetry is usually rhymed and is based on a complicated pattern of musical tones. In Japanese, on the other hand, rhyme is generally avoided, and the formal rules of prosody reduce themselves to a matter of counting syllables. Although the earliest Japanese poems we know, those preserved in a work of the early eighth century A.D., have lines of irregular length, the preference for alternating lines of five and seven syllables soon crystallized among Japanese poets, and this eventually became the basic rhythm of the language, found not only in poetry but in almost any type of literary composition.

To give an idea of the appearance of Japanese in transcription (with the consonants pronounced as in English, and the vowels as in Italian), I have chosen a passage, ostensibly in prose but in alternating lines of seven and five syllables. It is one of the most famous descriptions in the literature, the beginning of the lovers’ suicide journey in the play Love Suicides at Sonezaki, written in 1703 by Chikamatsu. The young man and the young woman, believing that it is impossible for them to know happiness together in this life, set out in the early morning for the wood of Sonezaki, where they are to kill themselves.

Kono yo no nagori	Farewell to this world
Yo mo nagori	And to the night, farewell.
Shini ni yuku mi wo	We who walk the way to death
Tatōreba	To what should we be likened?
Adashi ga hara no	To the frost on the road
Michi no shimo	To the graveyard
Hitoashi zutsu ni	Vanishing with each
Kiete yuku	Step ahead:
Yume no yume koso	This dream of a dream
Aware nare	Is sorrowful.
​
Are kazōreba	Ah, did you count the bell?
Akatsuki no	Of the seven strokes
Nanatsu no toki ga	That mark the dawn
Mutsu narite	Six have sounded;
Nokoru hitotsu ga	The remaining one
Konjō no	Will be for this existence
Kane no hibiki no	The last echo
Kiki osame	We shall hear.
Jakumetsu iraku to	It will echo
Hibiku nari	The bliss of nothingness.

As one may easily see from the above, the sounds of Japanese are very simple. Each syllable generally consists of one consonant followed by one vowel. The restricted number of possible sounds has inevitably meant that there are many homonyms in the language, and countless words contain within themselves other words or parts of words of quite unrelated meanings. For example, the word shiranami, meaning “white waves”, or the wake behind a boat, might suggest to a Japanese the word shiranu, meaning “unknown”, or namida, meaning “tears”. Thus we have blending into one another three ideas, “unknown”, “white waves”, “tears”. One can easily see how from a combination of such images a poem could grow—a boat sails for an unknown destination over the white waves, a lady watches the wake of her lover’s boat in tears. From such a multiplicity of word associations evolved the kakekotoba, or “pivot-word”, one of the most distinctive features of Japanese verse. The function of the “pivot-word” is to link two different images by shifting in its own meaning. This may be illustrated by the lines:

What use are riches when you diamonds,
Rubies and gold are dross.

In this crude example, “diamond” shifts as it is pronounced from the word “die”, necessary to complete the thought “when you die” to the full meaning of the precious stone, as though the sound “die” started in the poet’s subconscious mind a train of images associated with “riches”.

The Japanese “pivot-word” shows a characteristic feature of the language, the compression of many images into a small space, usually by means of puns which expand the overtones of words. In English the use of the pun, or the play on words, for this purpose is not common, but there are examples even before Joyce pushed this method to the extreme with such creations as Meandertalltale. In Macbeth, for instance, at a highly tragic moment in the play occur the lines:

Your castle is surpriz’d; your wife and Babes
Savagely slaughtered: To relate the manner
Were on the Quarry of these murther’d Deere
To adde the death of you.

(IV, iii, 239–42.)

Shakespeare certainly did not intend the pun on “deer” and “dear” to be greeted with laughter; it serves rather to increase the complexity of the lines, as it would in a Japanese drama.^[1] The great number of similar-sounding words in Japanese affords a perhaps unique range of play on words. Puns were sometimes used for comic effects as in other languages, but the tragic pun was also developed, and it was even possible for poets to keep two different sets of images going at the same time through an entire poem without any awkwardness, as in this example:

Kie wabinu, utsurou hito no, aki no iro ni,
mi wo kogarashi no, mori no shita tsuyu.

(Shin Kokinshū, 1205 A.D.)

