Page:A History of Japanese Literature (Aston).djvu/100

84 takes his leave while it is still pitch-dark. As Juliet, under somewhat similar circumstances, reviles the lark, the lady, attributing his departure to the crowing of a cock, vents her displeasure in the following stanza, which still lingers in the popular memory:—

I have before me two of the many editions of this work. One is by the eminent scholar and critic Mabuchi, and contains much more commentary than text. The other (dated 1608) is perhaps worthy of the attention of book-collectors whose mental horizon is not bounded by Europe. It is in two volumes, block-printed on variously-tinted paper, and adorned with numerous full-page illustrations which are among the very earliest specimens of the wood-engraver's art in Japan.

The Utsubo Monogatari is conjectured to have been written by the same author as the Taketori Monogatari, and the style and matter of the first of the fourteen stories of which it consists go far to confirm this supposition, though it may perhaps be a question whether the whole collection is by the same person. It is mentioned in the Genji Monogatari and in the Makura Zōshi, works which belong to the end of the tenth or the beginning of the eleventh century, and was probably composed some fifty or sixty years earlier. No exact date can be assigned for its composition.

The style of the Utsubo Monogatari is plain and straightforward; but it has unfortunately suffered greatly at the hands of copyists and editors, and also from the