Page:A History of Japanese Literature (Aston).djvu/194

178 (Then, without any warning of type or otherwise, there follows a passage which in metre, diction, and sentiment is essentially poetry. It is not very original, however, much of it consisting of scraps of verse supplied by the author's memory from older writers.)

Here the author becomes so involved in ingenious punning combinations of the names of places on the route with the thread of his story that it is impossible to follow him in a translation.

The following is one of the extraneous chapters of the Taiheiki. It describes in a very imaginative fashion the famous Mongol invasion of Japan by Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century of our era.

"Poring over the records of ancient times, in the leisure afforded me by the three superfluous things [night, winter, and rain], I find that since the Creation there have been seven invasions of Japan by foreign countries. The