One may give two almost entirely different translations of these lines. The first, the more personal interpretation, might be, “Sadly I long for death. My heart tormented to see how he, the inconstant one, is weary of me, I am weak as the forest dew.” Or, by using other meanings of the sounds, “See how it melts away, that dew in the wind-swept forest, where the autumn colours are changing!” Neither of these translations is a full rendering, because in the poet’s mind and words there is a constant shifting of the two sets of images, so that the dew which looks as if it soon must be melted away by the autumnal wind becomes one with the woman who has been abandoned by her bored lover, and who wonders what keeps her still alive. It is not that the dew is simply being used metaphorically to describe the woman’s state (and to suggest her tears), for the image of the dew is used in its full sense of the natural phenomenon in the second rendering of the poem I gave. The author meant both to be understood at the same time, to draw as it were two concentric circles of meaning, each complete but indissolubly linked to the other.

The effect achieved in this poem was naturally possible only because of the variety of word-play that Japanese affords. But Japanese writers have always been sensitive to the overtones of words, and their exploitation of the possibilities of their language is not merely a fortuitous result of the ease of punning. Place-names and their meanings have especially fascinated the Japanese. A whole class of early literature consists largely of folk-etymologies of place-names. Most plays contain a journey, as for example the one quoted above, during which the meaning and associations of the names of the places passed are used to communicate the emotions of the travellers, whether on their way to death or to a happy reunion. In the poem about the dew translated in two such different ways, there is one other image to be noted: kogarashi, which means both “the autumn wind” and “yearning for”, is the name of a famous forest, and it may have been from this name itself that the poem had its genesis, as the poet caught the successive waves of images evoked by its different meanings.

It would be untrue to infer from this example, however, that all Japanese poetry is so extremely complicated in its expression. There are many relatively straightforward poems, and there has been more than one poet who has decried the artificiality of the poetry of his time and insisted on the virtues of simple sincerity. But simplicity and plain expression do not seem to be truly characteristic of the language, which is surely one of the world’s vaguest yet most suggestive. Japanese sentences are apt to trail off into thin smoke, their whole meaning tinged with doubt by the use of little particles at the end, such as “perhaps”, “may it not be so?”

The ambiguity in the language is such that at times, especially in the Nō plays, we may have the effect of listening to a string trio or quartet. There is a total melody which we can recognize, although we are at the same time aware that it is the combined product of the individual melodic lines of the several instruments. Japanese critics, however, have generally been less concerned with the effects of ambiguity in the language than with the more deliberate effects of suggestion. Again and again in the history of literary criticism in Japan we find discussions of the functions of suggestion. Perhaps the most interesting remarks for the modern Western reader are those made by the dramatist Chikamatsu about 1720. In speaking of the art of the puppet theatre, he declared:

“There are some who, believing that pathos is essential to a puppet play, make frequent use of such expressions as ‘it was touching’ in their writing, or who when chanting the lines do so in voices thick with tears. This is foreign to my style. I take pathos to be entirely a matter of restraint. When all parts of the art are controlled by restraint, the effect is moving, and thus the stronger and firmer the melody and words are, the sadder will be the impression created. For this reason, when one says of something which is sad that it is sad, one loses the implications, and in the end, even the impression of sadness is slight. It is essential that one not say of a thing that ‘it is sad’, but that it be sad of itself.”^[2]

It is interesting to note in this connection that over two centuries later the editor of an anthology of English and American imagist poetry made the same discovery as Chikamatsu and wrote: “Poetry is a matter of rendering, not comment. You must not say: ‘I am so happy’; you must behave as if you were happy.”^[3] Imagist poetry was certainly deeply indebted to translations from the Japanese, which perhaps served also to inspire such a critical judgment.^[4]

In any case, what was new enough to need saying for Western readers in 1930 had been voiced in one form or another by Japanese authors for centuries. In Japanese literature the unexpressed is as carefully considered as the expressed, as in a Japanese painting the empty spaces are made to have as strong an evocative power as the carefully delineated mountains and pines. There always seems to be an instinctive reluctance to say the obvious words, whether they are “I am so happy” or “It is so sad”. Seldom has it been desired to present the whole of any sight or experience. What the Japanese poets and painters were trying to do instead is perhaps best illustrated by a famous anecdote. It is related how one day a great general, clad in brilliantly polished armour, was waiting for an audience. He was informed that someone was coming who must not see him in armour, and he quickly threw about himself a thin gown of white silk. The effect of the polished armour glinting through the thin silk is the one at which the poets have aimed. To attempt to describe the full magnificence of the general in his armour, or the full beauty of a spring day, has not been the intent of Japanese writers. They have preferred to tell of the glint of the metal, or of the opening of a single blossom, and lead us thus to imagine the rest of the whole from which these few drops have been distilled.

