Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/82

70 sources, the strange story and the poem-tale, is The Hollow Tree, a work of the tenth century. In the first part of the book is related the story of a musician who journeys to distant countries, as far even as Persia, in search of some magic wood with which to make lutes. After many curious adventures, the man finds the wood, but it is guarded by monsters. Only with the aid of supernatural intervention is he able to carry any wood back to Japan to make his wonderful musical instruments. The rest of this part of The Hollow Tree is conceived in the fantastic vein of the earlier short-stories. But in the second part of the novel, concerned mainly with an account of the Princess Atemiya and her suitors, we are taken into a far more realistic world, and the influence of the poem-tale is conspicuous. The Hollow Tree contains some 986 poems, which is almost as high a proportion as The Tales of Ise. It is a curious book in every way, representing an undigested set of influences. But as it moves towards its close The Hollow Tree acquires considerable power, as if the author were gradually gaining confidence in the new literary medium. It is, in a sense, a history of the development of the early Japanese novel. It has every feature of a missing link save that it is not missing. It affords us exactly the kind of transition which we might have conjectured between The Tales of Ise and The Tale of Genji, written about 1000

When the first volume of Arthur Waley’s translation of The Tale of Genji appeared in 1923, Western critics, astonished at its grandeur and at the unsuspected world which it revealed to them, searched desperately for parallels in more familiar literature. The Tale of Genji was likened to Don Quixote, The Decameron, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Tom Jones, even to Le Morte d’Arthur; in short, to almost every major work of fiction with such notable exceptions as Moby Dick. The relative suitability of such parallels will be clear after a brief