Donald Keene

“ What attracted a man to a woman might be hearing her play a musical instrument as he passed by her quarters at night, or it might be a note in her handwriting of which he caught a glimpse, or it might be just her name. Any of these things could persuade a man that he was madly in love with a woman, and cause him to pursue her until she yielded, all this without ever having seen her except at night, or perhaps by the light of fireflies.
The only Western book of which I am reminded in reading The Tale of Genji is Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. ”

“ One of the earliest and most famous statements on Japanese poetry was made in 905 A.D. by Ki no Tsurayuki in his preface to the Collection of Ancient and Modern Poetry. This begins:
“Japanese poetry has for its seed the human heart, and grows into countless leaves of words. In this life many things touch men: they seek then to express their feelings by images drawn from what they see or hear. Who among men does not compose poetry on hearing the song of the nightingale among the flowers, or the cries of the frog who lives in the water? ”

“ Everyone wanted to be up to date, and novelty was the goal not only of the writers of popular fiction, but of such eminently respectable people as the poet Bashō. A frequent motif in the art of the time is that of waves, the most dramatically changing of forms. The fleeting pleasures of life were more prized than the eternal values which the medieval recluses had sought. In their desire to recapture the pleasures of the day, the writers and artists sometimes went far beyond the bounds of decency, and from time to time the government adopted measures against pornographic works. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The falling of the cherry-blossoms and the scattering of the autumn leaves are favourite themes because both of them suggest the passing of time and the brevity of human existence. There is a religious background to such poetry, the type of Buddhism which taught that the things of this world are meaningless and soon faded, and that to rely on them is to put one’s faith in dust and ashes. But such religious ideas as are found in Japanese poetry are quite simple, and cannot have disturbed the poets very much. ”

“ This is the secret of the Nō and the puppet theatre. By keeping us at a distance from the stage the Japanese dramatists admit us to their special domain of art. What the puppet theatre can mean to a sensitive Western observer, is revealed by this statement of the French poet Paul Claudel: “The living actor, whatever his talent may be, always bothers us by admixing a foreign element into the part that he is playing, something ephemeral and commonplace; he remains always a man in disguise. The marionette, on the other hand, has no other life or movement but that which it draws from the action. ”

“ 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 level of accomplishment of Japanese writers can now compare with that of any country, and as there is every likelihood that it will continue to improve, it may well happen that Japan, which has produced The Tale of Genji, the Nō plays, and other works of remarkable beauty, will again add to that small body of immortal works which belong not only to herself but to the entire world. ”

“ It is like having a company of actors whose exclusive concern is to pronounce the lines of a play perfectly, without any attempt at interpretation or characterization, thus suppressing their own personalities for the sake of the texts. If the plays thus being performed are by Shakespeare, they may well gain a great deal, but most plays will not stand up to such treatment. This is always true of the puppet theatre, for none of the charm or individual talent of the accomplished actor can save the faulty text. ”

“ To tell a good story in such a way as to keep the reader’s attention from page to page is an essential feature of every novel, but to make this story the vehicle for one’s own thoughts, one’s own memories and impressions, one’s own feeling for the past, seems a strikingly modern method. Again, the dispassionate acceptance of all material, whether good deeds or bad ones, with no attempt at drawing a moral from them, is also an exceptionally advanced idea, especially for Japan, where it was shortly to be buried for many centuries. ”

“ It is an effort of memory to recreate what must have seemed to Tanizaki in 1947 to be a vanished world. Here we have a prosperous family living in the Japan of 1936–41, and Tanizaki lovingly recalls each detail of their lives, as some Roman historian might have done five years after the fall of Rome under the Barbarians. The people in the novel never go merely to a “restaurant”, but always to the “Oriental Grill” or some other specific place, and when they go to meet their friends or lovers, we are told the number of the bus that they take. ”

“ In a small town in the hills behind Saigon she has a tempestuous love-affair with one of the Japanese army employees. The intensity of their love is perhaps increased by their feeling that, since Japan was fated to lose the war, they must exhaust the possibility of happiness which each moment gave them. When the war does end and they are repatriated, everything in Japan seems mean and ugly. ”

“ 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. ”

“ After long years of internal warfare, the establishment of peace at the beginning of the century had led to a period of great prosperity and a brilliant flowering of the arts. It was natural that Japanese poetry, which had hitherto been marked chiefly by its sobriety and restraint, should become more cheerful and extravagant, and that the shift of the centre of creative activity from the court to the haunts of merchants should be reflected also in the tone. ”