The attempt to represent larger entities by small details resulted in a realism and concreteness in the images which contrast strangely with the misty ambiguity of the general effect. The splash of a frog jumping into the water, the shrill cries of the cicadas, the perfume of an unknown flower, may be the central image around which a Japanese poem is built. In this we may detect the influence of the philosophy of Zen Buddhism which taught, among other things, that enlightenment could come from any sudden perception. The splash of a frog disturbing the ancient stillness of a pond could be as valid a means of gaining enlightenment as any other, as well as the very embodiment of the movement of life.

It may be seen that the effect of suggesting a whole world by means of one sharp image is of necessity restricted to shorter verse forms, and it is in fact in such forms of expression that the Japanese have in general excelled. The literature contains some of the longest novels and plays in the world, some of them of high literary quality, but the special Japanese talent for exquisite and suggestive detail has not been matched by a talent for construction. The earliest novels, if so we may call them, were often little more than a number of poems and the circumstances which inspired them. Such unity as these books possessed came from the fact that all the poems were credited to one man, or to one Emperor’s court, but no attempt was made to connect the amorous adventure which gave rise to one verse with the adventure on the following page. Even in the later novels there is no really sharp distinction between the world of poetry and the world of prose, probably because poetry played a more common role in Japanese society than it has ever played in ours. In The Tale of Genji, written about 1000 A.D., there are about 800 verses. Conversations often consist largely of poetry, and no lover would neglect to send a poem on the day after seeing his mistress. But however lovely these poems may be, it cannot be pretended that they are all essential to the plot of the novel. Most Japanese novels indeed tend to break up into almost entirely disconnected incidents in the manner of the old poetry-tales. In some of the novels there is at least the thread of historical fact to link the various anecdotes of disparate nature, but in other works we have digressions of no apparent relevance. Even in the modern Japanese novel, which has been much influenced by European examples, we find curiously lyrical sections floating like clouds over the rest of the work. For example, in The Thin Snow (Sasame-yuki 1946–9) by Tanizaki, the most important Japanese novel published in the years following the war, there is an exquisite scene in which several of the principal characters go hunting fireflies of a summer night. Remembering from old novels and poetry the descriptions of elegant court ladies in long-sleeved kimonos catching the fireflies in silken nets, they at first feel disappointed, for they see before them only a muddy ditch in the open fields. But gradually, as the insects fill the air with glowing points of light, they are captured by the beauty so long familiar to them in poetry, and the description rises to lyrical heights worthy of The Tale of Genji.

If this incident does not advance very greatly the plot of The Thin Snow, nor give us any better understanding of the characters, it is beautiful in itself, and serves in an indefinite but real way to give us an impression of life in the Japan of 1939, just as the poetry in The Tale of Genji recreates for us the Japan of 950 years before. The digressions in Japanese novels may betray a weakness in the novelists’ powers of construction, but often their intrinsic beauty is such that our enjoyment of the whole work is not lessened by the disunity. In retrospect it is as brilliantly coloured bits somehow merging into an indefinite whole that we remember the novel. And, as the European impressionist painters create an illusion of reality in spite of the fact that their landscapes are composed of seemingly arbitrary splashes of green, orange, blue, and all the other colours, so the apparently disconnected incidents of a Japanese novel, blending into one another, leave us with an imprecise understanding of their life.

Certain genres of literature have developed to a greater extent in Japan than in other countries, perhaps as a result of the difficulty experienced by Japanese writers in organizing their lyrical impressions and perceptions. These are the diary, the travel account, and the book of random thoughts, works which are relatively formless, although certainly not artless. The charm and refinement of such works may be illustrated by one of the travel accounts, The Narrow Road of Oku, by the seventeenth-century poet Bashō. This work begins:

“The months and days are the travellers of eternity. The years that come and go are also voyagers. Those who float away their lives on boats or who grow old leading horses are forever journeying, and their home is wherever their travels take them. Many of the men of old died on the road, and I too for years past have been stirred by the sight of a solitary cloud drifting with the wind to ceaseless thoughts of roaming.

