Anthology of Japanese Literature

by Donald Keene

  Some of the early poetry in Chinese was devoted to Buddhist subjects5 —which was less often true of poetry in Japanese. The Buddhism of the early period was an optimistic religion marked by pageantry and the lavish patronage of the great temples of Nara. With the Heian Period, particularly as a result of the activities of such men as Kūkai (774-835), Buddhism became the study of many of the best minds of the age. The Buddhism taught by Kūkai was essentially an aristocratic religion, or at least restricted to those people who had the intellectual capacity to understand its profundities and the taste to appreciate its aesthetic manifestations. Toward the end of the Heian Period, however, greater attention was given to spreading Buddhist teaching to all classes of the people, and it is in the light of this development that we should read such works as "Tales from the Uji Collection," which was designed to communicate in simple and interesting language some of the Buddhist doctrine. It was from about this time too that the invocation to Amida Buddha, a seven-syllabled prayer, came to be considered a certain means of gaining salvation.

  Buddhism is to be found to a greater or lesser degree in most of the famous writings of the Heian Period. When in the novels—and indeed in real life—a situation was reached for which no other solution was immediately apparent, the person involved would usually "abandon the world," an act accompanied by the ritual gesture of shaving the head or at least trimming the hair, a moment accompanied by great lamentations. It was not, however, considered to be in very good taste for someone still "in the world" to show unusual piety. In the "Kagerō Nikki," for example, the husband of the author bursts into the room to find her at her devotions: "'Terrible,' he exclaimed, as he watched me burning incense and fingering my beads, the Sutras spread out in front of me. 'Worse even than I had expected. You really do seem to have run to an extreme.'"6

  Japanese poetry, as I have noted, made amazing progress in the eighth century. In the tenth century Japanese prose evolved to its highest development. With respect to prose style itself, one of the most important contributors to this progress was Ki no Tsurayuki (died 946) whose preface to the "Kokinshlū" or "Collection of Ancient and Modern Poetry," is celebrated, and whose "Tosa Diary" was the first example of what was to become an important genre, the literary diary. One may note in Tsurayuki's prose some Chinese influence, such as the parallelism, but his is essentially a Japanese style both in vocabulary and construction.

  The prose works of the early tenth century were of two main types: the fairy tales derived ultimately from the legends of Japan, China, and India; and the more realistic prose of the poem-tales.7 It was not until these two streams united that the Japanese novel, in a true sense, could be born. The outstanding product of this convergence and, indeed, the supreme masterpiece of Japanese literature, was "The Tale of Genji." Although this novel contains many hundred poems, it is not, like "The Tales of Ise," merely a collection of poetry linked by prose descriptions, and if it benefited by the example of such earlier "novels" as "The Tale of the Bamboo-Cutter,"8 it went immeasurably beyond them in depth and magnitude. It is a work of genius, which may justifiably be included among the great novels of the world. Thanks to the incomparable translation by Arthur Waley it is now available to Western readers.

  One of the unusual features of Heian literature is that such works as the "Kagerō Nikki," "The Pillow Book" of Sei Shonagon, "The Tale of Genji," most of the diaries, and much of the poetry were written by women. The usual explanation for this curious fact is that the men considered writing in Japanese to be beneath them and devoted themselves to the composition of poetry and prose in Chinese, leaving the women to write masterpieces in the native language. This is not a complete explanation—some of the lesser novels and other prose works in Japanese were written by men—but it is close enough to the truth to warrant its acceptance. Of the literature written in Chinese during the period, the poems by Sugawara no Michizane (845-903) are especially fine. Michizane was an accomplished poet, and was so widely known for his learning that after his death he was enshrined as a god of literature and calligraphy.

  The poetry of the Heian Period both in Japanese and Chinese is far more restricted in subject matter and manner than that of the earlier period. The Japanese poems are filled with falling cherry blossoms and maple leaves, the Chinese poems with the scent of plum blossoms and chrysanthemums. There is nothing wrong with these subjects, but it is hard to think of any fully developed poet devoting the major part of his attention to such themes. The aim of Heian poets was to perfect rather than to discover, to hit upon exactly the right adjective or image to be used in a familiar situation, rather than to invent a new one. This method may be most clearly illustrated by the following two tenth-century poems:

  Aki kaze ni The under leaves

  Shitaha ya samuku In the autumn wind

  Narinuramu Must have become cold:

  Kohagi ga hara ni In the moor of little lespedezas

  Uzura naku nari The quail are crying.

  Fujiwara no Michimune

  Tsuyu mustibu The under leaves of the lespedeza

  Hagi ga shitaha ya When the dew is gathering

  Samukaramu Must be cold:

  Aki no nohara ni In the autumn moor

  Ojika naku nari The young deer are crying.

  Lady Sagami9

  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'yōshū" is the easiest collection for us to appreciate because of its range of subjects and its powerful imagery. The "Kokinshū" 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 "Kokinshū," 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 "Kokinshū" was the "Shinko-kinshū," 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 "Shinkokinshū," the priest Saigyō (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 Chōmei'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 Kenkō (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 Shōnagon, 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 Nō 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 Nō, Seami Moto-kiyo (1363-1443), describing the three highest types of Nō 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 Nō— its other-worldliness, its profundity, and its stillness.

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

  Mi hitotsu ni Upon one body

  Hashi wo narabete Double heads opposing chop-

  Motsu tori ya Stick beaks in order,

  Ware wo tsutsukjte Peck peck pecking off to death

  Koroshihatsuramu One bird: both heads and body.11

  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 Bashō (1644-1694), was drawn in particular to Saigyō and the world of "Three Poets at Minase." But there is a great difference between Bashō's loneliness and that of the medieval poets. Bashō 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 Bashō, 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, Bashō, 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 Bashō'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

  Avahada no Stark naked, the men

  Danshi mureite Stand together in clusters;

  Aragane no Swinging great hammers

  Marogari kudaku They smash into fragments

  Tsuchi uchijurite The lumps of unwrought metal.

  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 share
r in the growing discontent with the regime. The poets who wrote in Chinese were particularly outspoken. Rai Sanyō (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.

  Footnotes

  1 For a fuller introduction see Donald Keene, "Japanese Literature," and W. G. Aston, "A History of Japanese Literature."

  2 There are examples of direct Chinese influence on some of the poems, but their number is not very considerable.

  3 Translated by Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai.

  4 Translated by Burton Watson.

  5 See page 162.

  6 Translated by Edward Seidensticker.

  7 See page 67.

  8 There is a poor English translation by F. V. Dickins and a good French one by René Sieffert.

  9 Translated by Arthur Waley.

  10 See page 314 for an explanation of linked-verse.

  11 Translated by Sam Houston Brock. This is a very ambiguous poem and may be interpreted variously. The poet William Burford has rendered it:

  Carrion

  With your chop-