Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/14

2 periods of indiscriminate borrowing, everything that Japan took from China was filtered through the basically different Japanese temperament and considerably modified. We may contrast this Japanese resistance to the powerful influences of Chinese culture with the almost unquestioning acceptance of them by Korea. Even when the Japanese were trying very hard to take over some Chinese doctrine, such as Confucianism, they appear to have been unable to refrain from altering it; thus it was that some of the Japanese Confucian scholars were at the same time devout worshippers of the gods of the Land of the Rising Sun and sought to reconcile the two beliefs. The Korean Confucianists, on the other hand, tended towards extreme orthodoxy, and a chance remark attributed to Confucius, that the superior man did not talk while he ate, resulted in centuries of silent meals in Korea, though not in China, much less in Japan.

But Japan has been far more than a skilful modifier of Chinese civilization. In the field of literature, with which we are primarily concerned here, we shall find that Japanese poetry is in most ways unlike Chinese, that the Japanese were writing novels of magnitude and beauty centuries before the Chinese, and that the Japanese theatre, far surpassing the Chinese, ranks with the great dramatic achievements of the world.

It is small wonder that Chinese and Japanese literature are so dissimilar, for the two languages are entirely different. Chinese is a monosyllabic language with musical tones to distinguish the many identical syllables. In its classical form at least, Chinese is a language of great compactness. Japanese, on the other hand, is polysyllabic, has no tones like the Chinese, and sounds rather like Italian, at least to those who do not know Italian. In contrast with the brevity of classical Chinese, Japanese is a language of interminable sentences—sometimes literally