“Last year I spent wandering along the seacoast. In autumn I returned to my cottage on the river and swept away the cobwebs. At last the year drew to its close. When spring came and there was mist in the air, I thought of crossing the barrier of Shirakawa into Oku. Everything I saw suggested travel, and I was so possessed by the gods that there was no controlling my mind. The spirits of the road beckoned, and I found I could do no work at all.

“I patched up my torn trousers and changed the cords on my bamboo hat. To strengthen my legs for the journey I had moxa burned on my shins. Then the thought of the moon at Matsushima began to occupy my thoughts. When I sold my cottage and moved to Sampū’s villa, to stay there until I started on my journey, I hung this poem on a post in my hut.

Kusa no to mo	Even a thatched hut
Sumikawaru yo zo	In this changing world may turn
Hina no ie	Into a doll’s house.

“When I set out on the 27th March, the dawn sky was misty. Though the pale morning moon had lost its light, Fuji could still be seen faintly. The cherry blossoms on the boughs at Ueno and Yanaka stirred sad thoughts within me, as I wondered when, if ever, I should see them again. My dearest friends had all come to Sampū’s house the night before so that they might accompany me on the boat part of the way that morning. When we disembarked at a place called Senju, the thought of parting for so long a journey filled me with sadness. As I stood on the road that was perhaps to separate us forever in this dreamlike existence, I wept tears of farewell.

Yuku haru ya	Spring soon ends—
Tori naki uo no	Birds will weep, while in
Me wa namida	The eyes of fish are tears.”

In such works the Japanese have been happiest, able as they are in them to give us their inimitable descriptions of nature, and their delicate emotional responses, without the necessity of a formal plot. A gentle humour and a gentle melancholy fill these pages. This desire to blend images into images, found throughout Japanese poetry, here takes the form of diverse experiences, whether the adventures of a journey, or the day-to-day happenings at the court, blended into the personality of the narrator. There is a general smoothing away of the rough edges of emotion, as something indecorous and rather vulgar. Much is sadly evocative, very little is shattering, either in these books of personal reflections or elsewhere in Japanese literature. Even in the direct imitations by Japanese poets and artists of foreign works, there is always a disinclination to lose the native lightness and grace. The heart-breaking grief experienced by a Chinese poet on seeing the destruction of his city will find its echo in the sweetly nostalgic recollections of his Japanese imitator. Or, the portrait of a Taoist immortal, filled by the Chinese artist with an intense sense of mystery, becomes, in an almost direct Japanese copy, a charming composition of the immortal, his magic toad, pine-trees and clouds.

In this attitude we may find what the Japanese call miyabi, literally, “courtliness”, for Japanese literature is prevailingly aristocratic in tone. This does not mean, of course, that there have been no folk ballads, and no novels designed to meet the tastes of the lower classes, but Japanese popular literature has not been of very great importance, at least until recent centuries, and even such works are likely to display far greater elegance than their Western equivalents do. Most of the poetry in the official anthologies was composed by courtiers, and this highly refined art has been so widely disseminated at all levels of society, that the images most likely to come to a peasant-poet’s mind today are those first used centuries ago by a prince at the court. There is a difference in this respect between the Chinese and Japanese literary traditions. In China, most of what we think of as literature—love poetry, the drama, the novel, etc.—was considered beneath the dignity of the educated writers, and we possess relatively few works of merit in these genres when compared with the vast bulk of Chinese literature. In Japan, even emperors were not ashamed to write love poetry, and the novels and dramas written by members of the court gave the tone to later works in these forms. But it was not only in the strict sense of having been written by aristocrats that the literature is aristocratic, for we may discover a constant tendency even in the popular literature for it to develop into more refined forms. Again and again we read how some new verse form or theatrical entertainment, originally intended merely as amusement for the lower classes, was purified and codified by persons who saw the higher, more aristocratic possibilities of the art. But the elimination of coarseness often means the elimination of vigour as well, as we can see in the French theatre of the seventeenth century, and some genres of Japanese literature by choosing not to offend thereby forfeited the power to interest, becoming no more than the academic toys of the idle court aristocracy. The poet Bashō was aware of this danger, and insisted that the haiku, the short verse form, should aim not only at achieving the eternally beautiful effects of which all poetry is capable, but also at creating an impression of freshness. This was rather an exceptional attitude, for the earlier masters had preferred to write “what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed” rather than to be original. Every member of the court was expected to know by heart the poems in the principal Japanese and Chinese anthologies, and a slightly different emphasis given to an old poem would be recognized at once and appreciated as much if not more than a completely new idea. The virtuoso approach to literature; and to art as well, where the artist attempts to do essentially the same thing as his predecessors but in a slightly different way, is characteristic of Japan. The technique may be illustrated most clearly by the following examples. The first is a haiku by Buson (1716–84):

