Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/116

104 and 1941 with works produced at the same time in Europe and America are such that to give a full account of the trends in Japanese literature during the period would necessitate an equally long study of the European trends to which they are intimately connected. This is not to say that Japanese literature lost its individuality, but it now assumed the shape of local or regional variations on the main stream of modern literature, and not, as earlier, of an entirely independent tradition. This was particularly true of the novels, somewhat less true of poetry where, in spite of vigorous new movements which followed on the heels of European avant-garde experiments, the traditional forms continued to exert a powerful attraction for writers. In the field of the drama, European methods were most frequently employed, even when the subjects were taken from medieval Japanese history.

The older genres of Japanese literature were not abandoned, however. The diary, for example, came back into its own as a popular literary medium with the publication of a series of war diaries by Hino Ashihei, which reflect the day-to-day life of a soldier during the so-called China Incidents in the 30’s’30s [sic]. The popularity of these works was such that no Japanese soldier or sailor would have dreamt of being without his diary, if only to record that it rained, or that he got up at six o’clock. But the diary was also used in the 30’s’30s [sic] for impressionistic reflections, as it was in earlier days. An example of this use of the diary is Hori Tatsuo’s The Wind Rises (1938–9), a sensitive, poetic account of the death of his wife by a young writer. The diary form is typically Japanese, but there is more than one suggestion of Gide’s Symphonie Pastorale in the method of narration. The work indeed represents a blending of native and foreign forms seldom so successfully achieved.

In the writings of the early Meiji period there was often