Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/23

Rh example, in The Thin Snow (Sasame-yuki 1946–9) by Tanizaki, the most important Japanese novel published in the years following the war, there is an exquisite scene in which several of the principal characters go hunting fireflies of a summer night. Remembering from old novels and poetry the descriptions of elegant court ladies in long-sleeved kimonos catching the fireflies in silken nets, they at first feel disappointed, for they see before them only a muddy ditch in the open fields. But gradually, as the insects fill the air with glowing points of light, they are captured by the beauty so long familiar to them in poetry, and the description rises to lyrical heights worthy of The Tale of Genji.

If this incident does not advance very greatly the plot of The Thin Snow, nor give us any better understanding of the characters, it is beautiful in itself, and serves in an indefinite but real way to give us an impression of life in the Japan of 1939, just as the poetry in The Tale of Genji recreates for us the Japan of 950 years before. The digressions in Japanese novels may betray a weakness in the novelists’ powers of construction, but often their intrinsic beauty is such that our enjoyment of the whole work is not lessened by the disunity. In retrospect it is as brilliantly coloured bits somehow merging into an indefinite whole that we remember the novel. And, as the European impressionist painters create an illusion of reality in spite of the fact that their landscapes are composed of seemingly arbitrary splashes of green, orange, blue, and all the other colours, so the apparently disconnected incidents of a Japanese novel, blending into one another, leave us with an imprecise understanding of their life.

Certain genres of literature have developed to a greater extent in Japan than in other countries, perhaps as a result of the difficulty experienced by Japanese writers in organizing their lyrical