Tsurigane ri	On the temple bell
Tomarite nemuru	Resting, asleep
Kochō ka na	A butterfly.

The second example is by Shiki (1867–1902):

Tsurigane ni	On the temple bell
Tomarite hikaru	Resting, glowing
Hotaru ka na	A firefly.

There is no question here of plagiarism; rather, Shiki assumed that the persons reading his haiku would be familiar with Buson’s, and undoubtedly hoped that the new touches which his sensibility imposed on the old poem would be welcomed by a discriminating audience. Objectively viewed, Shiki’s haiku is as good as Buson’s, although a Western reader would condemn Shiki’s as derivative, and his first impulse might be to write a parody of his own, such as “On the temple bell, Resting, chirping, A grasshopper.” Bashō saw the danger of the virtuoso technique practised by the court poets (and by Shiki in the example I have just used), and himself seldom made direct reference to earlier works in his poetry, but he was unable to rid the literature of this characteristic feature. This is not surprising, for in a country where poetry was recognized by some as a religion it is only natural that the words and images of the old poems come as quickly to a poet’s mind as original thoughts, so that he thinks largely in other people’s terms, adding only the colouring which is his own. Similarly, one finds the same stories figuring as the basic plots of every type of Japanese theatrical entertainment. The audiences which attended a play on one of the familiar themes did not expect to be surprised by the ending nor by any major change in the plot; it was rather to the details that they looked for the differences resulting from the temperaments of successive dramatists, as in the Greek theatre the story of Oedipus, roughly the same whether treated by Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides, nevertheless differed significantly from dramatist to dramatist in the details, as well as in the psychological approach. In some ways the fact that the subject is prescribed enables the dramatist to display his talents in more subtle ways than in the invention of plot, which may explain why certain dramatists, notably in France, have continued to treat the story of Oedipus, and why Japanese writers of today have not entirely abandoned the traditional themes of their country’s literature.

The survival of the old forms would scarcely have been predicted at certain times in the past eighty years when it seemed as though European literature and ideas would overwhelm the native culture. This was especially true during the twenty years immediately following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, a time when Japanese literature reached its lowest point. The university in Tokyo was for a time without a department of Japanese and Chinese literature, while in some schools English but not Japanese literature and history were taught and even the readers used for moral instruction were translations of foreign textbooks.^[5] The Minister of Education, who was later assassinated by an opponent of his views, went so far as to favour the use of English instead of Japanese, and one writer even advocated that Japanese men all take European wives so as to improve the size and strength of the race. Such suggestions were not really feasible, but there was a much more serious possibility that the native literature would be entirely eclipsed. Translations of European works soon became the most popular books in Japan. In an attempt to discover the reasons for the success of Western peoples, as shown by their military and commercial achievements, Japanese turned first to books of instruction, such as Self-Help by Samuel Smiles, translated in 1870, only two years after the Meiji Restoration, and destined to play an important role in advising Japanese how best to get along in the European manner.

