Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/80

68 under which they were composed. Thus, if the preface says that the verse was presented to a friend about to depart on a sea-journey, the words “you may be tossed about” presumably refer to the motion of the boat, rather than to any other possibility which the unelucidated words might possess. Sometimes the prefaces were longer than the poems they introduce; we can see how it might happen that a poet, instead of confining himself to the bare mention of his wife’s death, or whatever else had occasioned a poem, would tell in the preface about the love which the two had shared. The verse that followed then might be on the brevity of life, or any other suitable topic, the interest of the verse being increased by our knowledge of the particular circumstances under which it was written. In a similar manner, we can imagine how in later times someone, finding the poems left by a famous writer, might attempt in editing them to give the backgrounds of these poems, either from stories he had heard about the poet, or from his own intuitions. This may have been the origin of The Tales of Ise, a tenth-century work often attributed to Ariwara no Narihira. In this book we have 125 episodes, each built around one or more poems. There is no unified conception behind these little stories, although if we assume that the unnamed man who is the hero of most of them was Narihira himself, we may be able to consider The Tales of Ise as a kind of Vita Nuova, with the prose parts serving as explanations for the poems. But the organization of the book is so loose, and the connections between the episodes so tenuous, that no single narrative can be evolved, even of the kind which Shakespeare’s Sonnets have sometimes inspired.

The subject-matter of the poem-tales (if so we may style works in the genre of The Tales of Ise) was drawn, unlike the fantastic tales, from ordinary life. Many of the episodes