“ The society of The Tale of Genji was of an almost unimaginable subtlety. People constantly exchange remarks as obscure as any conversations in a novel by Henry James, and generally in poetry. Love-affairs, unlike the hearty adventures described in Tom Jones, usually involved more pain than pleasure, as the lovers realized the impossibility of being an entire world for one another. The conduct of the love-affairs is extremely remote from any described in Western books. ”

“ Tanizaki says that the doctor is abrupt because he is abrupt. When people in other novels fall ill, they are likely to die, or at least to reach the very brink of death, but in The Thin Snow people who are taken ill usually get better after a few days in bed. The effect of all this realism at the end of 1,400 pages is quite overpowering. We feel exactly as if we have lived with the family, and we are certain that we should instantly recognize any of its members if we met them again. I do not mean that we have any deep insights into the characters of the personages of the novel. ”

“ There is a full repertory of Japanese love-poetry, whether protestations of passion, aubades by parting lovers, laments over faithlessness, or any of the other possibilities in so highly developed a medium. The importance of poetry as a go-between in love-affairs arose from the to us rather strange manner of courtship of the Japanese aristocracy in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, when the techniques of their poetry were being formulated. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In earlier days almost all of the important books were written in the capital by members of the aristocracy, but with the breakdown of the central government, and the retreat to hermitages and monasteries by many sensitive people, literature came to be written in distant parts of the realm, as well as at the courts. Such literature does not have local colour in any cheerful sense of the term, but reflects the loneliness and resignation of artists cut off from the poetry-making society. ”

“ As a novelist, she stands without rival in her time, but there were several other women who were exceptionally talented in poetry and essay-writing. Indeed, it was an age of women writers, principally because the men preferred to devote themselves to writing in Chinese, leaving the women to express the genius of the time in the native language.
The Tale of Genji is a novel of a society, the extremely civilized, perhaps even decadent court of tenth-century Japan. We should not, however, be misled into imagining that Lady Murasaki has given us a realistic portrayal of contemporary conditions. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus, if when one paints an image or carves it of wood there are, in the name of artistic licence, some stylized parts in a work otherwise resembling the real form; this is, after all, what people love in art. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In Japan there existed no such tradition of individualism, at least not since the civil wars of the twelfth century and afterwards had led to the formation of a rigid feudal society, where the claims of the individual were sternly denied. When we read Lady Murasaki’s diary, written in the early eleventh century, we feel that she is a complex living being, whom we can understand, but even the most personal writings of the eight centuries that followed her time seldom arouse any such feeling. ”

“ 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. ”

“ With the figures in the novel she really cares for, however, she is more merciful, killing them off before they reach an unattractive state. In contrast to Proust, who turns the glorious world he at first pictures into a miserable company of parvenus and hideously aged aristocrats, Murasaki gradually dissolves her society into the empty spaces of her painting, leaving only a reduced figure here and there to show how great a falling-off there has been. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The realism of such writers as Zola was, initially at least, not of great interest to the Japanese because many of the subjects which Zola treated were the most common themes of their own literature, and the realism with which he shocked Europe was quite matter-of-fact to the Japanese. The real challenge for them lay in the field of political and social writing, something quite new in their fiction. The Broken Commandment attempted to discuss the problem of the eta in such a way as to arouse sympathy for those unfortunate people, but always within the limits of an interesting story. ”

“ When I say this I may be slandering the poetry of the Imperial Land as being very crude, but with the general development of culture and the advance of our knowledge by several stages, our emotions cannot help changing and becoming more complex. ”

“ Tsurayuki declared that poetry could comfort the hearts of fierce warriors. Indeed, we are likely to be struck when reading Japanese novels, by the composure of heroes in their death struggles who manage to find time to compose a valedictory verse about the falling of the cherry-blossoms, or by the verses of ordinary soldiers who gathered of a winter’s night to compose poetry together. ”

“ It was a classic in its own day and, devotedly read and annotated by emperors and philosophers, as well as by all manner of ordinary people, it has inspired a great deal of other literature and art. When in the seventeenth century an era of peace and prosperity followed centuries of terrible wars, it was to The Tale of Genji that the wealthy merchants turned for the model of the life they wished to enjoy, and novelists forgot six centuries of gloom in recreating Genjis of their own. ”