The Western books of a more literary character which were translated in the early days of the new Japan included novels by Bulwer Lytton and Disraeli, and the prevailingly political tone of these works was undoubtedly responsible for the large number of political novels which came to be written in Japan at the time. Japanese critics attempted to evaluate the native literature as they thought Europeans might, and in the search for a Japanese Shakespeare or a Japanese Goethe such writers as the eighteenth-century dramatist Chikamatsu were glorified as never before, while the fame of other writers whose works bore no obvious relationship to the European ideas of literature suffered accordingly. Essays with such titles as “The characters of Chikamatsu’s heroines” replaced earlier ones on the importance of literature as a means of encouraging virtue and chastising vice. It was inevitable that Japanese novelists and dramatists should then have begun to write in a revolutionarily different manner. Not only were they interested in aspects of society which had been ignored by their predecessors, but the very language that they used was markedly different. Previous to the Meiji Restoration there had existed a great gap between the colloquial and literary languages. Even the writers of popular romances had used a modified form of the older literary language with its distinctive grammar and vocabulary. But with the large-scale translation of works from English and other European languages it became necessary to make increasing use of the colloquial language in literary expression, for it was found hopelessly awkward to render the conversational approach of the English novel into the flowery patterns of literary-Japanese. The new colloquial style was used not only in translations, but in all works which had been influenced by European example.

There were, it is true, violent protests from various quarters against the adulation accorded to European examples, but although successful in some political and religious matters, such protests failed in so far as literature was concerned. In the past seventy years or more Japanese literature has been intimately affected by all European trends and, in fact, may be regarded in effect as forming a part of the modern movement in Western literature. Ezra Pound included a literary club in Tokyo among the four or five fragments he had shored against his ruins and quoted at length^[6] the views of Mr. Katsue Kitasono on the relation between imagery and ideoplasty. Kitasono wrote: “Man has thought out to make a heart-shaped space with two right angles,” and Pound commented that this was the “point where the occidental pedlars of imaginary geometries fell down”, indicating that perhaps the Japanese had beaten at their own game their masters in modern literary techniques.

Kitasono otherwise attained some celebrity as a poet of the new style with such verses as

The boy in the hothouse
The distant moon
White flowers
White.

A white building
White
Pink lady
White distant view
Blue sky.

White boy
Distant sky
Hyacinth
Window
White landscape.

This was not the most modern of the verses produced in the twenties by any means. One, entitled The White Butterfly, concluded:

It is a white butterfly.
It is a white butterfly.
It is a white butterfly.
It is a white butterfly.
It is a white butterfly.

In spite of such outstanding examples of the new style as The White Butterfly, the influence of the West was probably less marked on Japanese poetry than any other branch of literature. Many of the novelists of the new school had already gained fame as translators before publishing their own works, and they reveal at every moment their indebtedness to Western writers, even when the subject is purely Japanese. It is tempting to describe certain novels as being, for example, the “Japanese Of Human Bondage” or the “Japanese Forsyte Saga”, and such names are not devoid of meaning. Even the few novelists who have deliberately affected the old style betray in a thousand ways how much closer they are to the Western novel than to the traditional Japanese one. But the poets have not been so ready to abandon the old forms. Although new styles of poetry were evolved at about the same time for poetry as for the novel and for drama, the best poets continued for the most part to write in the traditional forms, and even works in the new style were likely to fall into the conventional pattern of alternating lines of five and seven syllables, the basic rhythm of the language. The decision of the poets to retain the traditional forms may show that there is a greater conservatism in poetry than in any other genre of literature, or it may represent an awareness that the brief poems were after all the most suited to the language, and more capable of achieving the impressionistic effects sought by the modern poets than the formless free verse. Certainly no modern poet has managed to suggest more with so few words than did Issa (1763–1828) after the death of his only surviving child. We may imagine that his friends attempted to console him with the usual remarks on the evanescence of the things of this world, and the meaninglessness of this existence as compared to the eternal life in Buddha’s Western Paradise. Issa wrote:

Tsuyu no yo wa	The world of dew
Tsuyu no yo nagara	Is a world of dew and yet,
Sarinagara	And yet.

1. See Muir, Kenneth, “The Uncomic Pun”, in the Cambridge Journal, Vol. 3, No. 8, May, 1950.
2. Translated in Keene, The Battles of Coxinga, p. 95.
3. Ford Madox Ford in Imagist Anthology 1930, p. xiv.
4. One critic of the imagist school asserted, “Their manifestos are prettily adorned with occult reference to Japanese poetry and criticism, with much expenditure of printer’s ink in spelling out exotic-looking syllables in ki, ka and ko.” (Quoted in Hughes, Imagism and the Imagists, p. 54.)
5. Cf. Sansom, The Western World and Japan, p. 487. Sansom gives an invaluable account of the whole period.
6. In Guide to Kulchur, pp. 137–9.