Page:A History of Japanese Literature (Aston).djvu/365

Rh merchandise, its lecturers, quack-doctors, fortune-tellers, and shows of wonders. There are beauteous maidens at the sight of whom the moon hides her head for shame and the flowers close, demons of smallpox and of suicide, scenes of witchcraft and enchantment, with

This is surely a sufficient stock of material with which to furnish a novel of twenty chapters and about three hundred pages.

Each chapter, as is the custom with Japanese novelists, has a sensational heading, such as "The Hovel and the Strange Stratagem," "The Danger by the Wayside Shrine," "The Guitar's Broken String," "The Witchcraft of the Venomous Rats," "The Drum of Hell."

The following is part of the opening chapter of the Honchō Suibodai:—

"In the reign of Go Hanazono [fifteenth century] there was a pilgrim named Shikama no Sonematsu. He had been told in his youth by a soothsayer that his physiognomy indicated a danger by the sword, so in order to avoid such a calamity he entered the way of Buddha. He had no settled residence, but wandered about visiting one province after another. At length he arrived at a place called Rokudō, in the district of Atago, in the province of Yamashiro. Darkness came on. A wide moor stretched out before him which afforded no lodging, so he resolved to spend the night there, and take shelter under a tree. This Rokudō is a place of burial on the moor of Toribe, provided for all sorts and conditions of men. Here the monuments of the dead stand in long rows, some overgrown with moss, some freshly carved.