Anthology of Japanese Literature Read Online Free

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 Bash ō '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 sharer in the growing discontent with the regime. The poets who wrote in Chinese were particularly outspoken. Rai Sany ō (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 Shink ō kai.
    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-
stick beaks
Pointed at me
Have you come,
at last,
To peck me
to death?

ANCIENT
PERIOD

    TO 794 AD

MAN'Y Ō SH Ū

    The "Man'y ō sh Å« ," or "Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves," is the oldest and greatest of the Japanese