Page:A History of Japanese Literature (Aston).djvu/393

Rh of view it belongs to this class of literature. It is one of the numerous versions of the story of the revenge of the forty-seven Rōnins. Few worse arranged books have ever been written. The scenes of which it is composed have no sort of order, chronological or otherwise, and in many cases have no obvious connection with the main action of the book. Shunsui, in writing it, seems to have had two objects in view, irreconcilable with each other. One was to produce a historical narrative (he describes it as a true record) enriched by matter drawn from genuine documents; the other to enhance the interest of the story by the addition of imaginative details. As a contribution to historical research the Iroha Bunko is worthless. It is not always possible to distinguish Shunsui the historian from Shunsui the romancist; and in order to comply with the edict forbidding novelists to meddle with real personages of the Yedo period, he was obliged to garble his materials, transferring the scene of the story from Yedo to Kamakura, and from the eighteenth to the fourteenth century, and altering the names of the characters. In this he was only following the example of the Chiushingura, the famous drama which deals with the same subject. The judicious reader will skip his historical disquisitions, nor care, for example, to follow him in discussing the question of the precise date when shops for the sale of buckwheat vermicelli were first established as separate institutions. He will turn from such muda-banashi (vain talk), as Shunsui himself calls it, to the scenes where he abandons his facts, and endeavours by the help of a sympathetic imagination to realise the feelings and emotions of the actors in the tragedy, filling in their surroundings, supplying them with parents, wives, sweethearts, or children, inventing