Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/32

20 twenties by any means. One, entitled The White Butterfly, concluded:

In spite of such outstanding examples of the new style as The White Butterfly, the influence of the West was probably less marked on Japanese poetry than any other branch of literature. Many of the novelists of the new school had already gained fame as translators before publishing their own works, and they reveal at every moment their indebtedness to Western writers, even when the subject is purely Japanese. It is tempting to describe certain novels as being, for example, the “Japanese Of Human Bondage” or the “Japanese Forsyte Saga”, and such names are not devoid of meaning. Even the few novelists who have deliberately affected the old style betray in a thousand ways how much closer they are to the Western novel than to the traditional Japanese one. But the poets have not been so ready to abandon the old forms. Although new styles of poetry were evolved at about the same time for poetry as for the novel and for drama, the best poets continued for the most part to write in the traditional forms, and even works in the new style were likely to fall into the conventional pattern of alternating lines of five and seven syllables, the basic rhythm of the language. The decision of the poets to retain the traditional forms may show that there is a greater conservatism in poetry than in any other genre of literature, or it may represent an awareness that the brief poems were after all the most suited to the language, and more capable of achieving the impressionistic effects sought