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We will give our daughter to the one who hits it.’ ‘An excellent plan,’ said they. But when they shot at it, one hit it on the head and the other near the tail. Thereupon the maiden, more profoundly embarrassed than ever, exclaimed— ‘ Weary of life, My body I will cast away Into the river Ikuta, In the land of Tsu. Ikuta! + to me a name and nothing more I? “With these words she plunged into the river which flowed below the tent. Amid the frantic cries of the parents, the two lovers forthwith leaped into the stream at the same place. One seized her by the foot, the other took hold of her arm, and both died along with her. The parents, wild with grief, took up her body and buried it with tears and lamentations. The parents of the lovers also came and built tombs on each side of the sepulchre of the maiden. But when the time of burial came, the parents of the youth of the land of Tsu objected, saying : ‘That a man of the same province should be buried in the same place is but right and proper, but how can it be allowed that a stranger should intrude upon our soil ?’ So the parents of the Idzumi wooer brought over in ships 1 Zkuta means ‘‘living field,” YAMATO MONOGATARI gl earth from the province of Idzumi, and at length buried their son. The maiden’s tomb is in the middle, and those of her lovers on each side, as may be seen unto this day.” The present writer once made a pious pilgrimage to these tombs, which are still in existence not far from the treaty port of Kobe. He was not a little surprised to find that they were immense tumuli, certainly the sepulchres of much more exalted personages than the heroes of the above tale. Not only so, but the so-called lovers’ tombs are a mile away on each side from that of the fair lady for whom they died. On one of them, sad to say, there was growing a thriving crop of cabbages, planted by some irreverent, or more likely ignorant, Japanese. The Ikuta river must have greatly changed since the days of this story. It now sends to the sea a volume of water about equal to that of the stream which - waters the public gardens at Bournemouth, and where, needless to say, death by drowning is impossible. CHAPTER IV “GENJI MONOGATARI ” 1} WE now come to two works which by common consent mark the highest point to which the classical literature of Japan attained, namely, the Genjz Monogatari and the Makura Zoshi. The authors were contemporaries, and both of them were women. The real name of the author of the Genjz Monogatari has not come down to us. She is known to history as MURA- SAKI NO SHIKIBU. Critics are not agreed as to the reason why she was called Murasaki, a word which means “ purple,” nor does it greatly matter. Shikibu, if it meant anything, would indicate that she was in some way con- nected with the Board of Rites. It was, however, customary at this time for the ladies of the court to take to themselves fancy official designations which had no particular application. In her case the name was per- haps suggested by the circumstance that her father held office in that Department. Murasaki.no Shikibu. belonged to_a junior branch of the great Fujiwara family, or rather clan, which held so distinguished a position in Japan during many centuries of its history, and which has produced such numbers of 1 There is a translation of the first seventeen (out of fifty-four) chapters of this work by K. Suyematsu. Although a highly creditable performance under the circumstances, it is not satisfactory. The translator had not Motodri’s commentary before him, and the Kogetsushé edition is a very uncertain guide, Q2 GENJI MONOGATARI. 93 Mikados, statesmen, literati, and poets. Her father had a reputation for scholarship, and others of her family were poets of some note. Murasaki no Shikibu herself displayed a love of learning at an early age. She was wellversed both in Japanese and Chinese literature, and her father often wished that such talents and la had not been wasted on a girl. Married to another Fujiwara, she lost her husband after a short time, and seems to have then attached herself to the Empress Akiko, also a Fujiwara ‘and fond of learned pursuits, This would explain” her ‘familiarity with the-ceremonies and institutions of the court of Kidto. Her writings bear “unmistakable testimony to the fact that she moved in the best circles of her time and country. ‘The Geu// is generally supposed to have been finished in A.D. 19¢4, but this date has been disputed, and it may have been composed a few years earlier. There is a pleasing legend which associates its composition with the Temple of Ishiyama at the southern end of Lake Biwa, where the river Uji issues from it. To this beautiful spot, it is said, Murasaki no Shikibu retired from court life to