Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/21

Rh readers in 1930 had been voiced in one form or another by Japanese authors for centuries. In Japanese literature the unexpressed is as carefully considered as the expressed, as in a Japanese painting the empty spaces are made to have as strong an evocative power as the carefully delineated mountains and pines. There always seems to be an instinctive reluctance to say the obvious words, whether they are “I am so happy” or “It is so sad”. Seldom has it been desired to present the whole of any sight or experience. What the Japanese poets and painters were trying to do instead is perhaps best illustrated by a famous anecdote. It is related how one day a great general, clad in brilliantly polished armour, was waiting for an audience. He was informed that someone was coming who must not see him in armour, and he quickly threw about himself a thin gown of white silk. The effect of the polished armour glinting through the thin silk is the one at which the poets have aimed. To attempt to describe the full magnificence of the general in his armour, or the full beauty of a spring day, has not been the intent of Japanese writers. They have preferred to tell of the glint of the metal, or of the opening of a single blossom, and lead us thus to imagine the rest of the whole from which these few drops have been distilled.

The attempt to represent larger entities by small details resulted in a realism and concreteness in the images which contrast strangely with the misty ambiguity of the general effect. The splash of a frog jumping into the water, the shrill cries of the cicadas, the perfume of an unknown flower, may be the central image around which a Japanese poem is built. In this we may detect the influence of the philosophy of Zen Buddhism which taught, among other things, that enlightenment could come from any sudden perception. The splash of a frog disturbing the ancient stillness of a pond could be as valid a means of