Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/19

Rh A whole class of early literature consists largely of folk-etymologies of place-names. Most plays contain a journey, as for example the one quoted above, during which the meaning and associations of the names of the places passed are used to communicate the emotions of the travellers, whether on their way to death or to a happy reunion. In the poem about the dew translated in two such different ways, there is one other image to be noted: kogarashi, which means both “the autumn wind” and “yearning for”, is the name of a famous forest, and it may have been from this name itself that the poem had its genesis, as the poet caught the successive waves of images evoked by its different meanings.

It would be untrue to infer from this example, however, that all Japanese poetry is so extremely complicated in its expression. There are many relatively straightforward poems, and there has been more than one poet who has decried the artificiality of the poetry of his time and insisted on the virtues of simple sincerity. But simplicity and plain expression do not seem to be truly characteristic of the language, which is surely one of the world’s vaguest yet most suggestive. Japanese sentences are apt to trail off into thin smoke, their whole meaning tinged with doubt by the use of little particles at the end, such as “perhaps”, “may it not be so?”

The ambiguity in the language is such that at times, especially in the Nō plays, we may have the effect of listening to a string trio or quartet. There is a total melody which we can recognize, although we are at the same time aware that it is the combined product of the individual melodic lines of the several instruments. Japanese critics, however, have generally been less concerned with the effects of ambiguity in the language than with the more deliberate effects of suggestion. Again and again in the history of literary criticism in Japan we find discussions of the