devote the remainder of her days to literature and religion. There are sceptics, however, Motodri being one, who refuse to believe this story, pointing out, after the manner of their kind, that it is irreconcilable with known facts. On the other hand, the very chamber in the temple where the Genjz was written is shown—with the ink-slab which the author used, and a Buddhist Sutra in her hand- writing, which, if they do not satisfy the critic, still are sufficient to carry conviction to the minds of ordinary visitors to the temple. The Genje Monogatari is a novel. There is nothing remarkable, it may be said, in a woman excelling in this 04 JAPANESE LITERATURE branch of literature. But Murasaki no Shikibu did more than merely write a successful novel. Like Fielding in England, she was the creator in Japan of this kind of fiction—the prose epic of real life, as it has been called. In the quality of her genius, however, she more resembled Fielding’s great contemporary Richardson. Before her time we have nothing but stories of no great length, and of a romantic character far removed from the realities of daily life. The Genj? Monogatari is realistic in the best sense of the word. Here we see depicted men and ‘women, especially women, as they are, in their everyday lives and surroundings, their sentiments and passions, their faults and weaknesses. The author does not aim at startling or horrifying her readers, and she has a whole- some abhorrence for all that is sensational, unnatural, monstrous, or improbable. Such a hero as the nine- teenth-century novelist Bakin’s Tametomo, who has two pupils to his eyes and one arm longer than the other, and who, after falling over a cliff many thousand feet high, presently picks himself up and walks home several miles as if nothing had happened, would have seemed to her as ridiculous as he does to ourselves. There are few dramatic situations in the Gezjz, and what little of mira- culous and supernatural it contains is of a kind which might well be believed by a contemporary reader. The story flows on easily from one scene of real life to another, giving us a varied and minutely detailed picture of life and society at Kioto such as we possess for no other country at the same period. The hero is the son of a Mikado by a favourite con- cubine, whose colleagues are all jealous of the preference shown her, and are continually annoying her in a petty way. She takes this so much to heart that she falls ill GENJI MONOGATARI 95 and dies. Her death is related with much pathos. Genji grows up to be a handsome and accomplished youth of a very susceptible disposition, and his history is mainly an account of his numerous love affairs, and of his ulti- mate union with Murasaki, a heroine in all respects worthy of him. It continues the story up to his death at the age of fifty-one. The last ten books, which relate chiefly to one of Genji’s sons, are by some considered a separate work. The style of the Gezjz has been called ornate. The writer who applied this epithet to it was probably think- ing of the courtly honorifics with which it is in many _places burdened. But there is much excuse for this. The Genji is a novel of aristocratic life. Most of the characters are personages of rank, in describing whose sayings and actions a courtly style of speech is indis- pensable. To a Japanese it would be simply shocking to say that a Mikado has breakfast—-he augustly deigns to partake of the morning meal, and so on. The Euro- pean reader finds this irritating and tiresome at first, but he soon gets accustomed to it. In truth, such language is in entire consonance with the elaborate ceremonial, the imposing but cumbrous costumes, and much else of the rather artificial life of the Japanese court of the time. Apart from this the style of the Genjz is not more ornate than that, let us say, of Robinson Crusoe, and incom- parably less so than that of many Japanese books of later date. It is free from any redundance of descriptive adjectives or profusion of metaphors such as we are accustomed to associate with the word ornate. Others have objected to the style of the Genji as wanting in brevity. It must be admitted that its long, involved sentences contrast strongly with the direct, con- 96 JAPANESE LITERATURE cise manner of the Jse Monogatari. But, as Motoori points out, a brief style may be a bad one, and lengthy sentences full of detail may best fit the subject. Mura- saki no Shikibu’s fulness is not prolixity. On close examination it will be found that there is nothing super- fluous in the abundant details of her narrative. That is her method, and is essential to the effect she aims at producing. The Genj? is not intrinsically a very difficult work, and no doubt the author’s contemporaries found it quite easy to understand.