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“ There is much humor in Bashō, and indeed in his last period he advocated “lightness” as the chief desideratum of the seven­ teen-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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”