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anese turned from hand crafts to machines or from native drinks to whiskey and beer. For the most part they contented themselves with lending a certain topicality to their otherwise stale accounts of the doings of rakes and courtesans by mentioning peculiarities of Western dress or joking about the recently introduced steamship and railroad. Not until translations of European works began to appear could the West exert any real influence on Japanese literature.
The first translation of a literary work from the English was of Bulwer Lytton’s novel Ernest Maltravers. It is not clear why this book, which first appeared in England in 1837, should have seemed to the translator more suitable than any other masterpiece of European literature for introduction to Japanese readers, but its great success on publication in 1878 justified the choice. The Japanese, who for a decade had been schooled to believe that Europeans were models of utter efficiency and practicality, unaffected like themselves by the emotions, were surprised to discover that even Europeans had a tenderer side to their lives. The title Ernest Maltravers was rendered in Japanese as “A Spring Tale of Blossoms and Willows,” an indication of what attracted most readers to the
